Author: J. S. Le Fanu
Date: 1837-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Ghost Stories; Horror Tales; Supernatural Fiction; Suspense; Mystery
Description: This extensive collection presents 46 short works by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. ~~~ Here, from the dark universe of a premiere ghost story writer, are unsettling tales of ghostly invasions and demonic encounters, betrayals and treacheries, madness and murder. Read them at night, alone in the dark – if you dare.
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain worldwide

IN  DARK  COMPANY

COLLECTED TALES
OF TERROR AND SUSPENSE

J. SHERIDAN LE FANU

MobileRead Edition
2020

TABLE OF CONTENTS

—ABOUT THIS EBOOK

IN DARK COMPANY

SHADOWS AND SHADES

SHORT STORIES

- The Drunkard’s Dream
- Schalken the Painter
- A Night in the Bell Inn

- An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street

- Ghost Stories of Chapelizod
- Ghost Stories of the Tiled House
- Borrhomeo the Astrologer
- An Authentic Narrative of a Haunted House
- Wicked Captain Walshawe, of Wauling
- My Aunt Margaret’s Adventure
- The Legend of Dunblane
- The Child that Went with the Fairies
- The White Cat of Drumgunniol
- Stories of Lough Guir
- The Vision of Tom Chuff
- Madam Crowl’s Ghost
- The Dead Sexton
- Dickon the Devil
- Laura Silver Bell
- Sir Dominick’s Bargain

NOVELETTES AND NOVELLAS

- The Murdered Cousin
- A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family
- Spalatro
- The Evil Guest
- The Mysterious Lodger
- Ultor De Lacy
- Squire Toby’s Will
- The Haunted Baronet

- A Strange Adventure in the Life of Miss Laura Mildmay

- Green Tea
- The Familiar
- Mr. Justice Harbottle
- The Room in the Dragon Volant
- Carmilla

“GHOSTS” WITH A GRIN

- The Ghost and the Bone Setter
- Jim Sulivan’s Adventures in the Great Snow
- The Quare Gander
- Billy Malowney’s Taste of Love and Glory

APPENDIX — ADDITIONAL TALES

- The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh

- Schalken the Painter

- Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess

- The Watcher
- The Fatal Bride
- The Last Heir Of Castle Connor
- The Bridal of Carrigvarah
- An Adventure Of Hardress Fitzgerald

INDEX OF TITLES

ABOUT

In Dark Company

JOSEPH SHERIDAN LE FANU
(1814–1873)

This extensive collection presents 46 short works by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.

Here, from the dark universe of a premiere writer of Gothic tales, are unsettling stories of ghostly invasions and demonic encounters, betrayals and treacheries, madness and murder. Read them at night, alone in the dark – if you dare.

* * * *

Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (28 August 1814 – 7 February 1873) was an Irish writer of Gothic tales, mystery novels, and horror fiction. He was a foremost ghost story writer of the nineteenth century, central to the development of the genre in the Victorian era. M. R. James described Le Fanu as “absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories”. Three of his best-known works are the locked-room mystery Uncle Silas, the lesbian vampire novella Carmilla, and the historical novel The House by the Churchyard.

This ebook was created by ECM for MobileRead.com, December 2020, and may be freely distributed for non-commercial purposes.

Contents were first published 1838 ~ 1873. This book is in the public domain worldwide.

IN  DARK  COMPANY

SHADOWS AND SHADES

Horror, Suspense, and Mystery

SHORT STORIES

THE DRUNKARD’S DREAM

(1838)

Dreams! What age, or what country of the world, has not felt and acknowledged the mystery of their origin and end? I have thought not a little upon the subject, seeing it is one which has been often forced upon my attention, and sometimes strangely enough; and yet I have never arrived at anything which at all appeared a satisfactory conclusion. It does appear that a mental phenomenon so extraordinary cannot be wholly without its use. We know, indeed, that in the olden times it has been made the organ of communication between the Deity and His creatures; and when a dream produces upon a mind, to all appearance hopelessly reprobate and depraved, an effect so powerful and so lasting as to break down the inveterate habits, and to reform the life of an abandoned sinner, we see in the result, in the reformation of morals which appeared incorrigible, in the reclamation of a human soul which seemed to be irretrievably lost, something more than could be produced by a mere chimera of the slumbering fancy, something more than could arise from the capricious images of a terrified imagination. And while Reason rejects as absurd the superstition which will read a prophecy in every dream, she may, without violence to herself, recognize, even in the wildest and most incongruous of the wanderings of a slumbering intellect, the evidences and the fragments of a language which may be spoken, which has been spoken, to terrify, to warn and to command. We have reason to believe too, by the promptness of action which in the age of the prophets followed all intimations of this kind, and by the strength of conviction and strange permanence of the effects resulting from certain dreams in latter times – which effects we ourselves may have witnessed – that when this medium of communication has been employed by the Deity, the evidences of His presence have been unequivocal. My thoughts were directed to this subject in a manner to leave a lasting impression upon my mind, by the events which I shall now relate, the statement of which, however extraordinary, is nevertheless accurate.

About the year 17——, having been appointed to the living of C———h, I rented a small house in the town which bears the same name: one morning in the month of November, I was awakened before my usual time by my servant, who bustled into my bedroom for the purpose of announcing a sick call. As the Catholic Church holds her last rites to be totally indispensable to the safety of the departing sinner, no conscientious clergyman can afford a moment’s unnecessary delay, and in little more than five minutes I stood ready, cloaked and booted for the road, in the small front parlour in which the messenger, who was to act as my guide, awaited my coming. I found a poor little girl crying piteously near the door, and after some slight difficulty I ascertained that her father was either dead or just dying.

“And what may be your father’s name, my poor child?” said I. She held down her head as if ashamed. I repeated the question, and the wretched little creature burst into floods of tears still more bitter than she had shed before. At length, almost angered by conduct which appeared to me so unreasonable, I began to lose patience, and I said rather harshly,

“If you will not tell me the name of the person to whom you would lead me, your silence can arise from no good motive, and I might be justified in refusing to go with you at all.”

“Oh, don’t say that – don’t say that!” cried she. “Oh, sir, it was that I was afeard of when I would not tell you – I was afeard, when you heard his name, you would not come with me; but it is no use hidin’ it now – it’s Pat Connell, the carpenter, your honour.”

She looked in my face with the most earnest anxiety, as if her very existence depended upon what she should read there. I relieved the child at once. The name, indeed, was most unpleasantly familiar to me; but, however fruitless my visits and advice might have been at another time, the present was too fearful an occasion to suffer my doubts of their utility, or my reluctance to re-attempting what appeared a hopeless task, to weigh even against the lightest chance that a consciousness of his imminent danger might produce in him a more docile and tractable disposition. Accordingly I told the child to lead the way, and followed her in silence. She hurried rapidly through the long narrow street which forms the great thoroughfare of the town.

The darkness of the hour, rendered still deeper by the close approach of the old-fashioned houses, which lowered in tall obscurity on either side of the way; the damp, dreary chill which renders the advance of morning peculiarly cheerless, combined with the object of my walk – to visit the deathbed of a presumptuous sinner, to endeavour, almost against my own conviction, to infuse a hope into the heart of a dying reprobate – a drunkard but too probably perishing under the consequences of some mad fit of intoxication; all these circumstances served to enhance the gloom and solemnity of my feelings, as I silently followed my little guide, who with quick steps traversed the uneven pavement of the Main Street. After a walk of about five minutes, she turned off into a narrow lane, of that obscure and comfortless class which is to be found in almost all small old-fashioned towns, chill, without ventilation, reeking with all manner of offensive effluvia, and lined by dingy, smoky, sickly and pent-up buildings, frequently not only in a wretched but in a dangerous condition.

“Your father has changed his abode since I last visited him, and, I am afraid, much for the worse,” said I.

“Indeed he has, sir; but we must not complain,” replied she. “We have to thank God that we have lodging and food, though it’s poor enough it is, your honour.”

Poor child! thought I. How many an older head might learn wisdom from thee – how many a luxurious philosopher, who is skilled to preach but not to suffer, might not thy patient words put to the blush! The manner and language of my companion were alike above her years and station; and, indeed, in all cases in which the cares and sorrows of life have anticipated their usual date, and have fallen, as they sometimes do, with melancholy prematurity to the lot of childhood, I have observed the result to have proved uniformly the same. A young mind, to which joy and indulgence have been strangers, and to which suffering and self-denial have been familiarized from the first, acquires a solidity and an elevation which no other discipline could have bestowed, and which, in the present case, communicated a striking but mournful peculiarity to the manners, even to the voice, of the child.

We paused before a narrow, crazy door, which she opened by means of a latch, and we forthwith began to ascend the steep and broken stairs which led to the sick man’s room.

As we mounted flight after flight towards the garret-floor, I heard more and more distinctly the hurried talking of many voices. I could also distinguish the low sobbing of a female. On arriving upon the uppermost lobby, these sounds became fully audible.

“This way, your honour,” said my little conductress; at the same time, pushing open a door of patched and half-rotten plank, she admitted me into the squalid chamber of death and misery. But one candle, held in the fingers of a scared and haggard-looking child, was burning in the room, and that so dim that all was twilight or darkness except within its immediate influence. The general obscurity, however, served to throw into prominent and startling relief the deathbed and its occupant. The light fell with horrible clearness upon the blue and swollen features of the drunkard.

I did not think it possible that a human countenance could look so terrific. The lips were black and drawn apart; the teeth were firmly set; the eyes a little unclosed, and nothing but the whites appearing. Every feature was fixed and livid, and the whole face wore a ghastly and rigid expression of despairing terror such as I never saw equalled. His hands were crossed upon his breast, and firmly clenched; while, as if to add to the corpse-like effect of the whole, some white cloths, dipped in water, were wound about the forehead and temples.

As soon as I could remove my eyes from this horrible spectacle, I observed my friend Dr. D———, one of the most humane of a humane profession, standing by the bedside. He had been attempting, but unsuccessfully, to bleed the patient, and had now applied his finger to the pulse.

“Is there any hope?” I inquired in a whisper.

A shake of the head was the reply. There was a pause, while he continued to hold the wrist; but he waited in vain for the throb of life – it was not there: and when he let go the hand, it fell stiffly back into its former position upon the other.

“The man is dead,” said the physician, as he turned from the bed where the terrible figure lay.

Dead! thought I, scarcely venturing to look upon the tremendous and revolting spectacle. Dead! without an hour for repentance, even a moment for reflection. Dead! without the rites which even the best should have. Was there a hope for him? The glaring eyeball, the grinning mouth, the distorted brow – that unutterable look in which a painter would have sought to embody the fixed despair of the nethermost hell – These were my answer.

The poor wife sat at a little distance, crying as if her heart would break – the younger children clustered round the bed, looking with wondering curiosity upon the form of death, never seen before.

When the first tumult of uncontrollable sorrow had passed away, availing myself of the solemnity and impressiveness of the scene, I desired the heart-stricken family to accompany me in prayer, and all knelt down while I solemnly and fervently repeated some of those prayers which appeared most applicable to the occasion. I employed myself thus in a manner which I trusted was not unprofitable, at least to the living, for about ten minutes; and having accomplished my task, I was the first to arise.

I looked upon the poor, sobbing, helpless creatures who knelt so humbly around me, and my heart bled for them. With a natural transition I turned my eyes from them to the bed in which the body lay; and, great God! what was the revulsion, the horror which I experienced on seeing the corpse-like, terrific thing seated half upright before me. The white cloths which had been wound about the head had now partly slipped from their position, and were hanging in grotesque festoons about the face and shoulders, while the distorted eyes leered from amid them—

“A sight to dream of, not to tell.”

I stood actually riveted to the spot. The figure nodded its head and lifted its arm, I thought, with a menacing gesture. A thousand confused and horrible thoughts at once rushed upon my mind. I had often read that the body of a presumptuous sinner, who, during life, had been the willing creature of every satanic impulse, had been known, after the human tenant had deserted it, to become the horrible sport of demoniac possession.

I was roused by the piercing scream of the mother, who now, for the first time, perceived the change which had taken place. She rushed towards the bed, but, stunned by the shock and overcome by the conflict of violent emotions, before she reached it she fell prostrate upon the floor.

I am perfectly convinced that had I not been startled from the torpidity of horror in which I was bound by some powerful and arousing stimulant, I should have gazed upon this unearthly apparition until I had fairly lost my senses. As it was, however, the spell was broken – superstition gave way to reason: the man whom all believed to have been actually dead was living!

Dr. D——— was instantly standing by the bedside, and upon examination he found that a sudden and copious flow of blood had taken place from the wound which the lancet had left; and this, no doubt, had effected his sudden and almost preternatural restoration to an existence from which all thought he had been forever removed. The man was still speechless, but he seemed to understand the physician when he forbade his repeating the painful and fruitless attempts which he made to articulate, and he at once resigned himself quietly into his hands.

I left the patient with leeches upon his temples, and bleeding freely, apparently with little of the drowsiness which accompanies apoplexy. Indeed, Dr. D——— told me that he had never before witnessed a seizure which seemed to combine the symptoms of so many kinds, and yet which belonged to none of the recognized classes; it certainly was not apoplexy, catalepsy, nor delirium tremens, and yet it seemed, in some degree, to partake of the properties of all. It was strange, but stranger things are coming.

During two or three days Dr. D——— would not allow his patient to converse in a manner which could excite or exhaust him, with anyone; he suffered him merely as briefly as possible to express his immediate wants. And it was not until the fourth day after my early visit, the particulars of which I have just detailed, that it was thought expedient that I should see him, and then only because it appeared that his extreme importunity and impatience to meet me were likely to retard his recovery more than the mere exhaustion attendant upon a short conversation could possibly do. Perhaps, too, my friend entertained some hope that if by holy confession his patient’s bosom were eased of the perilous stuff which no doubt oppressed it, his recovery would be more assured and rapid. It was then, as I have said, upon the fourth day after my first professional call, that I found myself once more in the dreary chamber of want and sickness.

The man was in bed, and appeared low and restless. On my entering the room he raised himself in the bed, and muttered, twice or thrice,

“Thank God! thank God!”

I signed to those of his family who stood by to leave the room, and took a chair beside the bed. So soon as we were alone, he said, rather doggedly,

“There’s no use in telling me of the sinfulness of bad ways – I know it all. I know where they lead to – I have seen everything about it with my own eyesight, as plain as I see you.” He rolled himself in the bed, as if to hide his face in the clothes; and then suddenly raising himself, he exclaimed with startling vehemence, “Look, sir! there is no use in mincing the matter: I’m blasted with the fires of hell; I have been in hell. What do you think of that? In hell – I’m lost forever – I have not a chance. I am damned already – damned – damned!”

The end of this sentence he actually shouted. His vehemence was perfectly terrific; he threw himself back, and laughed, and sobbed hysterically. I poured some water into a teacup, and gave it to him. After he had swallowed it, I told him if he had anything to communicate, to do so as briefly as he could, and in a manner as little agitating to himself as possible; threatening at the same time, though I had no intention of doing so, to leave him at once in case he again gave way to such passionate excitement.

“It’s only foolishness,” he continued, “for me to try to thank you for coming to such a villain as myself at all. It’s no use for me to wish good to you, or to bless you; for such as me has no blessings to give.”

I told him that I had but done my duty, and urged him to proceed to the matter which weighed upon his mind. He then spoke nearly as follows:

“I came in drunk on Friday night last, and got to my bed here; I don’t remember how. Sometime in the night it seemed to me I wakened, and feeling unasy in myself, I got up out of the bed. I wanted the fresh air; but I would not make a noise to open the window, for fear I’d waken the crathurs. It was very dark and throublesome to find the door; but at last I did get it, and I groped my way out, and went down as asy as I could. I felt quite sober, and I counted the steps one after another, as I was going down, that I might not stumble at the bottom.

“When I came to the first landing-place – God be about us always! – the floor of it sunk under me, and I went down – down – down, till the senses almost left me. I do not know how long I was falling, but it seemed to me a great while. When I came rightly to myself at last, I was sitting near the top of a great table; and I could not see the end of it, if it had any, it was so far off. And there was men beyond reckoning sitting down all along by it, at each side, as far as I could see at all. I did not know at first was it in the open air; but there was a close smothering feel in it that was not natural. And there was a kind of light that my eyesight never saw before, red and unsteady; and I did not see for a long time where it was coming from, until I looked straight up, and then I seen that it came from great balls of blood-coloured fire that were rolling high overhead with a sort of rushing, trembling sound, and I perceived that they shone on the ribs of a great roof of rock that was arched overhead instead of the sky. When I seen this, scarce knowing what I did, I got up, and I said, ‘I have no right to be here; I must go.’ And the man that was sitting at my left hand only smiled, and said, ‘Sit down again; you can never leave this place.’ And his voice was weaker than any child’s voice I ever heerd; and when he was done speaking he smiled again.

“Then I spoke out very loud and bold, and I said, ‘In the name of God, let me out of this bad place.’ And there was a great man that I did not see before, sitting at the end of the table that I was near; and he was taller than twelve men, and his face was very proud and terrible to look at. And he stood up and stretched out his hand before him; and when he stood up, all that was there, great and small, bowed down with a sighing sound; and a dread came on my heart, and he looked at me, and I could not speak. I felt I was his own, to do what he liked with, for I knew at once who he was; and he said, ‘If you promise to return, you may depart for a season;’ and the voice he spoke with was terrible and mournful, and the echoes of it went rolling and swelling down the endless cave, and mixing with the trembling of the fire overhead; so that when he sat down there was a sound after him, all through the place, like the roaring of a furnace. And I said, with all the strength I had, ‘I promise to come back – in God’s name let me go!’

“And with that I lost the sight and the hearing of all that was there, and when my senses came to me again, I was sitting in the bed with the blood all over me, and you and the rest praying around the room.”

Here he paused, and wiped away the chill drops which hung upon his forehead.

I remained silent for some moments. The vision which he had just described struck my imagination not a little, for this was long before Vathek and the “Hall of Eblis” had delighted the world; and the description which he gave had, as I received it, all the attractions of novelty beside the impressiveness which always belongs to the narration of an eyewitness, whether in the body or in the spirit, of the scenes which he describes. There was something, too, in the stern horror with which the man related these things, and in the incongruity of his description with the vulgarly received notions of the great place of punishment, and of its presiding spirit, which struck my mind with awe, almost with fear. At length he said, with an expression of horrible, imploring earnestness, which I shall never forget,

“Well, sir, is there any hope; is there any chance at all? or is my soul pledged and promised away for ever? is it gone out of my power? must I go back to the place?”

In answering him, I had no easy task to perform; for however clear might be my internal conviction of the groundlessness of his fears, and however strong my scepticism respecting the reality of what he had described, I nevertheless felt that his impression to the contrary, and his humility and terror resulting from it, might be made available as no mean engines in the work of his conversion from profligacy, and of his restoration to decent habits and to religious feeling.

I therefore told him that he was to regard his dream rather in the light of a warning than in that of a prophecy; that our salvation depended not upon the word or deed of a moment, but upon the habits of a life; that, in fine, if he at once discarded his idle companions and evil habits, and firmly adhered to a sober, industrious, and religious course of life, the powers of darkness might claim his soul in vain, for that there were higher and firmer pledges than human tongue could utter, which promised salvation to him who should repent and lead a new life.

I left him much comforted, and with a promise to return upon the next day. I did so, and found him much more cheerful, and without any remains of the dogged sullenness which I suppose had arisen from his despair. His promises of amendment were given in that tone of deliberate earnestness which belongs to deep and solemn determination; and it was with no small delight that I observed, after repeated visits, that his good resolutions, so far from failing, did but gather strength by time; and when I saw that man shake off the idle and debauched companions whose society had for years formed alike his amusement and his ruin, and revive his long-discarded habits of industry and sobriety, I said within myself, There is something more in all this than the operation of an idle dream.

One day, some time after his perfect restoration to health, I was surprised, on ascending the stairs for the purpose of visiting this man, to find him busily employed in nailing down some planks upon the landing-place, through which, at the commencement of his mysterious vision, it seemed to him that he had sunk. I perceived at once that he was strengthening the floor with a view to securing himself against such a catastrophe, and could scarcely forbear a smile as I bid “God bless his work.”

He perceived my thoughts, I suppose, for he immediately said:

“I can never pass over that floor without trembling. I’d leave this house if I could, but I can’t find another lodging in the town so cheap, and I’ll not take a better till I’ve paid off all my debts, please God; but I could not be asy in my mind till I made it as safe as I could. You’ll hardly believe me, your honour, that while I’m working, maybe a mile away, my heart is in a flutter the whole way back, with the bare thoughts of the two little steps I have to walk upon this bit of a floor. So it’s no wonder, sir, I’d thry to make it sound and firm with any idle timber I have.”

I applauded his resolution to pay off his debts, and the steadiness with which he perused his plans of conscientious economy, and passed on.

Many months elapsed, and still there appeared no alteration in his resolutions of amendment. He was a good workman, and with his better habits he recovered his former extensive and profitable employment. Everything seemed to promise comfort and respectability. I have little more to add, and that shall be told quickly. I had one evening met Pat Connell, as he returned from his work, and as usual, after a mutual, and on his side respectful salutation, I spoke a few words of encouragement and approval. I left him industrious, active, healthy – when next I saw him, not three days after, he was a corpse.

The circumstances which marked the event of his death were somewhat strange – I might say fearful. The unfortunate man had accidentally met an old friend just returned, after a long absence; and in a moment of excitement, forgetting everything in the warmth of his joy, he yielded to his urgent invitation to accompany him into a public house, which lay close by the spot where the encounter had taken place. Connell, however, previously to entering the room, had announced his determination to take nothing more than the strictest temperance would warrant.

But oh! who can describe the inveterate tenacity with which a drunkard’s habits cling to him through life? He may repent, he may reform, he may look with actual abhorrence upon his past profligacy; but amid all this reformation and compunction, who can tell the moment in which the base and ruinous propensity may not recur, triumphing over resolution, remorse, shame, everything, and prostrating its victim once more in all that is destructive and revolting in that fatal vice?

The wretched man left the place in a state of utter intoxication. He was brought home nearly insensible, and placed in his bed. The younger part of the family retired to rest much after their usual hour; but the poor wife remained up sitting by the fire, too much grieved and shocked at the occurrence of what she had so little expected, to settle to rest. Fatigue, however, at length overcame her, and she sank gradually into an uneasy slumber. She could not tell how long she had remained in this state; but when she awakened, and immediately on opening her eyes, she perceived by the faint red light of the smouldering turf embers, two persons, one of whom she recognized as her husband, noiselessly gliding out of the room.

“Pat, darling, where are you going?” said she.

There was no answer – the door closed after them; but in a moment she was startled and terrified by a loud and heavy crash, as if some ponderous body had been hurled down the stair.

Much alarmed, she started up, and going to the head of the staircase, she called repeatedly upon her husband, but in vain.

She returned to the room, and with the assistance of her daughter, whom I had occasion to mention before, she succeeded in finding and lighting a candle, with which she hurried again to the head of the staircase.

At the bottom lay what seemed to be a bundle of clothes, heaped together, motionless, lifeless – it was her husband. In going down the stairs, for what purpose can never now be known, he had fallen helplessly and violently to the bottom, and coming head foremost, the spine of the neck had been dislocated by the shock, and instant death must have ensued.

The body lay upon that landing-place to which his dream had referred.

It is scarcely worth endeavouring to clear up a single point in a narrative where all is mystery; yet I could not help suspecting that the second figure which had been seen in the room by Connell’s wife on the night of his death might have been no other than his own shadow.

I suggested this solution of the difficulty; but she told me that the unknown person had been considerably in advance of her husband, and on reaching the door, had turned back as if to communicate something to his companion.

It was, then, a mystery.

Was the dream verified? – whither had the disembodied spirit sped? who can say? We know not. But I left the house of death that day in a state of horror which I could not describe. It seemed to me that I was scarce awake. I heard and saw everything as if under the spell of a nightmare. The coincidence was terrible.

aka “The Dream”

“Dublin University Magazine”, Aug. 1838

The Purcell Papers: Volume I (1880)

SCHALKEN THE PAINTER

(1839 / 1851)

SEE APPENDIX FOR EARLY VERSION

“For he is not a man as I am that we should come together; neither is there any that might lay his hand upon us both. Let him, therefore, take his rod away from me, and let not his fear terrify me.”

There exists, at this moment, in good preservation a remarkable work of Schalken’s. The curious management of its lights constitutes, as usual in his pieces, the chief apparent merit of the picture. I say apparent, for in its subject, and not in its handling, however exquisite, consists its real value. The picture represents the interior of what might be a chamber in some antique religious building; and its foreground is occupied by a female figure, in a species of white robe, part of which is arranged so as to form a veil. The dress, however, is not that of any religious order. In her hand the figure bears a lamp, by which alone her figure and face are illuminated; and her features wear such an arch smile, as well becomes a pretty woman when practising some prankish roguery; in the background, and, excepting where the dim red light of an expiring fire serves to define the form, in total shadow, stands the figure of a man dressed in the old Flemish fashion, in an attitude of alarm, his hand being placed upon the hilt of his sword, which he appears to be in the act of drawing.

There are some pictures, which impress one, I know not how, with a conviction that they represent not the mere ideal shapes and combinations which have floated through the imagination of the artist, but scenes, faces, and situations which have actually existed. There is in that strange picture, something that stamps it as the representation of a reality.

And such in truth it is, for it faithfully records a remarkable and mysterious occurrence, and perpetuates, in the face of the female figure, which occupies the most prominent place in the design, an accurate portrait of Rose Velderkaust, the niece of Gerard Douw, the first, and, I believe, the only love of Godfrey Schalken. My great grandfather knew the painter well; and from Schalken himself he learned the fearful story of the painting, and from him too he ultimately received the picture itself as a bequest. The story and the picture have become heirlooms in my family, and having described the latter, I shall, if you please, attempt to relate the tradition which has descended with the canvas.

There are few forms on which the mantle of romance hangs more ungracefully than upon that of the uncouth Schalken – the boorish but most cunning worker in oils, whose pieces delight the critics of our day almost as much as his manners disgusted the refined of his own; and yet this man, so rude, so dogged, so slovenly, in the midst of his celebrity, had in his obscure, but happier days, played the hero in a wild romance of mystery and passion.

When Schalken studied under the immortal Gerard Douw, he was a very young man; and in spite of his phlegmatic temperament, he at once fell over head and ears in love with the beautiful niece of his wealthy master. Rose Velderkaust was still younger than he, having not yet attained her seventeenth year, and, if tradition speaks truth, possessed all the soft and dimpling charms of the fair, light-haired Flemish maidens. The young painter loved honestly and fervently. His frank adoration was rewarded. He declared his love, and extracted a faltering confession in return. He was the happiest and proudest painter in all Christendom. But there was somewhat to dash his elation; he was poor and undistinguished. He dared not ask old Gerard for the hand of his sweet ward. He must first win a reputation and a competence.

There were, therefore, many dread uncertainties and cold days before him; he had to fight his way against sore odds. But he had won the heart of dear Rose Velderkaust, and that was half the battle. It is needless to say his exertions were redoubled, and his lasting celebrity proves that his industry was not unrewarded by success.

These ardent labours, and worse still, the hopes that elevated and beguiled them, were however, destined to experience a sudden interruption – of a character so strange and mysterious as to baffle all inquiry and to throw over the events themselves a shadow of preternatural horror.

Schalken had one evening outstayed all his fellow-pupils, and still pursued his work in the deserted room. As the daylight was fast falling, he laid aside his colours, and applied himself to the completion of a sketch on which he had expressed extraordinary pains. It was a religious composition, and represented the temptations of a pot-bellied Saint Anthony. The young artist, however destitute of elevation, had, nevertheless, discernment enough to be dissatisfied with his own work, and many were the patient erasures and improvements which saint and devil underwent, yet all in vain. The large, old-fashioned room was silent, and, with the exception of himself, quite emptied of its usual inmates. An hour had thus passed away, nearly two, without any improved result. Daylight had already declined, and twilight was deepening into the darkness of night. The patience of the young painter was exhausted, and he stood before his unfinished production, angry and mortified, one hand buried in the folds of his long hair, and the other holding the piece of charcoal which had so ill-performed its office, and which he now rubbed, without much regard to the sable streaks it produced, with irritable pressure upon his ample Flemish inexpressibles. “Curse the subject!” said the young man aloud; “curse the picture, the devils, the saint—”

At this moment a short, sudden sniff uttered close beside him made the artist turn sharply round, and he now, for the first time, became aware that his labours had been overlooked by a stranger. Within about a yard and half, and rather behind him, there stood the figure of an elderly man in a cloak and broad-brimmed, conical hat; in his hand, which was protected with a heavy gauntlet-shaped glove, he carried a long ebony walking-stick, surmounted with what appeared, as it glittered dimly in the twilight, to be a massive head of gold, and upon his breast, through the folds of the cloak, there shone the links of a rich chain of the same metal. The room was so obscure that nothing further of the appearance of the figure could be ascertained, and his hat threw his features into profound shadow. It would not have been easy to conjecture the age of the intruder; but a quantity of dark hair escaping from beneath this sombre hat, as well as his firm and upright carriage served to indicate that his years could not yet exceed threescore, or thereabouts. There was an air of gravity and importance about the garb of the person, and something indescribably odd, I might say awful, in the perfect, stone-like stillness of the figure, that effectually checked the testy comment which had at once risen to the lips of the irritated artist. He, therefore, as soon as he had sufficiently recovered his surprise, asked the stranger, civilly, to be seated, and desired to know if he had any message to leave for his master.

“Tell Gerard Douw,” said the unknown, without altering his attitude in the smallest degree, “that Minheer Vanderhausen, of Rotterdam, desires to speak with him on tomorrow evening at this hour, and if he please, in this room, upon matters of weight; that is all.”

The stranger, having finished this message, turned abruptly, and, with a quick, but silent step quitted the room, before Schalken had time to say a word in reply. The young man felt a curiosity to see in what direction the burgher of Rotterdam would turn, on quitting the studio, and for that purpose he went directly to the window which commanded the door. A lobby of considerable extent intervened between the inner door of the painter’s room and the street entrance, so that Schalken occupied the post of observation before the old man could possibly have reached the street. He watched in vain, however. There was no other mode of exit. Had the queer old man vanished, or was he lurking about the recesses of the lobby for some sinister purpose? This last suggestion filled the mind of Schalken with a vague uneasiness, which was so unaccountably intense as to make him alike afraid to remain in the room alone, and reluctant to pass through the lobby. However, with an effort which appeared very disproportioned to the occasion, he summoned resolution to leave the room, and, having locked the door and thrust the key in his pocket, without looking to the right or left, he traversed the passage which had so recently, perhaps still, contained the person of his mysterious visitant, scarcely venturing to breathe till he had arrived in the open street.

“Minheer Vanderhausen!” said Gerard Douw within himself, as the appointed hour approached, “Minheer Vanderhausen, of Rotterdam! I never heard of the man till yesterday. What can he want of me? A portrait, perhaps, to be painted; or a poor relation to be apprenticed; or a collection to be valued; or – pshaw! there’s no one in Rotterdam to leave me a legacy. Well, whatever the business may be, we shall soon know it all.”

It was now the close of day, and again every easel, except that of Schalken, was deserted. Gerard Douw was pacing the apartment with the restless step of impatient expectation, sometimes pausing to glance over the work of one of his absent pupils, but more frequently placing himself at the window, from whence he might observe the passengers who threaded the obscure by-street in which his studio was placed.

“Said you not, Godfrey,” exclaimed Douw, after a long and fruitful gaze from his post of observation, and turning to Schalken, “that the hour he appointed was about seven by the clock of the Stadhouse?”

“It had just told seven when I first saw him, sir,” answered the student.

“The hour is close at hand, then,” said the master, consulting a horologe as large and as round as an orange. “Minheer Vanderhausen from Rotterdam – is it not so?”

“Such was the name.”

“And an elderly man, richly clad?” pursued Douw, musingly.

“As well as I might see,” replied his pupil; “he could not be young, nor yet very old, neither; and his dress was rich and grave, as might become a citizen of wealth and consideration.”

At this moment the sonorous boom of the Stadhouse clock told, stroke after stroke, the hour of seven; the eyes of both master and student were directed to the door; and it was not until the last peal of the bell had ceased to vibrate, that Douw exclaimed—

“So, so; we shall have his worship presently, that is, if he means to keep his hour; if not, you may wait for him, Godfrey, if you court his acquaintance. But what, after all, if it should prove but a mummery got up by Vankarp, or some such wag? I wish you had run all risks, and cudgelled the old burgomaster soundly. I’d wager a dozen of Rhenish, his worship would have unmasked, and pleaded old acquaintance in a trice.”

“Here he comes, sir,” said Schalken, in a low monitory tone; and instantly, upon turning towards the door, Gerard Douw observed the same figure which had, on the day before, so unexpectedly greeted his pupil Schalken.

There was something in the air of the figure which at once satisfied the painter that there was no masquerading in the case, and that he really stood in the presence of a man of worship; and so, without hesitation, he doffed his cap, and courteously saluting the stranger, requested him to be seated. The visitor waved his hand slightly, as if in acknowledgement of the courtesy, but remained standing.

“I have the honour to see Minheer Vanderhausen of Rotterdam?” said Gerard Douw.

“The same,” was the laconic reply of his visitor.

“I understand your worship desires to speak with me,” continued Douw, “and I am here by appointment to wait your commands.”

“Is that a man of trust?” said Vanderhausen, turning towards Schalken, who stood at a little distance behind his master.

“Certainly,” replied Gerard.

“Then let him take this box, and get the nearest jeweller or goldsmith to value its contents, and let him return hither with a certificate of the valuation.”

At the same time, he placed a small case about nine inches square in the hands of Gerard Douw, who was as much amazed at its weight as at the strange abruptness with which it was handed to him. In accordance with the wishes of the stranger, he delivered it into the hands of Schalken, and repeating his direction, despatched him upon the mission.

Schalken disposed his precious charge securely beneath the folds of his cloak, and rapidly traversing two or three narrow streets, he stopped at a corner house, the lower part of which was then occupied by the shop of a Jewish goldsmith. He entered the shop, and calling the little Hebrew into the obscurity of its back recesses, he proceeded to lay before him Vanderhausen’s casket. On being examined by the light of a lamp, it appeared entirely cased with lead, the outer surface of which was much scraped and soiled, and nearly white with age. This having been partially removed, there appeared beneath a box of some hard wood; which also they forced open and after the removal of two or three folds of linen, they discovered its contents to be a mass of golden ingots, closely packed, and, as the Jew declared, of the most perfect quality. Every ingot underwent the scrutiny of the little Jew, who seemed to feel an epicurean delight in touching and testing these morsels of the glorious metal; and each one of them was replaced in its berth with the exclamation: “Mein Gott, how very perfect! not one grain of alloy – beautiful, beautiful!” The task was at length finished, and the Jew certified under his hand the value of the ingots submitted to his examination, to amount to many thousand rix-dollars. With the desired document in his pocket, and the rich box of gold carefully pressed under his arm, and concealed by his cloak, he retraced his way, and entering the studio, found his master and the stranger in close conference. Schalken had no sooner left the room, in order to execute the commission he had taken in charge, than Vanderhausen addressed Gerard Douw in the following terms:

“I cannot tarry with you tonight more than a few minutes, and so I shall shortly tell you the matter upon which I come. You visited the town of Rotterdam some four months ago, and then I saw in the church of St. Lawrence your niece, Rose Velderkaust. I desire to marry her; and if I satisfy you that I am wealthier than any husband you can dream of for her, I expect that you will forward my suit with your authority. If you approve my proposal, you must close with it here and now, for I cannot wait for calculations and delays.”

Gerard Douw was hugely astonished by the nature of Minheer Vanderhausen’s communication, but he did not venture to express surprise; for besides the motives supplied by prudence and politeness, the painter experienced a kind of chill and oppression like that which is said to intervene when one is placed in unconscious proximity with the object of a natural antipathy – an undefined but overpowering sensation, while standing in the presence of the eccentric stranger, which made him very unwilling to say anything which might reasonably offend him.

“I have no doubt,” said Gerard, after two or three prefatory hems, “that the alliance which you propose would prove alike advantageous and honourable to my niece; but you must be aware that she has a will of her own, and may not acquiesce in what we may design for her advantage.”

“Do not seek to deceive me, sir painter,” said Vanderhausen; “you are her guardian – she is your ward – she is mine if you like to make her so.”

The man of Rotterdam moved forward a little as he spoke, and Gerard Douw, he scarce knew why, inwardly prayed for the speedy return of Schalken.

“I desire,” said the mysterious gentleman, “to place in your hands at once an evidence of my wealth, and a security for my liberal dealing with your niece. The lad will return in a minute or two with a sum in value five times the fortune which she has a right to expect from her husband. This shall lie in your hands, together with her dowry, and you may apply the united sum as suits her interest best; it shall be all exclusively hers while she lives: is that liberal?”

Douw assented, and inwardly acknowledged that fortune had been extraordinarily kind to his niece; the stranger, he thought, must be both wealthy and generous, and such an offer was not to be despised, though made by a humorist, and one of no very prepossessing presence. Rose had no very high pretensions for she had but a modest dowry, which she owed entirely to the generosity of her uncle; neither had she any right to raise exceptions on the score of birth, for her own origin was far from splendid, and as the other objections, Gerald resolved, and indeed, by the usages of the time, was warranted in resolving, not to listen to them for a moment.

“Sir” said he, addressing the stranger, “your offer is liberal, and whatever hesitation I may feel in closing with it immediately, arises solely from my not having the honour of knowing anything of your family or station. Upon these points you can, of course, satisfy me without difficulty?”

“As to my respectability,” said the stranger, drily, “you must take that for granted at present; pester me with no inquiries; you can discover nothing more about me than I choose to make known. You shall have sufficient security for my respectability – my word, if you are honourable: if you are sordid, my gold.”

“A testy old gentleman,” thought Douw, “he must have his own way; but, all things considered, I am not justified to declining his offer. I will not pledge myself unnecessarily, however.”

“You will not pledge yourself unnecessarily,” said Vanderhausen, strangely uttering the very words which had just floated through the mind of his companion; “but you will do so if it is necessary, I presume; and I will show you that I consider it indispensable. If the gold I mean to leave in your hands satisfy you, and if you don’t wish my proposal to be at once withdrawn, you must, before I leave this room, write your name to this engagement.”

Having thus spoken, he placed a paper in the hands of the master, the contents of which expressed an engagement entered into by Gerard Douw, to give to Wilken Vanderhausen of Rotterdam, in marriage, Rose Velderkaust, and so forth, within one week of the date thereof. While the painter was employed in reading this covenant, by the light of a twinkling oil lamp in the far wall of the room, Schalken, as we have stated, entered the studio, and having delivered the box and the valuation of the Jew, into the hands of the stranger, he was about to retire, when Vanderhausen called to him to wait; and, presenting the case and the certificate to Gerard Douw, he paused in silence until he had satisfied himself, by an inspection of both, respecting the value of the pledge left in his hands. At length he said—

“Are you content?”

The painter said he would fain have another day to consider.

“Not an hour,” said the suitor, apathetically.

“Well then,” said Douw, with a sore effort, “I am content, it is a bargain.”

“Then sign at once,” said Vanderhausen, “for I am weary.”

At the same time he produced a small case of writing materials, and Gerard signed the important document.

“Let this youth witness the covenant,” said the old man; and Godfrey Schalken unconsciously attested the instrument which for ever bereft him of his dear Rose Velderkaust.

The compact being thus completed, the strange visitor folded up the paper, and stowed it safely in an inner pocket.

“I will visit you tomorrow night at nine o’clock, at your own house, Gerard Douw, and will see the object of our contract;” and so saying Wilken Vanderhausen moved stiffly, but rapidly, out of the room.

Schalken, eager to resolve his doubts, had placed himself by the window, in order to watch the street entrance; but the experiment served only to support his suspicions, for the old man did not issue from the door. This was very strange, odd, nay fearful. He and his master returned together, and talked but little on the way, for each had his own subjects of reflection, of anxiety, and of hope. Schalken, however, did not know the ruin which menaced his dearest projects.

Gerard Douw knew nothing of the attachment which had sprung up between his pupil and his niece; and even if he had, it is doubtful whether he would have regarded its existence as any serious obstruction to the wishes of Minheer Vanderhausen. Marriages were then and there matters of traffic and calculation; and it would have appeared as absurd in the eyes of the guardian to make a mutual attachment an essential element in a contract of the sort, as it would have been to draw up his bonds and receipts in the language of romance.

The painter, however, did not communicate to his niece the important step which he had taken in her behalf, a forebearance caused not by any anticipated opposition on her part, but solely by a ludicrous consciousness that if she were to ask him for a description of her destined bridegroom, he would be forced to confess that he had not once seen his face, and if called upon, would find it absolutely impossible to identify him. Upon the next day, Gerard Douw, after dinner, called his niece to him and having scanned her person with an air of satisfaction, he took her hand, and looking upon her pretty innocent face with a smile of kindness, he said:

“Rose, my girl, that face of yours will make your fortune.” Rose blushed and smiled. “Such faces and such tempers seldom go together, and when they do, the compound is a love charm, few heads or hearts can resist; trust me, you will soon be a bride, girl. But this is trifling, and I am pressed for time, so make ready the large room by eight o’clock tonight, and give directions for supper at nine. I expect a friend; and observe me, child, do you trick yourself out handsomely. I will not have him think us poor or sluttish.”

With these words he left her, and took his way to the room in which his pupils worked.

When the evening closed in, Gerard called Schalken, who was about to take his departure to his own obscure and comfortless lodgings, and asked him to come home and sup with Rose and Vanderhausen. The invitation was, of course, accepted and Gerard Douw and his pupil soon found themselves in the handsome and, even then, antique chamber, which had been prepared for the reception of the stranger. A cheerful wood fire blazed in the hearth, a little at one side of which an old-fashioned table, which shone in the firelight like burnished gold, was awaiting the supper, for which preparations were going forward; and ranged with exact regularity, stood the tall-backed chairs, whose ungracefulness was more than compensated by their comfort. The little party, consisting of Rose, her uncle, and the artist, awaited the arrival of the expected visitor with considerable impatience. Nine o’clock at length came, and with it a summons at the street door, which being speedily answered, was followed by a slow and emphatic tread upon the staircase; the steps moved heavily across the lobby, the door of the room in which the party we have described were assembled slowly opened, and there entered a figure which startled, almost appalled, the phlegmatic Dutchmen, and nearly made Rose scream with terror. It was the form, and arrayed in the garb of Minheer Vanderhausen; the air, the gait, the height were the same, but the features had never been seen by any of the party before. The stranger stopped at the door of the room, and displayed his form and face completely. He wore a dark-coloured cloth cloak, which was short and full, not falling quite to his knees; his legs were cased in dark purple silk stockings, and his shoes were adorned with roses of the same colour. The opening of the cloak in front showed the under-suit to consist of some very dark, perhaps sable material, and his hands were enclosed in a pair of heavy leather gloves, which ran up considerably above the wrist, in the manner of a gauntlet. In one hand he carried his walking-stick and his hat, which he had removed, and the other hung heavily by his side. A quantity of grizzled hair descended in long tresses from his head, and rested upon the plaits of a stiff ruff, which effectually concealed his neck. So far all was well; but the face! – all the flesh of the face was coloured with the bluish leaden hue, which is sometimes produced by metallic medicines, administered in excessive quantities; the eyes showed an undue proportion of muddy white, and had a certain indefinable character of insanity; the hue of the lips bearing the usual relation to that of the face, was, consequently, nearly black; and the entire character of the face was sensual, malignant, and even satanic. It was remarkable that the worshipful stranger suffered as little as possible of his flesh to appear, and that during his visit he did not once remove his gloves. Having stood for some moments at the door, Gerard Douw at length found breath and collectedness to bid him welcome, and with a mute inclination of the head, the stranger stepped forward into the room. There was something indescribably odd, even horrible, about all his motions, something undefinable, that was unnatural, unhuman; it was as if the limbs were guided and directed by a spirit unused to the management of bodily machinery. The stranger spoke hardly at all during his visit, which did not exceed half an hour; and the host himself could scarcely muster courage enough to utter the few necessary salutations and courtesies; and, indeed, such was the nervous terror which the presence of Vanderhausen inspired, that very little would have made all his entertainers fly in downright panic from the room. They had not so far lost all self-possession, however, as to fail to observe two strange peculiarities of their visitor. During his stay his eyelids did not once close, or, indeed, move in the slightest degree; and farther, there was a deathlike stillness in his whole person, owing to the absence of the heaving motion of the chest, caused by the process of respiration. These two peculiarities, though when told they may appear trifling, produced a very striking and unpleasant effect when seen and observed. Vanderhausen at length relieved the painter of Leyden of his inauspicious presence; and with no trifling sense of relief the little party heard the street door close after him.

“Dear uncle,” said Rose, “what a frightful man! I would not see him again for the wealth of the States.”

“Tush, foolish girl,” said Douw, whose sensations were anything but comfortable. “A man may be as ugly as the devil, and yet, if his heart and actions are good, he is worth all the pretty-faced perfumed puppies that walk the Mall. Rose, my girl, it is very true he has not thy pretty face, but I know him to be wealthy and liberal; and were he ten times more ugly, these two virtues would be enough to counter balance all his deformity, and if not sufficient actually to alter the shape and hue of his features, at least enough to prevent one thinking them so much amiss.”

“Do you know, uncle,” said Rose, “when I saw him standing at the door, I could not get it out of my head that I saw the old painted wooden figure that used to frighten me so much in the Church of St. Laurence at Rotterdam.”

Gerard laughed, though he could not help inwardly acknowledging the justness of the comparison. He was resolved, however, as far as he could, to check his niece’s disposition to dilate upon the ugliness of her intended bridegroom, although he was not a little pleased, as well as puzzled, to observe that she appeared totally exempt from that mysterious dread of the stranger which, he could not disguise it from himself, considerably affected him, as also his pupil Godfrey Schalken.

Early on the next day there arrived, from various quarters of the town, rich presents of silks, velvets, jewellery, and so forth, for Rose; and also a packet directed to Gerard Douw, which on being opened, was found to contain a contract of marriage, formally drawn up, between Wilken Vanderhausen of the Boom-quay, in Rotterdam, and Rose Velderkaust of Leyden, niece to Gerard Douw, master in the art of painting, also of the same city; and containing engagements on the part of Vanderhausen to make settlements upon his bride, far more splendid than he had before led her guardian to believe likely, and which were to be secured to her use in the most unexceptionable manner possible – the money being placed in the hand of Gerard Douw himself.

I have no sentimental scenes to describe, no cruelty of guardians, no magnanimity of wards, no agonies, or transport of lovers. The record I have to make is one of sordidness, levity, and heartlessness. In less than a week after the first interview which we have just described, the contract of marriage was fulfilled, and Schalken saw the prize which he would have risked existence to secure, carried off in solemn pomp by his repulsive rival. For two or three days he absented himself from the school; he then returned and worked, if with less cheerfulness, with far more dogged resolution than before; the stimulus of love had given place to that of ambition. Months passed away, and, contrary to his expectation, and, indeed, to the direct promise of the parties, Gerard Douw heard nothing of his niece or her worshipful spouse. The interest of the money, which was to have been demanded in quarterly sums, lay unclaimed in his hands.

He began to grow extremely uneasy. Minheer Vanderhausen’s direction in Rotterdam he was fully possessed of; after some irresolution he finally determined to journey thither – a trifling undertaking, and easily accomplished – and thus to satisfy himself of the safety and comfort of his ward, for whom he entertained an honest and strong affection. His search was in vain, however; no one in Rotterdam had ever heard of Minheer Vanderhausen. Gerard Douw left not a house in the Boom-quay untried, but all in vain. No one could give him any information whatever touching the object of his inquiry, and he was obliged to return to Leyden nothing wiser and far more anxious, than when he had left it.

On his arrival he hastened to the establishment from which Vanderhausen had hired the lumbering, though, considering the times, most luxurious vehicle, which the bridal party had employed to convey them to Rotterdam. From the driver of this machine he learned, that having proceeded by slow stages, they had late in the evening approached Rotterdam; but that before they entered the city, and while yet nearly a mile from it, a small party of men, soberly clad, and after the old fashion, with peaked beards and moustaches, standing in the centre of the road, obstructed the further progress of the carriage. The driver reined in his horses, much fearing, from the obscurity of the hour, and the loneliness, of the road, that some mischief was intended. His fears were, however, somewhat allayed by his observing that these strange men carried a large litter, of an antique shape, and which they immediately set down upon the pavement, whereupon the bridegroom, having opened the coach door from within, descended, and having assisted his bride to do likewise, led her, weeping bitterly, and wringing her hands, to the litter, which they both entered. It was then raised by the men who surrounded it, and speedily carried towards the city, and before it had proceeded very far, the darkness concealed it from the view of the Dutch coachman. In the inside of the vehicle he found a purse, whose contents more than thrice paid the hire of the carriage and man. He saw and could tell nothing more of Minheer Vanderhausen and his beautiful lady.

This mystery was a source of profound anxiety and even grief to Gerard Douw. There was evidently fraud in the dealing of Vanderhausen with him, though for what purpose committed he could not imagine. He greatly doubted how far it was possible for a man possessing such a countenance to be anything but a villain, and every day that passed without his hearing from or of his niece, instead of inducing him to forget his fears, on the contrary tended more and more to aggravate them. The loss of her cheerful society tended also to depress his spirits; and in order to dispel the gloom, which often crept upon his mind after his daily occupations were over, he was wont frequently to ask Schalken to accompany him home, and share his otherwise solitary supper.

One evening, the painter and his pupil were sitting by the fire, having accomplished a comfortable meal, and had yielded to the silent and delicious melancholy of digestion, when their ruminations were disturbed by a loud sound at the street door, as if occasioned by some person rushing and scrambling vehemently against it. A domestic had run without delay to ascertain the cause of the disturbance, and they heard him twice or thrice interrogate the applicant for admission, but without eliciting any other answer but a sustained reiteration of the sounds. They heard him then open the hall door, and immediately there followed a light and rapid tread on the staircase. Schalken advanced towards the door. It opened before he reached it, and Rose rushed into the room. She looked wild, fierce and haggard with terror and exhaustion, but her dress surprised them as much as even her unexpected appearance. It consisted of a kind of white woollen wrapper, made close about the neck, and descending to the very ground. It was much deranged and travel-soiled. The poor creature had hardly entered the chamber when she fell senseless on the floor. With some difficulty they succeeded in reviving her, and on recovering her senses, she instantly exclaimed, in a tone of terror rather than mere impatience:

“Wine! wine! quickly, or I’m lost!”

Astonished and almost scared at the strange agitation in which the call was made, they at once administered to her wishes, and she drank some wine with a haste and eagerness which surprised them. She had hardly swallowed it, when she exclaimed, with the same urgency:

“Food, for God’s sake, food, at once, or I perish.”

A considerable fragment of a roast joint was upon the table, and Schalken immediately began to cut some, but he was anticipated, for no sooner did she see it than she caught it, a more than mortal image of famine, and with her hands, and even with her teeth, she tore off the flesh, and swallowed it. When the paroxysm of hunger had been a little appeased, she appeared on a sudden overcome with shame, or it may have been that other more agitating thoughts overpowered and scared her, for she began to weep bitterly and to wring her hands.

“Oh, send for a minister of God,” said she; “I am not safe till he comes; send for him speedily.”

Gerard Douw despatched a messenger instantly, and prevailed on his niece to allow him to surrender his bed chamber to her use. He also persuaded her to retire to it at once to rest; her consent was extorted upon the condition that they would not leave her for a moment.

“Oh that the holy man were here,” she said; “he can deliver me: the dead and the living can never be one: God has forbidden it.”

With these mysterious words she surrendered herself to their guidance, and they proceeded to the chamber which Gerard Douw had assigned to her use.

“Do not, do not leave me for a moment,” said she; “I am lost forever if you do.”

Gerard Douw’s chamber was approached through a spacious apartment, which they were now about to enter. He and Schalken each carried a candle, so that a sufficiency of light was cast upon all surrounding objects. They were now entering the large chamber, which as I have said, communicated with Douw’s apartment, when Rose suddenly stopped, and, in a whisper which thrilled them both with horror, she said:

“Oh, God! he is here! he is here! See, see! there he goes!”

She pointed towards the door of the inner room, and Schalken thought he saw a shadowy and ill-defined form gliding into that apartment. He drew his sword, and, raising the candle so as to throw its light with increased distinctness upon the objects in the room, he entered the chamber into which the shadow had glided. No figure was there – nothing but the furniture which belonged to the room, and yet he could not be deceived as to the fact that something had moved before them into the chamber. A sickening dread came upon him, and the cold perspiration broke out in heavy drops upon his forehead; nor was he more composed, when he heard the increased urgency and agony of entreaty, with which Rose implored them not to leave her for a moment.

“I saw him,” said she; “he’s here. I cannot be deceived; I know him; he’s by me; he is with me; he’s in the room. Then, for God’s sake, as you would save me, do not stir from beside me.”

They at length prevailed upon her to lie down upon the bed, where she continued to urge them to stay by her. She frequently uttered incoherent sentences, repeating, again and again, “the dead and the living cannot be one: God has forbidden it.” And then again, “Rest to the wakeful – sleep to the sleepwalkers.” These and such mysterious and broken sentences, she continued to utter until the clergyman arrived. Gerard Douw began to fear, naturally enough, that terror or ill-treatment, had unsettled the poor girl’s intellect, and he half suspected, by the suddenness of her appearance, the unseasonableness of the hour, and above all, from the wildness and terror of her manner, that she had made her escape from some place of confinement for lunatics, and was in imminent fear of pursuit. He resolved to summon medical advice as soon as the mind of his niece had been in some measure set at rest by the offices of the clergyman whose attendance she had so earnestly desired; and until this object had been attained, he did not venture to put any questions to her, which might possibly, by reviving painful or horrible recollections, increase her agitation. The clergyman soon arrived – a man of ascetic countenance and venerable age – one whom Gerard Douw respected very much, forasmuch as he was a veteran polemic, though one perhaps more dreaded as a combatant than beloved as a Christian – of pure morality, subtle brain, and frozen heart. He entered the chamber which communicated with that in which Rose reclined and immediately on his arrival, she requested him to pray for her, as for one who lay in the hands of Satan, and who could hope for deliverance only from heaven.

That you may distinctly understand all the circumstances of the event which I am going to describe, it is necessary to state the relative position of the parties who were engaged in it. The old clergyman and Schalken were in the anteroom of which I have already spoken; Rose lay in the inner chamber, the door of which was open; and by the side of the bed, at her urgent desire, stood her guardian; a candle burned in the bedchamber, and three were lighted in the outer apartment. The old man now cleared his voice as if about to commence, but before he had time to begin, a sudden gust of air blew out the candle which served to illuminate the room in which the poor girl lay, and she, with hurried alarm, exclaimed:

“Godfrey, bring in another candle; the darkness is unsafe.”

Gerard Douw forgetting for the moment her repeated injunctions, in the immediate impulse, stepped from the bedchamber into the other, in order to supply what she desired.

“Oh God! do not go, dear uncle,” shrieked the unhappy girl – and at the same time she sprung from the bed, and darted after him, in order, by her grasp, to detain him. But the warning came too late, for scarcely had he passed the threshold, and hardly had his niece had time to utter the startling exclamation, when the door which divided the two rooms closed violently after him, as if swung by a strong blast of wind. Schalken and he both rushed to the door, but their united and desperate efforts could not avail so much as to shake it. Shriek after shriek burst from the inner chamber, with all the piercing loudness of despairing terror. Schalken and Douw applied every nerve to force open the door; but all in vain. There was no sound of struggling from within, but the screams seemed to increase in loudness, and at the same time they heard the bolts of the latticed window withdrawn, and the window itself grated upon the sill as if thrown open. One last shriek, so long and piercing and agonized as to be scarcely human, swelled from the room, and suddenly there followed a deathlike silence. A light step was heard crossing the floor, as if from the bed to the window; and almost at the same instant the door gave way, and, yielding to the pressure of the external applicants, nearly precipitated them into the room. It was empty. The window was open, and Schalken sprung to a chair and gazed out upon the street and canal below. He saw no form, but he saw, or thought he saw, the waters of the broad canal beneath settling ring after ring in heavy circles, as if a moment before disturbed by the submission of some ponderous body.

No trace of Rose was ever after found, nor was anything certain respecting her mysterious wooer discovered or even suspected – no clue whereby to trace the intricacies of the labyrinth and to arrive at its solution, presented itself. But an incident occurred, which, though it will not be received by our rational readers in lieu of evidence, produced nevertheless a strong and a lasting impression upon the mind of Schalken. Many years after the events which we have detailed, Schalken, then residing far away received an intimation of his father’s death, and of his intended burial upon a fixed day in the church of Rotterdam. It was necessary that a very considerable journey should be performed by the funeral procession, which as it will be readily believed, was not very numerously attended. Schalken with difficulty arrived in Rotterdam late in the day upon which the funeral was appointed to take place. It had not then arrived. Evening closed in, and still it did not appear.

Schalken strolled down to the church; he found it open; notice of the arrival of the funeral had been given, and the vault in which the body was to be laid had been opened. The sexton, on seeing a well-dressed gentleman, whose object was to attend the expected obsequies, pacing the aisle of the church, hospitably invited him to share with him the comforts of a blazing fire, which, as was his custom in winter time upon such occasions, he had kindled in the hearth of a chamber in which he was accustomed to await the arrival of such grisly guests and which communicated, by a flight of steps, with the vault below. In this chamber, Schalken and his entertainer seated themselves; and the sexton, after some fruitless attempts to engage his guest in conversation, was obliged to apply himself to his tobacco-pipe and can, to solace his solitude. In spite of his grief and cares, the fatigues of a rapid journey of nearly forty hours gradually overcame the mind and body of Godfrey Schalken, and he sank into a deep sleep, from which he awakened by someone’s shaking him gently by the shoulder. He first thought that the old sexton had called him, but he was no longer in the room. He roused himself, and as soon as he could clearly see what was around him, he perceived a female form, clothed in a kind of light robe of white, part of which was so disposed as to form a veil, and in her hand she carried a lamp. She was moving rather away from him, in the direction of the flight of steps which conducted towards the vaults. Schalken felt a vague alarm at the sight of this figure and at the same time an irresistible impulse to follow its guidance. He followed it towards the vaults, but when it reached the head of the stairs, he paused; the figure paused also, and, turning gently round, displayed, by the light of the lamp it carried, the face and features of his first love, Rose Velderkaust. There was nothing horrible, or even sad, in the countenance. On the contrary, it wore the same arch smile which used to enchant the artist long before in his happy days. A feeling of awe and interest, too intense to be resisted, prompted him to follow the spectre, if spectre it were. She descended the stairs – he followed – and turning to the left, through a narrow passage, she led him, to his infinite surprise, into what appeared to be an old-fashioned Dutch apartment, such as the pictures of Gerard Douw have served to immortalize. Abundance of costly antique furniture was disposed about the room, and in one corner stood a four-post bed, with heavy black cloth curtains around it; the figure frequently turned towards him with the same arch smile; and when she came to the side of the bed, she drew the curtains, and, by the light of the lamp, which she held towards its contents, she disclosed to the horror-stricken painter, sitting bolt upright in the bed, the livid and demoniac form of Vanderhausen. Schalken had hardly seen him, when he fell senseless upon the floor, where he lay until discovered, on the next morning, by persons employed in closing the passages into the vaults. He was lying in a cell of considerable size, which had not been disturbed for a long time, and he had fallen beside a large coffin, which was supported upon small pillars, a security against the attacks of vermin.

To his dying day Schalken was satisfied of the reality of the vision which he had witnessed, and he has left behind him a curious evidence of the impression which it wrought upon his fancy, in a painting executed shortly after the event I have narrated, and which is valuable as exhibiting not only the peculiarities which have made Schalken’s pictures sought after, but even more so as presenting a portrait of his early love, Rose Velderkaust, whose mysterious fate must always remain matter of speculation.

originally “Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter”

“Dublin University Magazine”, May 1839
early version (see appendix) —
The Purcell Papers: Volume II (1880)

revised version (the above story) —
Ghost Stories And Tales Of Mystery (1851)

A NIGHT IN THE BELL INN

(1850)

Though few men are themselves on visiting terms with their ancestors, most are furnished with one or two decently-authenticated ghost stories. I myself am a firm believer in spectral phenomena, for reasons which I may perhaps, be tempted to give to the public whenever the custom of printing in folio shall have been happily revived; meanwhile, as they will not bear compression, I keep them by me, and content myself with now and then stating a fact, leaving the theory to suggest itself.

Now it has always appeared to me that the apostles of spectres (if the phrase will be allowed me) have, like other men with a mission, been, perhaps, a little precipitate in assuming their facts, and sometimes find “true ghosts” upon evidence much too slender to satisfy the hard-hearted and unbelieving generation we live in. They have thus brought scandal not only upon the useful class to which they belong, but upon the world of spirits itself – causing ghosts to be so generally discredited, that fifty visits made in their usual private and confidential way, will now hardly make a single convert beyond the individual favoured with the interview; and, in order to reinstate themselves in their former position, they will be obliged henceforward to appear at noonday, and in places of public resort.

The reader will perceive, then, that I am convinced of the equal impolicy and impropriety of resting the claims of my clients (ghosts in general) upon facts which will not stand the test of an impartial, and even a sceptical scrutiny. And, perhaps, I cannot give a happier illustration of the temper of my philosophy, at once candid and cautious, than is afforded by the following relation, for every tittle of which I solemnly pledge my character at once as a gentleman and a metaphysician.

There is a very agreeable book by Mrs. Crowe, entitled “The Night Side of Nature,” and which, among a dubia caena of authentic tales of terror, contains several which go to show the very trivial causes which have from time to time caused the re-appearance of departed spirits in this grosser world. A certain German professor, for instance, actually persecuted an old college friend with preternatural visitations for no other purpose, as it turned out, than to procure a settlement of some small six-and-eightpenny accounts, which he owed among his tradespeople at the time of his death. I could multiply, from my own notes, cases still odder, in which sensible and rather indolent men, too, have been at the trouble to re-cross the awful interval between us and the invisible, for purposes apparently still less important – so trivial, indeed, that for the present I had rather not mention them, lest I should expose their memories to the ridicule of the unreflecting. I shall now proceed to my narrative, with the repeated assurance, that the reader will nowhere find in it a single syllable that is not most accurately and positively true.

About four-and-thirty years ago I was travelling through Denbighshire upon a mission which needed despatch. I had, in fact, in my charge some papers which were required for the legal preliminaries to a marriage which was about to take place in a family of consideration, upon the borders of that county.

The season was winter, but the weather delightful – that is to say, clear and frosty; and, even without foliage, the country through which I posted was beautiful. The subject of my journey was a pleasant one. I anticipated an agreeable visit, and a cordial welcome; and the weather and scenery were precisely of the sort to second the cheerful associations with which my excursion had been undertaken. Let no one, therefore, suggest that I was predisposed for the reception of gloomy or horrible impressions. When the sun set we had a splendid moon, at once soft and brilliant; and I pleased myself with watching the altered, and, if possible, more beautiful effects of the scenery through which we were smoothly rolling. I was to put up for the night at the little town of ———; and on reaching the hill – over which the approach to it is conducted, about a short mile from its quaint little street – I dismounted, and directing the postillion to walk his jaded horses leisurely up the winding road, I trod on before him in the pleasant moonlight, and sharp bracing air. A little bypath led directly up the steep acclivity, while the carriage road more gradually ascended by a wide sweep this little path, leading through fields and hedgerows, I followed, intending to anticipate the arrival of my conveyance at the summit of the hill.

I had not proceeded very far when I found myself close to a pretty old church, whose ivied tower, and countless diamond windowpanes, were glittering in the moonbeams – a high, irregular hedge, overtopped by tall and ancient trees, enclosed it; and rows of funereal yews showed black and mournful among the wan array of headstones that kept watch over the village dead. I was so struck with the glimpse I had caught of the old churchyard, that I could not forbear mounting the little stile that commanded it – no scene could be imagined more still and solitary. Not a human habitation was near – every sign and sound of life was reverently remote; and this old church, with its silent congregation of the dead marshalled under its walls, seemed to have spread round it a circle of stillness and desertion that pleased, while it thrilled me.

No sound was here audible but the softened rush of waters, and that sweet note of home and safety, the distant baying of the watchdog – now and then broken by the sharper rattle of the carriage-wheels upon the dry road. But while I looked upon the sad and solemn scene before me, these sounds were interrupted by one which startled, and, indeed, for a moment, froze me with horror. The sound was a cry, or rather a howl of despairing terror, such as I have never heard before or since uttered by human voice. It broke from the stillness of the churchyard; but I saw no figure from which it proceeded – though this circumstance, indeed, was scarcely wonderful, as the broken ground, the trees, tall weeds, and tombstones afforded abundant cover for any person who might have sought concealment. This cry of unspeakable agony was succeeded by a silence; and, I confess, my heart throbbed strangely, when the same voice articulated, in the same tone of agony,

“Why will you trouble the dead? Who can torment us before the time? I will come to you in my flesh, though after my skin worms destroy this body, and you shall speak to me, face to face.”

This strange address was followed by a another cry of despair, which died away as suddenly as it was raised. I never could tell why it was I was not more horror-stricken than I really was by this mysterious, and, all things considered, even terrible interpolation. It was not until the silence had again returned, and the faint rustling of the frosty breeze among the crisp weeds crept towards me like the stealthy approach of some unearthly influence, that I felt a superstitious terror gradually inspire me, which hurried me at an accelerated pace from the place. A few minutes, and I heard the friendly voice of my charioteer hallooing to me from the summit of the hill.

Reassured, as I approached him, I abated my speed.

“I saw you standing on the stile, sir, by the churchyard,” he said, as I drew near, “and I ask your pardon for not giving you the hint before, but they say it is not lucky; and I called to you loud and lusty to come away, sir; but I see you are nothing the worse of it.”

“Why, what is there to be afraid of there, my good fellow?” I asked, affecting as much indifference as I was able.

“Why, sir,” said the man, throwing an uneasy look in the direction, “they do say there’s a bad spirit haunts it; and nobody in these parts would go near it after dark for love or money.”

“Haunted!” I repeated; “and how does the spirit show himself?” I asked.

“Oh! lawk, sir, in all sorts of shapes – sometimes like an old woman a’most doubled in two with years,” he answered – “sometimes like a little child agoing along a full foot high above the grass of the graves; and sometimes like a big black ram, strutting on his hind legs, and with a pair of eyes like live coals; and some has seen him in the shape of a man, with his arm raised up towards the sky, and his head hanging down, as if his neck was broke. I can’t think of half the shapes he has took at different times; but they’re all bad: the very child, they say – when he comes in that shape – has the face of Satan – God bless us! – and nobody’s ever the same again that sees him once.”

By this time I was again seated in my vehicle, and some six or eight minutes’ quick driving whirled us into the old-fashioned street, and brought the chaise to a full stop before the open door and well-lighted hall of the Bell Inn.

To me there has always been an air of indescribable cheer and comfort about a substantial country hostelry, especially when one arrives, as I did, upon a keen winter’s night, with an appetite as sharp, and something of that sense of adventure and excitement which, before the days of down-trains and tickets, always, in a greater or less degree, gave a zest to travelling. Greeted with that warmest of welcomes for which inns, alas! are celebrated, I had soon satisfied the importunities of a keen appetite; and having for some hours taken mine ease in a comfortable parlour before a blazing fire, I began to feel sleepy, and betook myself to my no less comfortable bed-chamber.

It is not to be supposed that the adventure of the churchyard had been obliterated from my recollection by the suppressed bustle and good cheer of the “Bell.” On the contrary, it had occupied me almost incessantly during my solitary ruminations; and as the night advanced, and the stillness of repose and desertion stole over the old mansion, the sensations with which this train of remembrance and speculation was accompanied became anything but purely pleasant.

I felt, I confess, fidgety and queer – I searched the corners and recesses apartment – I turned the face of the looking-glass to the wall – I poked the fire into a roaring blaze – I looked behind the window-curtains, with a vague anxiety, to assure myself that nothing could be lurking there. The shutter was a little open, and the ivied tower of the little church, and the tufted tops of the trees that surrounded it, were visible over the slope of the intervening hill. I hastily shut out the unwelcome object, and in a mood of mind, I must confess, favourable enough to any freak my nerves might please to play me, I hurried through my dispositions for the night, humming a gay air all the time, to reassure myself, and plunged into bed, extinguishing the candle, and – shall I acknowledge the weakness? – nearly burying my head under the blankets.

I lay awake some time, as men will do under such circumstances, but at length fatigue overcame me, and I fell into a profound sleep. From this repose I was, however, aroused in the manner I am about to describe. A very considerable interval must have intervened. There was a cold air in the room very unlike the comfortable atmosphere in which I had composed myself to sleep. The fire, though much lower than when I had gone to bed, was still emitting flame enough to throw a flickering light over the chamber. My curtains were, however, closely drawn, and I could not see beyond the narrow tent in which I lay.

There had been as I awoke a clanking among the fire-irons, as if a palsied hand was striving to arrange the fire, and this rather unaccountable noise continued for some seconds after I had become completely awake.

Under the impression that I was subjected to an accidental intrusion, I called out first in a gentle and afterwards in a sharper tone—

“Who’s there?”

At the second summons the sounds ceased, and I heard instead the tread of naked feet, as it seemed to me, upon the floor, pacing to and fro, between the hearth and the bed in which I lay. A superstitious terror, which I could not combat, stole over me; with an effort I repeated my question, and drawing myself upright in the bed, expected the answer with a strange sort of trepidation. It came in terms and accompanied with accessories which I shall not soon forget.

The very same tones which had so startled me in the churchyard the evening before, the very sounds which I had heard then and there, were now filling my ears, and spoken in the chamber where I lay.

“Why will you trouble the dead? Who can torment us before the time? I will come to you in my flesh, ‘though after my skin worms destroy this body,’ and you shall speak with me face to face.”

As I live, I can swear the words and the voice were the very same I had heard on the occasion I have mentioned, but (and mark this) repeated to no one. With feelings which I shall not attempt to describe, I heard the speaker approach the bed – a hand parted the bed-curtains and drew them open, revealing a form more horrible than my fancy had ever seen – an almost gigantic figure – naked, except for what might well have been the rotten remnant of a shroud – stood close beside my bed – livid and cadaverous, grimed as it seemed with the dust of the grave, and staring on me with a gaze of despair, malignity, and fury too intense almost for human endurance.

I cannot say whether I spoke or not, but this infernal spectre answered me as if I had.

“I am dead and yet alive,” it said – “the child of perdition – in the grave I am a murderer, but here I am Apollyon. Fall down and worship me.”

Having thus spoken, it stood for a moment at the bedside, and then turned away with a shuddering moan, and I lost sight of it, but after a few seconds it came again to the bedside as before.

“When I died they put me under Mervyn’s tombstone, and they did not bury me. My feet lie toward the west – turn them to the east and I will rest – maybe I will rest – I will rest – rest – rest.”

Again the figure was gone, and once again it returned, and said—

“I am your master – I am your resurrection and your life, and therefore, fall down and worship me.”

It made a motion to mount upon the bed, but what further passed I know not, for I fainted.

I must have lain in this state for a long time, for when I became conscious the fire was almost extinct. For hours that seemed interminable, I lay, scarcely daring to breathe, and afraid to get up lest I should encounter the hideous apparition, for aught I knew, lurking close beside me . I lay, therefore, in an agony of expectation such as I will not attempt to describe, awaiting the appearance of the daylight.

Gradually it came, and with it the cheerful and reassuring sounds of life and occupation. At length I mustered courage to reach the bell-rope, and having rung lustily, I plunged again into bed.

“Draw the window-curtains – open the shutters,” I exclaimed as the man entered, and these orders executed, “look about the room,” I added, “and see whether a cat or any other animal has got in.”

There was nothing of the sort; and satisfied that my visitant was no longer in the chamber, I dismissed the man, and hurried through my toilet with breathless precipitation.

Hastening from the hated scene of my terrors, I escaped to the parlour, whither I instantly summoned the proprietor of the Bell in propria persona. I suppose I looked scared and haggard enough, for mine host looked upon me with an expression of surprise and inquiry.

“Shut the door,” said I.

It was done.

“I have had an uneasy night in the room you assigned me, sir; I may say, indeed, a miserable night,” I said.

“Pray,” resumed I, interrupting his apologetic expressions of surprise, “has any person but myself ever complained of – of being disturbed in that room?”

“Never,” he assured me.

I had suspected the ghastly old practical joke, so often played off by landlords in story books, and fancied I might have been deliberately exposed to the chances of a “haunted chamber.” But there was no acting in the frank look and honest denial of mine host.

“It is a very strange thing,” said I, hesitating; “and I do not see why I should not tell you what has occurred. And as I could swear, if necessary, to the perfect reality of the entire scene, it behoves you, I think, to sift the matter carefully. For myself, I cannot entertain a doubt as to the nature of the truly terrible visitation to which I have been subjected; and, were I in your position, I should transfer my establishment at once to some other house as well suited to the purpose, and free from the dreadful liabilities of this.”

I proceeded to detail the particulars of the occurrence of the past night, to which he listened with nearly as much horror as I recited them with.

“Mervyn’s tomb!” he repeated after me; “why, that’s down there in L———r: the churchyard you can see from the window of the room you slept in.”

“Let us go there instantly,” I exclaimed, with an almost feverish anxiety to ascertain whether we should discover in the place indicated anything corroborative of the authenticity of my vision.

“Well, I shan’t say no,” said he, obviously bracing himself for an effort of courage; “but we’ll take Faukes, and James the helper, with us; and please, sir, you’ll not mention the circumstance as has occurred to either on ’em.”

I gave him the assurance he asked for, and in a few minutes our little party were in full march upon the point of interest.

There had been an intense black frost, and the ground, reverberating to our tread with the hollow sound of a vault, emitted the only noise that accompanied our rapid advance. I and my host were too much preoccupied for conversation, and our attendants maintained a respectful silence. A few minutes brought us to the low, grey walls, and bleak hedgerows that surrounded the pretty old church, and a its melancholy and picturesque memorials.

“Mervyn’s tomb lies there, I think, sir,” he said, pointing to a corner of the churchyard, in which piles of rubbish, withered weeds, and brambles were thickly accumulated under the solemn, though imperfect, shelter of the wintry trees.

He exchanged some sentences with our attendants in Welsh.

“Yes, sir, that’s the place,” he added, turning to me.

And as we all approached it, I bethought me that the direction in which, as I stood upon the stile, I had heard the voice on the night preceding, corresponded accurately with that indicated by my guides. The tomb in question was a huge slab of black marble, supported, as was made apparent when the surrounding brambles were removed, upon six pillars, little more than two feet high each. There was ample room for a human body to lie inside this funeral penthouse; and, on stooping to look beneath, I was unspeakably shocked to see that something like a human figure was actually extended there.

It was, indeed, a corpse – and, what’s more, corresponded in every trait with the infernal phantom which, on the preceding night, had visited, and appalled me.

The body, though miserably emaciated, was that of a large-boned, athletic man, of fully six-feet-four in height; and it was, therefore, no easy task to withdraw it from the receptacle where it had been deposited, and lay it, as our assistants did, upon the tombstone which had covered it. Strange to say, moreover, the feet of the body, as we found it, had been placed toward the west.

As I looked upon this corpse, and recognised, but too surely, in its proportions and lineaments, every trait of the apparition that had stood at my bedside, with a countenance animated by the despair and malignity of the damned, my heart fluttered and sank within me, and I recoiled from the effigy of the demon with terror, second only to that which had thrilled me on the night preceding.

~   ~   ~   ~

Now reader – honest reader – I appeal to your own appreciation of testimony, and ask you, having these facts in evidence, and upon the deposition of an eye and ear witness – whose veracity, through a long life, has never once been compromised or questioned – have you, or have you not, in the foregoing story, a well-authenticated ghost story?

~   ~   ~   ~

Before you answer the above question, however, it may be convenient to let you know certain other facts which were clearly established upon the inquest that was very properly held upon the body which in so strange a manner we had discovered.

I purposely avoid details, and without assigning the depositions respectively to the witnesses who made them, shall restrict myself to a naked outline of the evidence as it appeared. The body I have described was identified as that of Abraham Smith, an unfortunate lunatic, who had, upon the day but one preceding, made his escape from the neighbouring parish workhouse, where he had been for many years confined. His hallucination was a strange, but not by any means an unprecedented one. He fancied that he had died, and was condemned; and, as these ideas alternately predominated, sometimes spoke of himself as an “evil spirit,” and sometimes importuned his keepers to “bury him” – using habitually certain phrases, which I had no difficulty in recognising as among those which he had addressed to me. He had been traced to the neighbourhood where his body was found, and had been seen and relieved scarcely half a mile from it about two hours before my visit to the churchyard! There were, further, unmistakeable evidences of some person’s having climbed up the trellis-work to my window on the previous night – the shutter of which had been left unbarred, and, as the window might have been easily opened with a push, the cold which I experienced, as an accompaniment of the nocturnal visit, was easily accounted for. There was a mark of blood upon the window-stool, and a scrape upon the knee of the body corresponded with it. A multiplicity of other slight circumstances, and the positive assertion of the chambermaid that the window had been opened, and was but imperfectly closed again, came in support of the conclusion, which was to my mind satisfactorily settled by the concurrent evidence of the medical men, to the effect that the unhappy man could not have been many hours dead when the body was found.

Taken in the mass, the evidence convinced me; and though I might still have clung to the preternatural theory, which, in the opinion of some persons, the facts of the case might still have sustained, I candidly decided with the weight of evidence, “gave up the ghost,” and accepted the natural, but still somewhat horrible explanation of the occurrence. For this candour I take credit to myself. I might have stopped short at the discovery of the corpse, but I am no friend to “spurious gospels;” let our faith, whatever it is, be founded in honest fact. For my part, I steadfastly believe in ghosts, and have dozens of stories to support that belief; but this is not among them. Should I ever come, therefore, to tell you one, pray remember that you have to deal with a candid narrator.

“Dublin University Magazine”, Jun. 1850

AN ACCOUNT OF SOME STRANGE DISTURBANCES IN AUNGIER STREET

(1851)

It is not worth telling, this story of mine – at least, not worth writing. Told, indeed, as I have sometimes been called upon to tell it, to a circle of intelligent and eager faces, lighted up by a good after-dinner fire on a winter’s evening, with a cold wind rising and wailing outside, and all snug and cosy within, it has gone off – though I say it, who should not – indifferent well. But it is a venture to do as you would have me. Pen, ink, and paper are cold vehicles for the marvellous, and a “reader” decidedly a more critical animal than a “listener”. If, however, you can induce your friends to read it after nightfall, and when the fireside talk has run for a while on thrilling tales of shapeless terror; in short, if you will secure me the mollia tempora fandi, I will go to my work, and say my say, with better heart. Well, then, these conditions presupposed, I shall waste no more words, but tell you simply how it all happened.

My cousin (Tom Ludlow) and I studied medicine together. I think he would have succeeded, had he stuck to the profession; but he preferred the Church, poor fellow, and died early, a sacrifice to contagion, contracted in the noble discharge of his duties. For my present purpose, I say enough of his character when I mention that he was of a sedate but frank and cheerful nature; very exact in his observance of truth, and not by any means like myself – of an excitable or nervous temperament.

My Uncle Ludlow – Tom’s father – while we were attending lectures, purchased three or four old houses in Aungier Street, one of which was unoccupied. He resided in the country, and Tom proposed that we should take up our abode in the untenanted house, so long as it should continue unlet; a move which would accomplish the double end of settling us nearer alike to our lecture-rooms and to our amusements, and of relieving us from the weekly charge of rent for our lodgings.

Our furniture was very scant – our whole equipage remarkably modest and primitive; and, in short, our arrangements pretty nearly as simple as those of a bivouac. Our new plan was, therefore, executed almost as soon as conceived. The front drawing-room was our sitting-room. I had the bedroom over it, and Tom the back bedroom on the same floor, which nothing could have induced me to occupy.

The house, to begin with, was a very old one. It had been, I believe, newly fronted about fifty years before; but with this exception, it had nothing modern about it. The agent who bought it and looked into the titles for my uncle, told me that it was sold, along with much other forfeited property, at Chichester House, I think, in 1702; and had belonged to Sir Thomas Hacket, who was Lord Mayor of Dublin in James II.’s time. How old it was then, I can’t say; but, at all events, it had seen years and changes enough to have contracted all that mysterious and saddened air, at once exciting and depressing, which belongs to most old mansions.

There had been very little done in the way of modernising details; and, perhaps, it was better so; for there was something queer and bygone in the very walls and ceilings – in the shape of doors and windows – in the odd diagonal site of the chimney-pieces – in the beams and ponderous cornices – not to mention the singular solidity of all the woodwork, from the bannisters to the window-frames, which hopelessly defied disguise, and would have emphatically proclaimed their antiquity through any conceivable amount of modern finery and varnish.

An effort had, indeed, been made, to the extent of papering the drawing-rooms; but somehow, the paper looked raw and out of keeping; and the old woman, who kept a little dirt-pie of a shop in the lane, and whose daughter – a girl of two and fifty – was our solitary handmaid, coming in at sunrise, and chastely receding again as soon as she had made all ready for tea in our state apartment; – this woman, I say, remembered it, when old Judge Horrocks (who, having earned the reputation of a particularly “hanging judge,” ended by hanging himself, as the coroner’s jury found, under an impulse of “temporary insanity,” with a child’s skipping-rope, over the massive old bannisters) resided there, entertaining good company, with fine venison and rare old port. In those halcyon days, the drawing-rooms were hung with gilded leather, and, I dare say, cut a good figure, for they were really spacious rooms.

The bedrooms were wainscoted, but the front one was not gloomy; and in it the cosiness of antiquity quite overcame its sombre associations. But the back bedroom, with its two queerly-placed melancholy windows, staring vacantly at the foot of the bed, and with the shadowy recess to be found in most old houses in Dublin, like a large ghostly closet, which, from congeniality of temperament, had amalgamated with the bed-chamber, and dissolved the partition. At night-time, this “alcove” – as our “maid” was wont to call it – had, in my eyes, a specially sinister and suggestive character. Tom’s distant and solitary candle glimmered vainly into its darkness. There it was always overlooking him – always itself impenetrable. But this was only part of the effect. The whole room was, I can’t tell how, repulsive to me. There was, I suppose, in its proportions and features, a latent discord – a certain mysterious and indescribable relation, which jarred indistinctly upon some secret sense of the fitting and the safe, and raised indefinable suspicions and apprehensions of the imagination. On the whole, as I began by saying, nothing could have induced me to pass a night alone in it.

I had never pretended to conceal from poor Tom my superstitious weakness; and he, on the other hand, most unaffectedly ridiculed my tremors. The sceptic was, however, destined to receive a lesson, as you shall hear.

We had not been very long in occupation of our respective dormitories, when I began to complain of uneasy nights and disturbed sleep. I was, I suppose, the more impatient under this annoyance, as I was usually a sound sleeper, and by no means prone to nightmares. It was now, however, my destiny, instead of enjoying my customary repose, every night to “sup full of horrors”. After a preliminary course of disagreeable and frightful dreams, my troubles took a definite form, and the same vision, without an appreciable variation in a single detail, visited me at least (on an average) every second night in the week.

Now, this dream, nightmare, or infernal illusion – which you please – of which I was the miserable sport, was on this wise:

I saw, or thought I saw, with the most abominable distinctness, although at the time in profound darkness, every article of furniture and accidental arrangement of the chamber in which I lay. This, as you know, is incidental to ordinary nightmare. Well, while in this clairvoyant condition, which seemed but the lighting up of the theatre in which was to be exhibited the monotonous tableau of horror, which made my nights insupportable, my attention invariably became, I know not why, fixed upon the windows opposite the foot of my bed; and, uniformly with the same effect, a sense of dreadful anticipation always took slow but sure possession of me. I became somehow conscious of a sort of horrid but undefined preparation going forward in some unknown quarter, and by some unknown agency, for my torment; and, after an interval, which always seemed to me of the same length, a picture suddenly flew up to the window, where it remained fixed, as if by an electrical attraction, and my discipline of horror then commenced, to last perhaps for hours. The picture thus mysteriously glued to the windowpanes, was the portrait of an old man, in a crimson flowered silk dressing-gown, the folds of which I could now describe, with a countenance embodying a strange mixture of intellect, sensuality, and power, but withal sinister and full of malignant omen. His nose was hooked, like the beak of a vulture; his eyes large, grey, and prominent, and lighted up with a more than mortal cruelty and coldness. These features were surmounted by a crimson velvet cap, the hair that peeped from under which was white with age, while the eyebrows retained their original blackness. Well I remember every line, hue, and shadow of that stony countenance, and well I may! The gaze of this hellish visage was fixed upon me, and mine returned it with the inexplicable fascination of nightmare, for what appeared to me to be hours of agony. At last—

The cock he crew,
away then flew”

the fiend who had enslaved me through the awful watches of the night; and, harassed and nervous, I rose to the duties of the day.

I had – I can’t say exactly why, but it may have been from the exquisite anguish and profound impressions of unearthly horror, with which this strange phantasmagoria was associated – an insurmountable antipathy to describing the exact nature of my nightly troubles to my friend and comrade. Generally, however, I told him that I was haunted by abominable dreams; and, true to the imputed materialism of medicine, we put our heads together to dispel my horrors, not by exorcism, but by a tonic.

I will do this tonic justice, and frankly admit that the accursed portrait began to intermit its visits under its influence. What of that? Was this singular apparition – as full of character as of terror – therefore the creature of my fancy, or the invention of my poor stomach? Was it, in short, subjective (to borrow the technical slang of the day) and not the palpable aggression and intrusion of an external agent? That, good friend, as we will both admit, by no means follows. The evil spirit, who enthralled my senses in the shape of that portrait, may have been just as near me, just as energetic, just as malignant, though I saw him not. What means the whole moral code of revealed religion regarding the due keeping of our own bodies, soberness, temperance, etc.? here is an obvious connection between the material and the invisible; the healthy tone of the system, and its unimpaired energy may, for aught we can tell, guard us against influences which would otherwise render life itself terrific. The mesmerist and the electro-biologist will fail upon an average with nine patients out of ten – so may the evil spirit. Special conditions of the corporeal system are indispensable to the production of certain spiritual phenomena. The operation succeeds sometimes – sometimes fails – that is all.

I found afterwards that my would-be sceptical companion had his troubles too. But of these I knew nothing yet. One night, for a wonder, I was sleeping soundly, when I was roused by a step on the lobby outside my room, followed by the loud clang of what turned out to be a large brass candlestick, flung with all his force by poor Tom Ludlow over the banisters, and rattling with a rebound down the second flight of stairs; and almost concurrently with this, Tom burst open my door, and bounced into my room backwards, in a state of extraordinary agitation.

I had jumped out of bed and clutched him by the arm before I had any distinct idea of my own whereabouts. There we were – in our shirts – standing before the open door – staring through the great old banister opposite, at the lobby window, through which the sickly light of a clouded moon was gleaming.

“What’s the matter, Tom? What’s the matter with you? What the devil’s the matter with you, Tom?” I demanded shaking him with nervous impatience.

He took a long breath before he answered me, and then it was not very coherently.

“It’s nothing, nothing at all – did I speak? – what did I say? – where’s the candle, Richard? It’s dark; I – I had a candle!”

“Yes, dark enough,” I said; “but what’s the matter? – what is it? – why don’t you speak, Tom? – have you lost your wits? – what is the matter?”

“The matter? – oh, it is all over. It must have been a dream – nothing at all but a dream – don’t you think so? It could not be anything more than a dream.”

“Of course,” said I, feeling uncommonly nervous, “it was a dream.”

“I thought,” he said, “there was a man in my room, and – and I jumped out of bed; and – and – where’s the candle?”

“In your room, most likely,” I said, “shall I go and bring it?”

“No; stay here – don’t go; it’s no matter – don’t, I tell you; it was all a dream. Bolt the door, Dick; I’ll stay here with you – I feel nervous. So, Dick, like a good fellow, light your candle and open the window – I am in a shocking state.”

I did as he asked me, and robing himself like Granuaile in one of my blankets, he seated himself close beside my bed.

Everybody knows how contagious is fear of all sorts, but more especially that particular kind of fear under which poor Tom was at that moment labouring. I would not have heard, nor I believe would he have recapitulated, just at that moment, for half the world, the details of the hideous vision which had so unmanned him.

“Don’t mind telling me anything about your nonsensical dream, Tom,” said I, affecting contempt, really in a panic; “let us talk about something else; but it is quite plain that this dirty old house disagrees with us both, and hang me if I stay here any longer, to be pestered with indigestion and – and – bad nights, so we may as well look out for lodgings – don’t you think so? – at once.”

Tom agreed, and, after an interval, said—

“I have been thinking, Richard, that it is a long time since I saw my father, and I have made up my mind to go down tomorrow and return in a day or two, and you can take rooms for us in the meantime.”

I fancied that this resolution, obviously the result of the vision which had so profoundly scared him, would probably vanish next morning with the damps and shadows of night. But I was mistaken. Off went Tom at peep of day to the country, having agreed that so soon as I had secured suitable lodgings, I was to recall him by letter from his visit to my Uncle Ludlow.

Now, anxious as I was to change my quarters, it so happened, owing to a series of petty procrastinations and accidents, that nearly a week elapsed before my bargain was made and my letter of recall on the wing to Tom; and, in the meantime, a trifling adventure or two had occurred to your humble servant, which, absurd as they now appear, diminished by distance, did certainly at the time serve to whet my appetite for change considerably.

A night or two after the departure of my comrade, I was sitting by my bedroom fire, the door locked, and the ingredients of a tumbler of hot whisky-punch upon the crazy spider-table; for, as the best mode of keeping the

“Black spirits and white,

Blue spirits and grey,”

with which I was environed, at bay, I had adopted the practice recommended by the wisdom of my ancestors, and “kept my spirits up by pouring spirits down.” I had thrown aside my volume of Anatomy, and was treating myself by way of a tonic, preparatory to my punch and bed, to half-a-dozen pages of the Spectator, when I heard a step on the flight of stairs descending from the attics. It was two o’clock, and the streets were as silent as a churchyard – the sounds were, therefore, perfectly distinct. There was a slow, heavy tread, characterised by the emphasis and deliberation of age, descending by the narrow staircase from above; and, what made the sound more singular, it was plain that the feet which produced it were perfectly bare, measuring the descent with something between a pound and a flop, very ugly to hear.

I knew quite well that my attendant had gone away many hours before, and that nobody but myself had any business in the house. It was quite plain also that the person who was coming down stairs had no intention whatever of concealing his movements; but, on the contrary, appeared disposed to make even more noise, and proceed more deliberately, than was at all necessary. When the step reached the foot of the stairs outside my room, it seemed to stop; and I expected every moment to see my door open spontaneously, and give admission to the original of my detested portrait. I was, however, relieved in a few seconds by hearing the descent renewed, just in the same manner, upon the staircase leading down to the drawing-rooms, and thence, after another pause, down the next flight, and so on to the hall, whence I heard no more.

Now, by the time the sound had ceased, I was wound up, as they say, to a very unpleasant pitch of excitement. I listened, but there was not a stir. I screwed up my courage to a decisive experiment – opened my door, and in a stentorian voice bawled over the banisters, “Who’s there?” There was no answer but the ringing of my own voice through the empty old house, – no renewal of the movement; nothing, in short, to give my unpleasant sensations a definite direction. There is, I think, something most disagreeably disenchanting in the sound of one’s own voice under such circumstances, exerted in solitude, and in vain. It redoubled my sense of isolation, and my misgivings increased on perceiving that the door, which I certainly thought I had left open, was closed behind me; in a vague alarm, lest my retreat should be cut off, I got again into my room as quickly as I could, where I remained in a state of imaginary blockade, and very uncomfortable indeed, till morning.

Next night brought no return of my barefooted fellow-lodger; but the night following, being in my bed, and in the dark – somewhere, I suppose, about the same hour as before, I distinctly heard the old fellow again descending from the garrets.

This time I had had my punch, and the morale of the garrison was consequently excellent. I jumped out of bed, clutched the poker as I passed the expiring fire, and in a moment was upon the lobby. The sound had ceased by this time – the dark and chill were discouraging; and, guess my horror, when I saw, or thought I saw, a black monster, whether in the shape of a man or a bear I could not say, standing, with its back to the wall, on the lobby, facing me, with a pair of great greenish eyes shining dimly out. Now, I must be frank, and confess that the cupboard which displayed our plates and cups stood just there, though at the moment I did not recollect it. At the same time I must honestly say, that making every allowance for an excited imagination, I never could satisfy myself that I was made the dupe of my own fancy in this matter; for this apparition, after one or two shiftings of shape, as if in the act of incipient transformation, began, as it seemed on second thoughts, to advance upon me in its original form. From an instinct of terror rather than of courage, I hurled the poker, with all my force, at its head; and to the music of a horrid crash made my way into my room, and double-locked the door. Then, in a minute more, I heard the horrid bare feet walk down the stairs, till the sound ceased in the hall, as on the former occasion.

If the apparition of the night before was an ocular delusion of my fancy sporting with the dark outlines of our cupboard, and if its horrid eyes were nothing but a pair of inverted teacups, I had, at all events, the satisfaction of having launched the poker with admirable effect, and in true “fancy” phrase, “knocked its two daylights into one,” as the commingled fragments of my tea-service testified. I did my best to gather comfort and courage from these evidences; but it would not do. And then what could I say of those horrid bare feet, and the regular tramp, tramp, tramp, which measured the distance of the entire staircase through the solitude of my haunted dwelling, and at an hour when no good influence was stirring? Confound it! – the whole affair was abominable. I was out of spirits, and dreaded the approach of night.

It came, ushered ominously in with a thunderstorm and dull torrents of depressing rain. Earlier than usual the streets grew silent; and by twelve o’clock nothing but the comfortless pattering of the rain was to be heard.

I made myself as snug as I could. I lighted two candles instead of one. I forswore bed, and held myself in readiness for a sally, candle in hand; for, coute qui coute, I was resolved to see the being, if visible at all, who troubled the nightly stillness of my mansion. I was fidgetty and nervous and, tried in vain to interest myself with my books. I walked up and down my room, whistling in turn martial and hilarious music, and listening ever and anon for the dreaded noise. I sat down and stared at the square label on the solemn and reserved-looking black bottle, until “Flanagan & Co.’s Best Old Malt Whisky” grew into a sort of subdued accompaniment to all the fantastic and horrible speculations which chased one another through my brain.

Silence, meanwhile, grew more silent, and darkness darker. I listened in vain for the rumble of a vehicle, or the dull clamour of a distant row. There was nothing but the sound of a rising wind, which had succeeded the thunderstorm that had travelled over the Dublin mountains quite out of hearing. In the middle of this great city I began to feel myself alone with nature, and Heaven knows what beside. My courage was ebbing. Punch, however, which makes beasts of so many, made a man of me again – just in time to hear with tolerable nerve and firmness the lumpy, flabby, naked feet deliberately descending the stairs again.

I took a candle, not without a tremor. As I crossed the floor I tried to extemporise a prayer, but stopped short to listen, and never finished it. The steps continued. I confess I hesitated for some seconds at the door before I took heart of grace and opened it. When I peeped out the lobby was perfectly empty – there was no monster standing on the staircase; and as the detested sound ceased, I was reassured enough to venture forward nearly to the banisters. Horror of horrors! within a stair or two beneath the spot where I stood the unearthly tread smote the floor. My eye caught something in motion; it was about the size of Goliah’s foot – it was grey, heavy, and flapped with a dead weight from one step to another. As I am alive, it was the most monstrous grey rat I ever beheld or imagined.

Shakespeare says – “Some men there are cannot abide a gaping pig, and some that are mad if they behold a cat.” I went well-nigh out of my wits when I beheld this rat; for, laugh at me as you may, it fixed upon me, I thought, a perfectly human expression of malice; and, as it shuffled about and looked up into my face almost from between my feet, I saw, I could swear it – I felt it then, and know it now, the infernal gaze and the accursed countenance of my old friend in the portrait, transfused into the visage of the bloated vermin before me.

I bounced into my room again with a feeling of loathing and horror I cannot describe, and locked and bolted my door as if a lion had been at the other side. Damn him or it; curse the portrait and its original! I felt in my soul that the rat – yes, the rat, the RAT I had just seen, was that evil being in masquerade, and rambling through the house upon some infernal night lark.

Next morning I was early trudging through the miry streets; and, among other transactions, posted a peremptory note recalling Tom. On my return, however, I found a note from my absent “chum,” announcing his intended return next day. I was doubly rejoiced at this, because I had succeeded in getting rooms; and because the change of scene and return of my comrade were rendered specially pleasant by the last night’s half ridiculous half horrible adventure.

I slept extemporaneously in my new quarters in Digges’ Street that night, and next morning returned for breakfast to the haunted mansion, where I was certain Tom would call immediately on his arrival.

I was quite right – he came; and almost his first question referred to the primary object of our change of residence.

“Thank God,” he said with genuine fervour, on hearing that all was arranged. “On your account I am delighted. As to myself, I assure you that no earthly consideration could have induced me ever again to pass a night in this disastrous old house.”

“Confound the house!” I ejaculated, with a genuine mixture of fear and detestation, “we have not had a pleasant hour since we came to live here”; and so I went on, and related incidentally my adventure with the plethoric old rat.

“Well, if that were all,” said my cousin, affecting to make light of the matter, “I don’t think I should have minded it very much.”

“Aye, but its eye – its countenance, my dear Tom,” urged I; “if you had seen that, you would have felt it might be anything but what it seemed.”

“I inclined to think the best conjuror in such a case would be an able-bodied cat,” he said, with a provoking chuckle.

“But let us hear your own adventure,” I said tartly.

At this challenge he looked uneasily round him. I had poked up a very unpleasant recollection.

“You shall hear it, Dick; I’ll tell it to you,” he said. “Begad, sir, I should feel quite queer, though, telling it here, though we are too strong a body for ghosts to meddle with just now.”

Though he spoke this like a joke, I think it was serious calculation. Our Hebe was in a corner of the room, packing our cracked delft tea and dinner-services in a basket. She soon suspended operations, and with mouth and eyes wide open became an absorbed listener. Tom’s experiences were told nearly in these words:

~   ~   ~   ~

“I saw it three times, Dick – three distinct times; and I am perfectly certain it meant me some infernal harm. I was, I say, in danger – in extreme danger; for, if nothing else had happened, my reason would most certainly have failed me, unless I had escaped so soon. Thank God. I did escape.

“The first night of this hateful disturbance, I was lying in the attitude of sleep, in that lumbering old bed. I hate to think of it. I was really wide awake, though I had put out my candle, and was lying as quietly as if I had been asleep; and although accidentally restless, my thoughts were running in a cheerful and agreeable channel.

“I think it must have been two o’clock at least when I thought I heard a sound in that – that odious dark recess at the far end of the bedroom. It was as if someone was drawing a piece of cord slowly along the floor, lifting it up, and dropping it softly down again in coils. I sat up once or twice in my bed, but could see nothing, so I concluded it must be mice in the wainscot. I felt no emotion graver than curiosity, and after a few minutes ceased to observe it.

“While lying in this state, strange to say; without at first a suspicion of anything supernatural, on a sudden I saw an old man, rather stout and square, in a sort of roan-red dressing-gown, and with a black cap on his head, moving stiffly and slowly in a diagonal direction, from the recess, across the floor of the bedroom, passing my bed at the foot, and entering the lumber-closet at the left. He had something under his arm; his head hung a little at one side; and, merciful God! when I saw his face.”

Tom stopped for a while, and then said—

“That awful countenance, which living or dying I never can forget, disclosed what he was. Without turning to the right or left, he passed beside me, and entered the closet by the bed’s head.

“While this fearful and indescribable type of death and guilt was passing, I felt that I had no more power to speak or stir than if I had been myself a corpse. For hours after it had disappeared, I was too terrified and weak to move. As soon as daylight came, I took courage, and examined the room, and especially the course which the frightful intruder had seemed to take, but there was not a vestige to indicate anybody’s having passed there; no sign of any disturbing agency visible among the lumber that strewed the floor of the closet.

“I now began to recover a little. I was fagged and exhausted, and at last, overpowered by a feverish sleep. I came down late; and finding you out of spirits, on account of your dreams about the portrait, whose original I am now certain disclosed himself to me, I did not care to talk about the infernal vision. In fact, I was trying to persuade myself that the whole thing was an illusion, and I did not like to revive in their intensity the hated impressions of the past night – or, to risk the constancy of my scepticism, by recounting the tale of my sufferings.

“It required some nerve, I can tell you, to go to my haunted chamber next night, and lie down quietly in the same bed,” continued Tom. “I did so with a degree of trepidation, which, I am not ashamed to say, a very little matter would have sufficed to stimulate to downright panic. This night, however, passed off quietly enough, as also the next; and so too did two or three more. I grew more confident, and began to fancy that I believed in the theories of spectral illusions, with which I had at first vainly tried to impose upon my convictions.

“The apparition had been, indeed, altogether anomalous. It had crossed the room without any recognition of my presence: I had not disturbed it, and it had no mission to me. What, then, was the imaginable use of its crossing the room in a visible shape at all? Of course it might have been in the closet instead of going there, as easily as it introduced itself into the recess without entering the chamber in a shape discernible by the senses. Besides, how the deuce had I seen it? It was a dark night; I had no candle; there was no fire; and yet I saw it as distinctly, in colouring and outline, as ever I beheld human form! A cataleptic dream would explain it all; and I was determined that a dream it should be.

“One of the most remarkable phenomena connected with the practice of mendacity is the vast number of deliberate lies we tell ourselves, whom, of all persons, we can least expect to deceive. In all this, I need hardly tell you, Dick, I was simply lying to myself, and did not believe one word of the wretched humbug. Yet I went on, as men will do, like persevering charlatans and impostors, who tire people into credulity by the mere force of reiteration; so I hoped to win myself over at last to a comfortable scepticism about the ghost.

“He had not appeared a second time – that certainly was a comfort; and what, after all, did I care for him, and his queer old toggery and strange looks? Not a fig! I was nothing the worse for having seen him, and a good story the better. So I tumbled into bed, put out my candle, and, cheered by a loud drunken quarrel in the back lane, went fast asleep.

“From this deep slumber I awoke with a start. I knew I had had a horrible dream; but what it was I could not remember. My heart was thumping furiously; I felt bewildered and feverish; I sat up in the bed and looked about the room. A broad flood of moonlight came in through the curtainless window; everything was as I had last seen it; and though the domestic squabble in the back lane was, unhappily for me, allayed, I yet could hear a pleasant fellow singing, on his way home, the then popular comic ditty called, ‘Murphy Delany.’ Taking advantage of this diversion I lay down again, with my face towards the fireplace, and closing my eyes, did my best to think of nothing else but the song, which was every moment growing fainter in the distance:

‘’Twas Murphy Delany, so funny and frisky,

Stept into a shebeen shop to get his skin full;

He reeled out again pretty well lined with whiskey,

As fresh as a shamrock, as blind as a bull.’

“The singer, whose condition I dare say resembled that of his hero, was soon too far off to regale my ears any more; and as his music died away, I myself sank into a doze, neither sound nor refreshing. Somehow the song had got into my head, and I went meandering on through the adventures of my respectable fellow-countryman, who, on emerging from the ‘shebeen shop,’ fell into a river, from which he was fished up to be ‘sat upon’ by a coroner’s jury, who having learned from a ‘horse-doctor’ that he was ‘dead as a doornail, so there was an end,’ returned their verdict accordingly, just as he returned to his senses, when an angry altercation and a pitched battle between the body and the coroner winds up the lay with due spirit and pleasantry.

“Through this ballad I continued with a weary monotony to plod, down to the very last line, and then da capo, and so on, in my uncomfortable half-sleep, for how long, I can’t conjecture. I found myself at last, however, muttering, ‘dead as a doornail, so there was an end’; and something like another voice within me, seemed to say, very faintly, but sharply, ‘dead! dead! dead! and may the Lord have mercy on your soul!’ and instantaneously I was wide awake, and staring right before me from the pillow.

“Now – will you believe it, Dick? – I saw the same accursed figure standing full front, and gazing at me with its stony and fiendish countenance, not two yards from the bedside.”

Tom stopped here, and wiped the perspiration from his face. I felt very queer. The girl was as pale as Tom; and, assembled as we were in the very scene of these adventures, we were all, I dare say, equally grateful for the clear daylight and the resuming bustle out of doors.

“For about three seconds only I saw it plainly; then it grew indistinct; but, for a long time, there was something like a column of dark vapour where it had been standing, between me and the wall; and I felt sure that he was still there. After a good while, this appearance went too. I took my clothes downstairs to the hall, and dressed there, with the door half open; then went out into the street, and walked about the town till morning, when I came back, in a miserable state of nervousness and exhaustion. I was such a fool, Dick, as to be ashamed to tell you how I came to be so upset. I thought you would laugh at me; especially as I had always talked philosophy, and treated your ghosts with contempt. I concluded you would give me no quarter; and so kept my tale of horror to myself.

“Now, Dick, you will hardly believe me, when I assure you, that for many nights after this last experience, I did not go to my room at all. I used to sit up for a while in the drawing-room after you had gone up to your bed; and then steal down softly to the hall door, let myself out, and sit in the ‘Robin Hood’ tavern until the last guest went off; and then I got through the night like a sentry, pacing the streets till morning.

“For more than a week I never slept in bed. I sometimes had a snooze on a form in the Robin Hood, and sometimes a nap in a chair during the day; but regular sleep I had absolutely none.

“I was quite resolved that we should get into another house; but I could not bring myself to tell you the reason, and I somehow put it off from day to day, although my life was, during every hour of this procrastination, rendered as miserable as that of a felon with the constables on his track. I was growing absolutely ill from this wretched mode of life.

“One afternoon I determined to enjoy an hour’s sleep upon your bed. I hated mine; so that I had never, except in a stealthy visit every day to unmake it, lest Martha should discover the secret of my nightly absence, entered the ill-omened chamber.

“As ill-luck would have it, you had locked your bedroom, and taken away the key. I went into my own to unsettle the bed-clothes, as usual, and give the bed the appearance of having been slept in. Now, a variety of circumstances concurred to bring about the dreadful scene through which I was that night to pass. In the first place, I was literally overpowered with fatigue, and longing for sleep; in the next place, the effect of this extreme exhaustion upon my nerves resembled that of a narcotic, and rendered me less susceptible than, perhaps I should in any other condition have been, of the exciting fears which had become habitual to me. Then again, a little bit of the window was open, a pleasant freshness pervaded the room, and, to crown all, the cheerful sun of day was making the room quite pleasant. What was to prevent my enjoying an hour’s nap here? The whole air was resonant with the cheerful hum of life, and the broad matter-of-fact light of day filled every corner of the room.

“I yielded – stifling my qualms – to the almost overpowering temptation; and merely throwing off my coat, and loosening my cravat, I lay down, limiting myself to half-an-hour’s doze in the unwonted enjoyment of a feather bed, a coverlet, and a bolster.

“It was horribly insidious; and the demon, no doubt, marked my infatuated preparations. Dolt that I was, I fancied, with mind and body worn out for want of sleep, and an arrear of a full week’s rest to my credit, that such measure as half-an-hour’s sleep, in such a situation, was possible. My sleep was deathlike, long, and dreamless.

“Without a start or fearful sensation of any kind, I waked gently, but completely. It was, as you have good reason to remember, long past midnight – I believe, about two o’clock. When sleep has been deep and long enough to satisfy nature thoroughly, one often wakens in this way, suddenly, tranquilly, and completely.

“There was a figure seated in that lumbering, old sofa-chair, near the fireplace. Its back was rather towards me, but I could not be mistaken; it turned slowly round, and, merciful heavens! there was the stony face, with its infernal lineaments of malignity and despair, gloating on me. There was now no doubt as to its consciousness of my presence, and the hellish malice with which it was animated, for it arose, and drew close to the bedside. There was a rope about its neck, and the other end, coiled up, it held stiffly in its hand.

“My good angel nerved me for this horrible crisis. I remained for some seconds transfixed by the gaze of this tremendous phantom. He came close to the bed, and appeared on the point of mounting upon it. The next instant I was upon the floor at the far side, and in a moment more was, I don’t know how, upon the lobby.

“But the spell was not yet broken; the valley of the shadow of death was not yet traversed. The abhorred phantom was before me there; it was standing near the banisters, stooping a little, and with one end of the rope round its own neck, was poising a noose at the other, as if to throw over mine; and while engaged in this baleful pantomime, it wore a smile so sensual, so unspeakably dreadful, that my senses were nearly overpowered, I saw and remember nothing more, until I found myself in your room.

“I had a wonderful escape, Dick – there is no disputing that – an escape for which, while I live, I shall bless the mercy of heaven. No one can conceive or imagine what it is for flesh and blood to stand in the presence of such a thing, but one who has had the terrific experience. Dick, Dick, a shadow has passed over me – a chill has crossed my blood and marrow, and I will never be the same again – never, Dick – never!”

~   ~   ~   ~

Our handmaid, a mature girl of two-and-fifty, as I have said, stayed her hand, as Tom’s story proceeded, and by little and little drew near to us, with open mouth, and her brows contracted over her little, beady black eyes, till stealing a glance over her shoulder now and then, she established herself close behind us. During the relation, she had made various earnest comments, in an undertone; but these and her ejaculations, for the sake of brevity and simplicity, I have omitted in my narration.

“It’s often I heard tell of it,” she now said, “but I never believed it rightly till now – though, indeed, why should I not? Does not my mother, down there in the lane, know quare stories, God bless us, beyont telling about it? But you ought not to have slept in the back bedroom. She was loath to let me be going in and out of that room even in the day time, let alone for any Christian to spend the night in it; for sure she says it was his own bedroom.”

“Whose own bedroom?” we asked, in a breath.

“Why, his – the ould Judge’s – Judge Horrock’s, to be sure, God rest his sowl”; and she looked fearfully round.

“Amen!” I muttered. “But did he die there?”

“Die there! No, not quite there,” she said. “Shure, was not it over the bannisters he hung himself, the ould sinner, God be merciful to us all? and was not it in the alcove they found the handles of the skipping-rope cut off, and the knife where he was settling the cord, God bless us, to hang himself with? It was his housekeeper’s daughter owned the rope, my mother often told me, and the child never throve after, and used to be starting up out of her sleep, and screeching in the night time, wid dhrames and frights that cum an her; and they said how it was the speerit of the ould Judge that was tormentin’ her; and she used to be roaring and yelling out to hould back the big ould fellow with the crooked neck; and then she’d screech ‘Oh, the master! the master! he’s stampin’ at me, and beckoning to me! Mother, darling, don’t let me go!’ And so the poor crathure died at last, and the docthers said it was wather on the brain, for it was all they could say.”

“How long ago was all this?” I asked.

“Oh, then, how would I know?” she answered. “But it must be a wondherful long time ago, for the housekeeper was an ould woman, with a pipe in her mouth, and not a tooth left, and better nor eighty years ould when my mother was first married; and they said she was a rale buxom, fine-dressed woman when the ould Judge come to his end; an’, indeed, my mother’s not far from eighty years ould herself this day; and what made it worse for the unnatural ould villain, God rest his soul, to frighten the little girl out of the world the way he did, was what was mostly thought and believed by everyone. My mother says how the poor little crathure was his own child; for he was by all accounts an ould villain every way, an’ the hangin’est judge that ever was known in Ireland’s ground.”

“From what you said about the danger of sleeping in that bedroom,” said I, “I suppose there were stories about the ghost having appeared there to others.”

“Well, there was things said – quare things, surely,” she answered, as it seemed, with some reluctance. “And why would not there? Sure was it not up in that same room he slept for more than twenty years? and was it not in the alcove he got the rope ready that done his own business at last, the way he done many a betther man’s in his lifetime? – and was not the body lying in the same bed after death, and put in the coffin there, too, and carried out to his grave from it in Pether’s churchyard, after the coroner was done? But there was quare stories – my mother has them all – about how one Nicholas Spaight got into trouble on the head of it.”

“And what did they say of this Nicholas Spaight?” I asked.

“Oh, for that matther, it’s soon told,” she answered.

And she certainly did relate a very strange story, which so piqued my curiosity, that I took occasion to visit the ancient lady, her mother, from whom I learned many very curious particulars. Indeed, I am tempted to tell the tale, but my fingers are weary, and I must defer it. But if you wish to hear it another time, I shall do my best.

When we had heard the strange tale I have not told you, we put one or two further questions to her about the alleged spectral visitations, to which the house had, ever since the death of the wicked old Judge, been subjected.

“No one ever had luck in it,” she told us. “There was always cross accidents, sudden deaths, and short times in it. The first that tuck it was a family – I forget their name – but at any rate there was two young ladies and their papa. He was about sixty, and a stout healthy gentleman as you’d wish to see at that age. Well, he slept in that unlucky back bedroom; and, God between us an’ harm! sure enough he was found dead one morning, half out of the bed, with his head as black as a sloe, and swelled like a puddin’, hanging down near the floor. It was a fit, they said. He was as dead as a mackerel, and so he could not say what it was; but the ould people was all sure that it was nothing at all but the ould Judge, God bless us! that frightened him out of his senses and his life together.

“Some time after there was a rich old maiden lady took the house. I don’t know which room she slept in, but she lived alone; and at any rate, one morning, the servants going down early to their work, found her sitting on the passage-stairs, shivering and talkin’ to herself, quite mad; and never a word more could any of them or her friends get from her ever afterwards but, ‘Don’t ask me to go, for I promised to wait for him.’ They never made out from her who it was she meant by him, but of course those that knew all about the ould house were at no loss for the meaning of all that happened to her.

“Then afterwards, when the house was let out in lodgings, there was Micky Byrne that took the same room, with his wife and three little children; and sure I heard Mrs. Byrne myself telling how the children used to be lifted up in the bed at night, she could not see by what mains; and how they were starting and screeching every hour, just all as one as the housekeeper’s little girl that died, till at last one night poor Micky had a dhrop in him, the way he used now and again; and what do you think in the middle of the night he thought he heard a noise on the stairs, and being in liquor, nothing less id do him but out he must go himself to see what was wrong. Well, after that, all she ever heard of him was himself sayin’, ‘Oh, God!’ and a tumble that shook the very house; and there, sure enough, he was lying on the lower stairs under the lobby, with his neck smashed double undher him, where he was flung over the banisters.”

Then the handmaiden added—

“I’ll go down to the lane, and send up Joe Gavvey to pack up the rest of the taythings, and bring all the things across to your new lodgings.”

And so we all sallied out together, each of us breathing more freely, I have no doubt, as we crossed that ill-omened threshold for the last time.

Now, I may add thus much, in compliance with the immemorial usage of the realm of fiction, which sees the hero not only through his adventures, but fairly out of the world. You must have perceived that what the flesh, blood, and bone hero of romance proper is to the regular compounder of fiction, this old house of brick, wood, and mortar is to the humble recorder of this true tale. I, therefore, relate, as in duty bound, the catastrophe which ultimately befell it, which was simply this – that about two years subsequently to my story it was taken by a quack doctor, who called himself Baron Duhlstoerf, and filled the parlour windows with bottles of indescribable horrors preserved in brandy, and the newspapers with the usual grandiloquent and mendacious advertisements. This gentleman among his virtues did not reckon sobriety, and one night, being overcome with much wine, he set fire to his bed curtains, partially burned himself, and totally consumed the house. It was afterwards rebuilt, and for a time an undertaker established himself in the premises.

I have now told you my own and Tom’s adventures, together with some valuable collateral particulars; and having acquitted myself of my engagement, I wish you a very good night, and pleasant dreams.

aka “The House on Aungier Street”

“Dublin University Magazine”, Jan. 1851

Madam Crowl’s Ghost And Other Tales of Mystery (1923)

GHOST STORIES OF CHAPELIZOD

(1851)

Take my word for it, there is no such thing as an ancient village, especially if it has seen better days, unillustrated by its legends of terror. You might as well expect to find a decayed cheese without mites, or an old house without rats, as an antique and dilapidated town without an authentic population of goblins. Now, although this class of inhabitants are in nowise amenable to the police authorities, yet, as their demeanour directly affects the comforts of her Majesty’s subjects, I cannot but regard it as a grave omission that the public have hitherto been left without any statistical returns of their numbers, activity, etc., etc. And I am persuaded that a Commission to inquire into and report upon the numerical strength, habits, haunts, etc., etc., of supernatural agents resident in Ireland, would be a great deal more innocent and entertaining than half the Commissions for which the country pays, and at least as instructive. This I say, more from a sense of duty, and to deliver my mind of a grave truth, than with any hope of seeing the suggestion adopted. But, I am sure, my readers will deplore with me that the comprehensive powers of belief, and apparently illimitable leisure, possessed by parliamentary commissions of inquiry, should never have been applied to the subject I have named, and that the collection of that species of information should be confided to the gratuitous and desultory labours of individuals, who, like myself, have other occupations to attend to. This, however, by the way.

Among the village outposts of Dublin, Chapelizod once held a considerable, if not a foremost rank. Without mentioning its connection with the history of the great Kilmainham Preceptory of the Knights of St. John, it will be enough to remind the reader of its ancient and celebrated Castle, not one vestige of which now remains, and of the fact that it was for, we believe, some centuries, the summer residence of the Viceroys of Ireland. The circumstance of its being up, we believe, to the period at which that corps was disbanded, the headquarters of the Royal Irish Artillery, gave it also a consequence of an humbler, but not less substantial kind. With these advantages in its favour, it is not wonderful that the town exhibited at one time an air of substantial and semi-aristocratic prosperity unknown to Irish villages in modern times.

A broad street, with a well-paved footpath, and houses as lofty as were at that time to be found in the fashionable streets of Dublin; a goodly stone-fronted barrack; an ancient church, vaulted beneath, and with a tower clothed from its summit to its base with the richest ivy; an humble Roman Catholic chapel; a steep bridge spanning the Liffey, and a great old mill at the near end of it, were the principal features of the town. These, or at least most of them, remain still, but the greater part in a very changed and forlorn condition. Some of them indeed are superseded, though not obliterated by modern erections, such as the bridge, the chapel, and the church in part; the rest forsaken by the order who originally raised them, and delivered up to poverty, and in some cases to absolute decay.

The village lies in the lap of the rich and wooded valley of the Liffey, and is overlooked by the high grounds of the beautiful Phoenix Park on the one side, and by the ridge of the Palmerstown hills on the other. Its situation, therefore, is eminently picturesque; and factory-fronts and chimneys notwithstanding, it has, I think, even in its decay, a sort of melancholy picturesqueness of its own. Be that as it may, I mean to relate two or three stories of that sort which may be read with very good effect by a blazing fire on a shrewd winter’s night, and are all directly connected with the altered and somewhat melancholy little town I have named. The first I shall relate concerns

THE VILLAGE BULLY

About thirty years ago there lived in the town of Chapelizod an ill-conditioned fellow of herculean strength, well known throughout the neighbourhood by the title of Bully Larkin. In addition to his remarkable physical superiority, this fellow had acquired a degree of skill as a pugilist which alone would have made him formidable. As it was, he was the autocrat of the village, and carried not the sceptre in vain. Conscious of his superiority, and perfectly secure of impunity, he lorded it over his fellows in a spirit of cowardly and brutal insolence, which made him hated even more profoundly than he was feared.

Upon more than one occasion he had deliberately forced quarrels upon men whom he had singled out for the exhibition of his savage prowess; and in every encounter his over-matched antagonist had received an amount of “punishment” which edified and appalled the spectators, and in some instances left ineffaceable scars and lasting injuries after it.

Bully Larkin’s pluck had never been fairly tried. For, owing to his prodigious superiority in weight, strength, and skill, his victories had always been certain and easy; and in proportion to the facility with which he uniformly smashed an antagonist, his pugnacity and insolence were inflamed. He thus became an odious nuisance in the neighbourhood, and the terror of every mother who had a son, and of every wife who had a husband who possessed a spirit to resent insult, or the smallest confidence in his own pugilistic capabilities.

Now it happened that there was a young fellow named Ned Moran – better known by the soubriquet of “Long Ned,” from his slender, lathy proportions – at that time living in the town. He was, in truth, a mere lad, nineteen years of age, and fully twelve years younger than the stalwart bully. This, however, as the reader will see, secured for him no exemption from the dastardly provocations of the ill-conditioned pugilist. Long Ned, in an evil hour, had thrown eyes of affection upon a certain buxom damsel, who, notwithstanding Bully Larkin’s amorous rivalry, inclined to reciprocate them.

I need not say how easily the spark of jealousy, once kindled, is blown into a flame, and how naturally, in a coarse and ungoverned nature, it explodes in acts of violence and outrage.

“The bully” watched his opportunity, and contrived to provoke Ned Moran, while drinking in a public-house with a party of friends, into an altercation, in the course of which he failed not to put such insults upon his rival as manhood could not tolerate. Long Ned, though a simple, good-natured sort of fellow, was by no means deficient in spirit, and retorted in a tone of defiance which edified the more timid, and gave his opponent the opportunity he secretly coveted.

Bully Larkin challenged the heroic youth, whose pretty face he had privately consigned to the mangling and bloody discipline he was himself so capable of administering. The quarrel, which he had himself contrived to get up, to a certain degree covered the ill blood and malignant premeditation which inspired his proceedings, and Long Ned, being full of generous ire and whiskey punch, accepted the gauge of battle on the instant. The whole party, accompanied by a mob of idle men and boys, and in short by all who could snatch a moment from the calls of business, proceeded in slow procession through the old gate into the Phoenix Park, and mounting the hill overlooking the town, selected near its summit a level spot on which to decide the quarrel.

The combatants stripped, and a child might have seen in the contrast presented by the slight, lank form and limbs of the lad, and the muscular and massive build of his veteran antagonist, how desperate was the chance of Poor Ned Moran.

“Seconds” and “bottle-holders” – selected of course for their love of the game – were appointed, and “the fight” commenced.

I will not shock my readers with a description of the cool-blooded butchery that followed. The result of the combat was what anybody might have predicted. At the eleventh round, poor Ned refused to “give in”; the brawny pugilist, unhurt, in good wind, and pale with concentrated and as yet unslaked revenge, had the gratification of seeing his opponent seated upon his second’s knee, unable to hold up his head, his left arm disabled; his face a bloody, swollen, and shapeless mass; his breast scarred and bloody, and his whole body panting and quivering with rage and exhaustion.

“Give in Ned, my boy,” cried more than one of the bystanders.

“Never, never,” shrieked he, with a voice hoarse and choking.

Time being “up,” his second placed him on his feet again. Blinded with his own blood, panting and staggering, he presented but a helpless mark for the blows of his stalwart opponent. It was plain that a touch would have been sufficient to throw him to the earth. But Larkin had no notion of letting him off so easily. He closed with him without striking a blow (the effect of which, prematurely dealt, would have been to bring him at once to the ground, and so put an end to the combat), and getting his battered and almost senseless head under his arm, fast in that peculiar “fix” known to the fancy pleasantly by the name of “chancery,” he held him firmly, while with monotonous and brutal strokes he beat his fist, as it seemed, almost into his face. A cry of “shame” broke from the crowd, for it was plain that the beaten man was now insensible, and supported only by the herculean arm of the bully. The round and the fight ended by his hurling him upon the ground, falling upon him at the same time with his knee upon his chest.

The bully rose, wiping the perspiration from his white face with his bloodstained hands, but Ned lay stretched and motionless upon the grass. It was impossible to get him upon his legs for another round. So he was carried down, just as he was, to the pond which then lay close to the old Park gate, and his head and body were washed beside it. Contrary to the belief of all he was not dead. He was carried home, and after some months to a certain extent recovered. But he never held up his head again, and before the year was over he had died of consumption. Nobody could doubt how the disease had been induced, but there was no actual proof to connect the cause and effect, and the ruffian Larkin escaped the vengeance of the law. A strange retribution, however, awaited him.

After the death of Long Ned, he became less quarrelsome than before, but more sullen and reserved. Some said “he took it to heart,” and others, that his conscience was not at ease about it. Be this as it may, however, his health did not suffer by reason of his presumed agitations, nor was his worldly prosperity marred by the blasting curses with which poor Moran’s enraged mother pursued him; on the contrary, he had rather risen in the world, and obtained regular and well-remunerated employment from the Chief Secretary’s gardener, at the other side of the Park. He still lived in Chapelizod, whither, on the close of his day’s work, he used to return across the Fifteen Acres.

It was about three years after the catastrophe we have mentioned, and late in the autumn, when, one night, contrary to his habit, he did not appear at the house where he lodged, neither had he been seen anywhere, during the evening, in the village. His hours of return had been so very regular, that his absence excited considerable surprise, though, of course, no actual alarm; and, at the usual hour, the house was closed for the night, and the absent lodger consigned to the mercy of the elements, and the care of his presiding star. Early in the morning, however, he was found lying in a state of utter helplessness upon the slope immediately overlooking the Chapelizod gate. He had been smitten with a paralytic stroke: his right side was dead; and it was many weeks before he had recovered his speech sufficiently to make himself at all understood.

He then made the following relation: – He had been detained, it appeared, later than usual, and darkness had closed before he commenced his homeward walk across the Park. It was a moonlit night, but masses of ragged clouds were slowly drifting across the heavens. He had not encountered a human figure, and no sounds but the softened rush of the wind sweeping through bushes and hollows met his ear. These wild and monotonous sounds, and the utter solitude which surrounded him, did not, however, excite any of those uneasy sensations which are ascribed to superstition, although he said he did feel depressed, or, in his own phraseology, “lonesome.” Just as he crossed the brow of the hill which shelters the town of Chapelizod, the moon shone out for some moments with unclouded lustre, and his eye, which happened to wander by the shadowy enclosures which lay at the foot of the slope, was arrested by the sight of a human figure climbing, with all the haste of one pursued, over the churchyard wall, and running up the steep ascent directly towards him. Stories of “resurrectionists” crossed his recollection, as he observed this suspicious-looking figure. But he began, momentarily, to be aware with a sort of fearful instinct which he could not explain, that the running figure was directing his steps, with a sinister purpose, towards himself.

The form was that of a man with a loose coat about him, which, as he ran, he disengaged, and as well as Larkin could see, for the moon was again wading in clouds, threw from him. The figure thus advanced until within some two score yards of him, it arrested its speed, and approached with a loose, swaggering gait. The moon again shone out bright and clear, and, gracious God! what was the spectacle before him? He saw as distinctly as if he had been presented there in the flesh, Ned Moran, himself, stripped naked from the waist upward, as if for pugilistic combat, and drawing towards him in silence. Larkin would have shouted, prayed, cursed, fled across the Park, but he was absolutely powerless; the apparition stopped within a few steps, and leered on him with a ghastly mimicry of the defiant stare with which pugilists strive to cow one another before combat. For a time, which he could not so much as conjecture, he was held in the fascination of that unearthly gaze, and at last the thing, whatever it was, on a sudden swaggered close up to him with extended palms. With an impulse of horror, Larkin put out his hand to keep the figure off, and their palms touched – at least, so he believed – for a thrill of unspeakable agony, running through his arm, pervaded his entire frame, and he fell senseless to the earth.

Though Larkin lived for many years after, his punishment was terrible. He was incurably maimed; and being unable to work, he was forced, for existence, to beg alms of those who had once feared and flattered him. He suffered, too, increasingly, under his own horrible interpretation of the preternatural encounter which was the beginning of all his miseries. It was vain to endeavour to shake his faith in the reality of the apparition, and equally vain, as some compassionately did, to try to persuade him that the greeting with which his vision closed was intended, while inflicting a temporary trial, to signify a compensating reconciliation.

“No, no,” he used to say, “all won’t do. I know the meaning of it well enough; it is a challenge to meet him in the other world – in Hell, where I am going – that’s what it means, and nothing else.”

And so, miserable and refusing comfort, he lived on for some years, and then died, and was buried in the same narrow churchyard which contains the remains of his victim.

I need hardly say, how absolute was the faith of the honest inhabitants, at the time when I heard the story, in the reality of the preternatural summons which, through the portals of terror, sickness, and misery, had summoned Bully Larkin to his long, last home, and that, too, upon the very ground on which he had signalised the guiltiest triumph of his violent and vindictive career.

~   ~   ~   ~

I recollect another story of the preternatural sort, which made no small sensation, some five-and-thirty years ago, among the good gossips of the town; and, with your leave, courteous reader, I shall relate it.

THE SEXTON’S ADVENTURE

Those who remember Chapelizod a quarter of a century ago, or more, may possibly recollect the parish sexton. Bob Martin was held much in awe by truant boys who sauntered into the churchyard on Sundays, to read the tombstones, or play leapfrog over them, or climb the ivy in search of bats or sparrows’ nests, or peep into the mysterious aperture under the eastern window, which opened a dim perspective of descending steps losing themselves among profounder darkness, where lidless coffins gaped horribly among tattered velvet, bones, and dust, which time and mortality had strewn there. Of such horribly curious, and otherwise enterprising juveniles, Bob was, of course, the special scourge and terror. But terrible as was the official aspect of the sexton, and repugnant as his lank form, clothed in rusty, sable vesture, his small, frosty visage, suspicious grey eyes, and rusty, brown scratch-wig, might appear to all notions of genial frailty; it was yet true, that Bob Martin’s severe morality sometimes nodded, and that Bacchus did not always solicit him in vain.

Bob had a curious mind, a memory well stored with “merry tales,” and tales of terror. His profession familiarised him with graves and goblins, and his tastes with weddings, wassail, and sly frolics of all sorts. And as his personal recollections ran back nearly three score years into the perspective of the village history, his fund of local anecdote was copious, accurate, and edifying.

As his ecclesiastical revenues were by no means considerable, he was not unfrequently obliged, for the indulgence of his tastes, to arts which were, at the best, undignified.

He frequently invited himself when his entertainers had forgotten to do so; he dropped in accidentally upon small drinking parties of his acquaintance in public houses, and entertained them with stories, queer or terrible, from his inexhaustible reservoir, never scrupling to accept an acknowledgement in the shape of hot whiskey-punch, or whatever else was going.

There was at that time a certain atrabilious publican, called Philip Slaney, established in a shop nearly opposite the old turnpike. This man was not, when left to himself, immoderately given to drinking; but being naturally of a saturnine complexion, and his spirits constantly requiring a fillip, he acquired a prodigious liking for Bob Martin’s company. The sexton’s society, in fact, gradually became the solace of his existence, and he seemed to lose his constitutional melancholy in the fascination of his sly jokes and marvellous stories.

This intimacy did not redound to the prosperity or reputation of the convivial allies. Bob Martin drank a good deal more punch than was good for his health, or consistent with the character of an ecclesiastical functionary. Philip Slaney, too, was drawn into similar indulgences, for it was hard to resist the genial seductions of his gifted companion; and as he was obliged to pay for both, his purse was believed to have suffered even more than his head and liver.

Be this as it may, Bob Martin had the credit of having made a drunkard of “black Phil Slaney” – for by this cognomen was he distinguished; and Phil Slaney had also the reputation of having made the sexton, if possible, a “bigger bliggard” than ever. Under these circumstances, the accounts of the concern opposite the turnpike became somewhat entangled; and it came to pass one drowsy summer morning, the weather being at once sultry and cloudy, that Phil Slaney went into a small back parlour, where he kept his books, and which commanded, through its dirty windowpanes, a full view of a dead wall, and having bolted the door, he took a loaded pistol, and clapping the muzzle in his mouth, blew the upper part of his skull through the ceiling.

This horrid catastrophe shocked Bob Martin extremely; and partly on this account, and partly because having been, on several late occasions, found at night in a state of abstraction, bordering on insensibility, upon the high road, he had been threatened with dismissal; and, as some said, partly also because of the difficulty of finding anybody to “treat” him as poor Phil Slaney used to do, he for a time forswore alcohol in all its combinations, and became an eminent example of temperance and sobriety.

Bob observed his good resolutions, greatly to the comfort of his wife, and the edification of the neighbourhood, with tolerable punctuality. He was seldom tipsy, and never drunk, and was greeted by the better part of society with all the honours of the prodigal son.

Now it happened, about a year after the grisly event we have mentioned, that the curate having received, by the post, due notice of a funeral to be consummated in the churchyard of Chapelizod, with certain instructions respecting the site of the grave, despatched a summons for Bob Martin, with a view to communicate to that functionary these official details.

It was a lowering autumn night: piles of lurid thunderclouds, slowly rising from the earth, had loaded the sky with a solemn and boding canopy of storm. The growl of the distant thunder was heard afar off upon the dull, still air, and all nature seemed, as it were, hushed and cowering under the oppressive influence of the approaching tempest.

It was past nine o’clock when Bob, putting on his official coat of seedy black, prepared to attend his professional superior.

“Bobby, darlin’,” said his wife, before she delivered the hat she held in her hand to his keeping, “sure you won’t, Bobby, darlin’ – you won’t – you know what.”

“I don’t know what,” he retorted, smartly, grasping at his hat.

“You won’t be throwing up the little finger, Bobby, acushla?” she said, evading his grasp.

“Arrah, why would I, woman? there, give me my hat, will you?”

“But won’t you promise me, Bobby darlin’ – won’t you, alanna?”

“Aye, aye, to be sure I will – why not? – there, give me my hat, and let me go.”

“Aye, but you’re not promisin’, Bobby, mavourneen; you’re not promisin’ all the time.”

“Well, divil carry me if I drink a drop till I come back again,” said the sexton, angrily; “will that do you? And now will you give me my hat?”

“Here it is, darlin’,” she said, “and God send you safe back.”

And with this parting blessing she closed the door upon his retreating figure, for it was now quite dark, and resumed her knitting till his return, very much relieved; for she thought he had of late been oftener tipsy than was consistent with his thorough reformation, and feared the allurements of the half dozen “publics” which he had at that time to pass on his way to the other end of the town.

They were still open, and exhaled a delicious reek of whiskey, as Bob glided wistfully by them; but he stuck his hands in his pockets and looked the other way, whistling resolutely, and filling his mind with the image of the curate and anticipations of his coming fee. Thus he steered his morality safely through these rocks of offence, and reached the curate’s lodging in safety.

He had, however, an unexpected sick call to attend, and was not at home, so that Bob Martin had to sit in the hall and amuse himself with the devil’s tattoo until his return. This, unfortunately, was very long delayed, and it must have been fully twelve o’clock when Bob Martin set out upon his homeward way. By this time the storm had gathered to a pitchy darkness, the bellowing thunder was heard among the rocks and hollows of the Dublin mountains, and the pale, blue lightning shone upon the staring fronts of the houses.

By this time, too, every door was closed; but as Bob trudged homeward, his eye mechanically sought the public-house which had once belonged to Phil Slaney. A faint light was making its way through the shutters and the glass panes over the doorway, which made a sort of dull, foggy halo about the front of the house.

As Bob’s eyes had become accustomed to the obscurity by this time, the light in question was quite sufficient to enable him to see a man in a sort of loose riding-coat seated upon a bench which, at that time, was fixed under the window of the house. He wore his hat very much over his eyes, and was smoking a long pipe. The outline of a glass and a quart bottle were also dimly traceable beside him; and a large horse saddled, but faintly discernible, was patiently awaiting his master’s leisure.

There was something odd, no doubt, in the appearance of a traveller refreshing himself at such an hour in the open street; but the sexton accounted for it easily by supposing that, on the closing of the house for the night, he had taken what remained of his refection to the place where he was now discussing it al fresco.

At another time Bob might have saluted the stranger as he passed with a friendly “good night”; but, somehow, he was out of humour and in no genial mood, and was about passing without any courtesy of the sort, when the stranger, without taking the pipe from his mouth, raised the bottle, and with it beckoned him familiarly, while, with a sort of lurch of the head and shoulders, and at the same time shifting his seat to the end of the bench, he pantomimically invited him to share his seat and his cheer. There was a divine fragrance of whiskey about the spot, and Bob half relented; but he remembered his promise just as he began to waver, and said:

“No, I thank you, sir, I can’t stop tonight.”

The stranger beckoned with vehement welcome, and pointed to the vacant space on the seat beside him.

“I thank you for your polite offer,” said Bob, “but it’s what I’m too late as it is, and haven’t time to spare, so I wish you a good night.”

The traveller jingled the glass against the neck of the bottle, as if to intimate that he might at least swallow a dram without losing time. Bob was mentally quite of the same opinion; but, though his mouth watered, he remembered his promise, and shaking his head with incorruptible resolution, walked on.

The stranger, pipe in mouth, rose from his bench, the bottle in one hand, and the glass in the other, and followed at the Sexton’s heels, his dusky horse keeping close in his wake.

There was something suspicious and unaccountable in this importunity.

Bob quickened his pace, but the stranger followed close. The sexton began to feel queer, and turned about. His pursuer was behind, and still inviting him with impatient gestures to taste his liquor.

“I told you before,” said Bob, who was both angry and frightened, “that I would not taste it, and that’s enough. I don’t want to have anything to say to you or your bottle; and in God’s name,” he added, more vehemently, observing that he was approaching still closer, “fall back and don’t be tormenting me this way.”

These words, as it seemed, incensed the stranger, for he shook the bottle with violent menace at Bob Martin; but, notwithstanding this gesture of defiance, he suffered the distance between them to increase. Bob, however, beheld him dogging him still in the distance, for his pipe shed a wonderful red glow, which duskily illuminated his entire figure like the lurid atmosphere of a meteor.

“I wish the devil had his own, my boy,” muttered the excited sexton, “and I know well enough where you’d be.”

The next time he looked over his shoulder, to his dismay he observed the importunate stranger as close as ever upon his track.

“Confound you,” cried the man of skulls and shovels, almost beside himself with rage and horror, “what is it you want of me?”

The stranger appeared more confident, and kept wagging his head and extending both glass and bottle toward him as he drew near, and Bob Martin heard the horse snorting as it followed in the dark.

“Keep it to yourself, whatever it is, for there is neither grace nor luck about you,” cried Bob Martin, freezing with terror; “leave me alone, will you.”

And he fumbled in vain among the seething confusion of his ideas for a prayer or an exorcism. He quickened his pace almost to a run; he was now close to his own door, under the impending bank by the river side.

“Let me in, let me in, for God’s sake; Molly, open the door,” he cried, as he ran to the threshold, and leant his back against the plank. His pursuer confronted him upon the road; the pipe was no longer in his mouth, but the dusky red glow still lingered round him. He uttered some inarticulate cavernous sounds, which were wolfish and indescribable, while he seemed employed in pouring out a glass from the bottle.

The sexton kicked with all his force against the door, and cried at the same time with a despairing voice.

“In the name of God Almighty, once for all, leave me alone.”

His pursuer furiously flung the contents of the bottle at Bob Martin; but instead of fluid it issued out in a scream of flame, which expanded and whirled round them, and for a moment they were both enveloped in a faint blaze; at the same instant a sudden gust whisked off the stranger’s hat, and the sexton beheld that his skull was roofless. For an instant he beheld the gaping aperture, black and shattered, and then he fell senseless into his own doorway, which his affrighted wife had just unbarred.

I need hardly give my reader the key to this most intelligible and authentic narrative. The traveller was acknowledged by all to have been the spectre of the suicide, called up by the Evil One to tempt the convivial sexton into a violation of his promise, sealed, as it was, by an imprecation. Had he succeeded, no doubt the dusky steed, which Bob had seen saddled in attendance, was destined to have carried back a double burden to the place from whence he came.

As an attestation of the reality of this visitation, the old thorn tree which overhung the doorway was found in the morning to have been blasted with the infernal fires which had issued from the bottle, just as if a thunderbolt had scorched it.

~   ~   ~   ~

The moral of the above tale is upon the surface, apparent, and, so to speak, self-acting – a circumstance which happily obviates the necessity of our discussing it together. Taking our leave, therefore, of honest Bob Martin, who now sleeps soundly in the same solemn dormitory where, in his day, he made so many beds for others, I come to a legend of the Royal Irish Artillery, whose headquarters were for so long a time in the town of Chapelizod. I don’t mean to say that I cannot tell a great many more stories, equally authentic and marvellous, touching this old town; but as I may possibly have to perform a like office for other localities, and as Anthony Poplar is known, like Atropos, to carry a shears, wherewith to snip across all “yarns” which exceed reasonable bounds, I consider it, on the whole, safer to despatch the traditions of Chapelizod with one tale more.

Let me, however, first give it a name; for an author can no more despatch a tale without a title, than an apothecary can deliver his physic without a label. We shall, therefore, call it—

THE SPECTRE LOVERS

There lived some fifteen years since in a small and ruinous house, little better than a hovel, an old woman who was reported to have considerably exceeded her eightieth year, and who rejoiced in the name of Alice, or popularly, Ally Moran. Her society was not much courted, for she was neither rich, nor, as the reader may suppose, beautiful. In addition to a lean cur and a cat she had one human companion, her grandson, Peter Brien, whom, with laudable good-nature, she had supported from the period of his orphanage down to that of my story, which finds him in his twentieth year. Peter was a good-natured slob of a fellow, much more addicted to wrestling, dancing, and love-making, than to hard work, and fonder of whiskey punch than good advice. His grandmother had a high opinion of his accomplishments, which indeed was but natural, and also of his genius, for Peter had of late years begun to apply his mind to politics; and as it was plain that he had a mortal hatred of honest labour, his grandmother predicted, like a true fortune-teller, that he was born to marry an heiress, and Peter himself (who had no mind to forego his freedom even on such terms) that he was destined to find a pot of gold. Upon one point both agreed, that being unfitted by the peculiar bias of his genius for work, he was to acquire the immense fortune to which his merits entitled him by means of a pure run of good luck. This solution of Peter’s future had the double effect of reconciling both himself and his grandmother to his idle courses, and also of maintaining that even flow of hilarious spirits which made him everywhere welcome, and which was in truth the natural result of his consciousness of approaching affluence.

It happened one night that Peter had enjoyed himself to a very late hour with two or three choice spirits near Palmerstown. They had talked politics and love, sung songs, and told stories, and, above all, had swallowed, in the chastened disguise of punch, at least a pint of good whiskey, every man.

It was considerably past one o’clock when Peter bid his companions good-bye, with a sigh and a hiccough, and lighting his pipe set forth on his solitary homeward way.

The bridge of Chapelizod was pretty nearly the midway point of his night march, and from one cause or another his progress was rather slow, and it was past two o’clock by the time he found himself leaning over its old battlements, and looking up the river, over whose winding current and wooded banks the soft moonlight was falling.

The cold breeze that blew lightly down the stream was grateful to him. It cooled his throbbing head, and he drank it in at his hot lips. The scene, too, had, without his being well sensible of it, a secret fascination. The village was sunk in the profoundest slumber, not a mortal stirring, not a sound afloat, a soft haze covered it all, and the fairy moonlight hovered over the entire landscape.

In a state between rumination and rapture, Peter continued to lean over the battlements of the old bridge, and as he did so he saw, or fancied he saw, emerging one after another along the river bank in the little gardens and enclosures in the rear of the street of Chapelizod, the queerest little whitewashed huts and cabins he had ever seen there before. They had not been there that evening when he passed the bridge on the way to his merry tryst. But the most remarkable thing about it was the odd way in which these quaint little cabins showed themselves. First he saw one or two of them just with the corner of his eye, and when he looked full at them, strange to say, they faded away and disappeared. Then another and another came in view, but all in the same coy way, just appearing and gone again before he could well fix his gaze upon them; in a little while, however, they began to bear a fuller gaze, and he found, as it seemed to himself, that he was able by an effort of attention to fix the vision for a longer and a longer time, and when they waxed faint and nearly vanished, he had the power of recalling them into light and substance, until at last their vacillating indistinctness became less and less, and they assumed a permanent place in the moonlit landscape.

“Be the hokey,” said Peter, lost in amazement, and dropping his pipe into the river unconsciously, “them is the quarest bits iv mud cabins I ever seen, growing up like musharoons in the dew of an evening, and poppin’ up here and down again there, and up again in another place, like so many white rabbits in a warren; and there they stand at last as firm and fast as if they were there from the Deluge; bedad it’s enough to make a man a’most believe in the fairies.”

This latter was a large concession from Peter, who was a bit of a free-thinker, and spoke contemptuously in his ordinary conversation of that class of agencies.

Having treated himself to a long last stare at these mysterious fabrics, Peter prepared to pursue his homeward way; having crossed the bridge and passed the mill, he arrived at the corner of the main street of the little town, and casting a careless look up the Dublin road, his eye was arrested by a most unexpected spectacle.

This was no other than a column of foot-soldiers, marching with perfect regularity towards the village, and headed by an officer on horseback. They were at the far side of the turnpike, which was closed; but much to his perplexity he perceived that they marched on through it without appearing to sustain the least check from that barrier.

On they came at a slow march; and what was most singular in the matter was, that they were drawing several cannons along with them; some held ropes, others spoked the wheels, and others again marched in front of the guns and behind them, with muskets shouldered, giving a stately character of parade and regularity to this, as it seemed to Peter, most unmilitary procedure.

It was owing either to some temporary defect in Peter’s vision, or to some illusion attendant upon mist and moonlight, or perhaps to some other cause, that the whole procession had a certain waving and vapoury character which perplexed and tasked his eyes not a little. It was like the pictured pageant of a phantasmagoria reflected upon smoke. It was as if every breath disturbed it; sometimes it was blurred, sometimes obliterated; now here, now there. Sometimes, while the upper part was quite distinct, the legs of the column would nearly fade away or vanish outright, and then again they would come out into clear relief, marching on with measured tread, while the cocked hats and shoulders grew, as it were, transparent, and all but disappeared.

Notwithstanding these strange optical fluctuations, however, the column continued steadily to advance. Peter crossed the street from the corner near the old bridge, running on tiptoe, and with his body stooped to avoid observation, and took up a position upon the raised footpath in the shadow of the houses, where, as the soldiers kept the middle of the road, he calculated that he might, himself undetected, see them distinctly enough as they passed.

“What the div—, what on airth,” he muttered, checking the irreligious ejaculation with which he was about to start, for certain queer misgivings were hovering about his heart, notwithstanding the factitious courage of the whiskey bottle. “What on airth is the manin’ of all this? is it the French that’s landed at last to give us a hand and help us in airnest to this blessed repale? If it is not them, I simply ask who the div—, I mane who on airth are they, for such sogers as them I never seen before in my born days?”

By this time the foremost of them were quite near, and truth to say they were the queerest soldiers he had ever seen in the course of his life. They wore long gaiters and leather breeches, three-cornered hats, bound with silver lace, long blue coats, with scarlet facings and linings, which latter were shown by a fastening which held together the two opposite corners of the skirt behind; and in front the breasts were in like manner connected at a single point, where and below which they sloped back, disclosing a long-flapped waistcoat of snowy whiteness; they had very large, long cross-belts, and wore enormous pouches of white leather hung extraordinarily low, and on each of which a little silver star was glittering. But what struck him as most grotesque and outlandish in their costume was their extraordinary display of shirt-frill in front, and of ruffle about their wrists, and the strange manner in which their hair was frizzled out and powdered under their hats, and clubbed up into great rolls behind. But one of the party was mounted. He rode a tall white horse, with high action and arching neck; he had a snow-white feather in his three-cornered hat, and his coat was shimmering all over with a profusion of silver lace. From these circumstances Peter concluded that he must be the commander of the detachment, and examined him as he passed attentively. He was a slight, tall man, whose legs did not half fill his leather breeches, and he appeared to be at the wrong side of sixty. He had a shrunken, weather-beaten, mulberry-coloured face, carried a large black patch over one eye, and turned neither to the right nor to the left, but rode on at the head of his men, with a grim, military inflexibility.

The countenances of these soldiers, officers as well as men, seemed all full of trouble, and, so to speak, scared and wild. He watched in vain for a single contented or comely face. They had, one and all, a melancholy and hangdog look; and as they passed by, Peter fancied that the air grew cold and thrilling.

He had seated himself upon a stone bench, from which, staring with all his might, he gazed upon the grotesque and noiseless procession as it filed by him. Noiseless it was; he could neither hear the jingle of accoutrements, the tread of feet, nor the rumble of the wheels; and when the old colonel turned his horse a little, and made as though he were giving the word of command, and a trumpeter, with a swollen blue nose and white feather fringe round his hat, who was walking beside him, turned about and put his bugle to his lips, still Peter heard nothing, although it was plain the sound had reached the soldiers, for they instantly changed their front to three abreast.

“Botheration!” muttered Peter, “is it deaf I’m growing?”

But that could not be, for he heard the sighing of the breeze and the rush of the neighbouring Liffey plain enough.

“Well,” said he, in the same cautious key, “by the piper, this bangs Banagher fairly! It’s either the Frinch army that’s in it, come to take the town iv Chapelizod by surprise, an’ makin’ no noise for feard iv wakenin’ the inhabitants; or else it’s – it’s – what it’s – somethin’ else. But, tundher-an-ouns, what’s gone wid Fitzpatrick’s shop across the way?”

The brown, dingy stone building at the opposite side of the street looked newer and cleaner than he had been used to see it; the front door of it stood open, and a sentry, in the same grotesque uniform, with shouldered musket, was pacing noiselessly to and fro before it. At the angle of this building, in like manner, a wide gate (of which Peter had no recollection whatever) stood open, before which, also, a similar sentry was gliding, and into this gateway the whole column gradually passed, and Peter finally lost sight of it.

“I’m not asleep; I’m not dhramin’,” said he, rubbing his eyes, and stamping slightly on the pavement, to assure himself that he was wide awake. “It is a quare business, whatever it is; an’ it’s not alone that, but everything about the town looks strange to me. There’s Tresham’s house new painted, bedad, an’ them flowers in the windies! An’ Delany’s house, too, that had not a whole pane of glass in it this morning, and scarce a slate on the roof of it! It is not possible it’s what it’s dhrunk I am. Sure there’s the big tree, and not a leaf of it changed since I passed, and the stars overhead, all right. I don’t think it is in my eyes it is.”

And so looking about him, and every moment finding or fancying new food for wonder, he walked along the pavement, intending, without further delay, to make his way home.

But his adventures for the night were not concluded. He had nearly reached the angle of the short lane that leads up to the church, when for the first time he perceived that an officer, in the uniform he had just seen, was walking before, only a few yards in advance of him.

The officer was walking along at an easy, swinging gait, and carried his sword under his arm, and was looking down on the pavement with an air of reverie.

In the very fact that he seemed unconscious of Peter’s presence, and disposed to keep his reflections to himself, there was something reassuring. Besides, the reader must please to remember that our hero had a quantum sufficit of good punch before his adventure commenced, and was thus fortified against those qualms and terrors under which, in a more reasonable state of mind, he might not impossibly have sunk.

The idea of the French invasion revived in full power in Peter’s fuddled imagination, as he pursued the nonchalant swagger of the officer.

“Be the powers iv Moll Kelly, I’ll ax him what it is,” said Peter, with a sudden accession of rashness. “He may tell me or not, as he plases, but he can’t be offinded, anyhow.”

With this reflection having inspired himself, Peter cleared his voice and began—

“Captain!” said he, “I ax your pardon, captain, an’ maybe you’d be so condescindin’ to my ignorance as to tell me, if it’s plasin’ to yer honour, whether your honour is not a Frinchman, if it’s plasin’ to you.”

This he asked, not thinking that, had it been as he suspected, not one word of his question in all probability would have been intelligible to the person he addressed. He was, however, understood, for the officer answered him in English, at the same time slackening his pace and moving a little to the side of the pathway, as if to invite his interrogator to take his place beside him.

“No; I am an Irishman,” he answered.

“I humbly thank your honour,” said Peter, drawing nearer – for the affability and the nativity of the officer encouraged him – “but maybe your honour is in the sarvice of the King of France?”

“I serve the same King as you do,” he answered, with a sorrowful significance which Peter did not comprehend at the time; and, interrogating in turn, he asked, “But what calls you forth at this hour of the day?”

“The day, your honour! – the night, you mane.”

“It was always our way to turn night into day, and we keep to it still,” remarked the soldier. “But, no matter, come up here to my house; I have a job for you, if you wish to earn some money easily. I live here.”

As he said this, he beckoned authoritatively to Peter, who followed almost mechanically at his heels, and they turned up a little lane near the old Roman Catholic chapel, at the end of which stood, in Peter’s time, the ruins of a tall, stone-built house.

Like everything else in the town, it had suffered a metamorphosis. The stained and ragged walls were now erect, perfect, and covered with pebble-dash; windowpanes glittered coldly in every window; the green hall door had a bright brass knocker on it. Peter did not know whether to believe his previous or his present impressions; seeing is believing, and Peter could not dispute the reality of the scene. All the records of his memory seemed but the images of a tipsy dream. In a trance of astonishment and perplexity, therefore, he submitted himself to the chances of his adventure.

The door opened, the officer beckoned with a melancholy air of authority to Peter, and entered. Our hero followed him into a sort of hall, which was very dark, but he was guided by the steps of the soldier, and, in silence, they ascended the stairs. The moonlight, which shone in at the lobbies, showed an old, dark wainscoting, and a heavy, oak banister. They passed by closed doors at different landing-places, but all was dark and silent as, indeed, became that late hour of the night.

Now they ascended to the topmost floor. The captain paused for a minute at the nearest door, and, with a heavy groan, pushing it open, entered the room. Peter remained at the threshold. A slight female form in a sort of loose, white robe, and with a great deal of dark hair hanging loosely about her, was standing in the middle of the floor, with her back towards them.

The soldier stopped short before he reached her, and said, in a voice of great anguish, “Still the same, sweet bird – sweet bird! still the same.” Whereupon, she turned suddenly, and threw her arms about the neck of the officer, with a gesture of fondness and despair, and her frame was agitated as if by a burst of sobs. He held her close to his breast in silence; and honest Peter felt a strange terror creep over him, as he witnessed these mysterious sorrows and endearments.

“Tonight, tonight – and then ten years more – ten long years – another ten years.”

The officer and the lady seemed to speak these words together; her voice mingled with his in a musical and fearful wail, like a distant summer wind, in the dead hour of night, wandering through ruins. Then he heard the officer say, alone, in a voice of anguish—

“Upon me be it all, for ever, sweet birdie, upon me.”

And again they seemed to mourn together in the same soft and desolate wail, like sounds of grief heard from a great distance.

Peter was thrilled with horror, but he was also under a strange fascination; and an intense and dreadful curiosity held him fast.

The moon was shining obliquely into the room, and through the window Peter saw the familiar slopes of the Park, sleeping mistily under its shimmer. He could also see the furniture of the room with tolerable distinctness – the old balloon-backed chairs, a four-post bed in a sort of recess, and a rack against the wall, from which hung some military clothes and accoutrements; and the sight of all these homely objects reassured him somewhat, and he could not help feeling unspeakably curious to see the face of the girl whose long hair was streaming over the officer’s epaulet.

Peter, accordingly, coughed, at first slightly, and afterward more loudly, to recall her from her reverie of grief; and, apparently, he succeeded; for she turned round, as did her companion, and both, standing hand in hand, gazed upon him fixedly. He thought he had never seen such large, strange eyes in all his life; and their gaze seemed to chill the very air around him, and arrest the pulses of his heart. An eternity of misery and remorse was in the shadowy faces that looked upon him.

If Peter had taken less whisky by a single thimbleful, it is probable that he would have lost heart altogether before these figures, which seemed every moment to assume a more marked and fearful, though hardly definable, contrast to ordinary human shapes.

“What is it you want with me?” he stammered.

“To bring my lost treasure to the churchyard,” replied the lady, in a silvery voice of more than mortal desolation.

The word “treasure” revived the resolution of Peter, although a cold sweat was covering him, and his hair was bristling with horror; he believed, however, that he was on the brink of fortune, if he could but command nerve to brave the interview to its close.

“And where,” he gasped, “is it hid – where will I find it?”

They both pointed to the sill of the window, through which the moon was shining at the far end of the room, and the soldier said—

“Under that stone.”

Peter drew a long breath, and wiped the cold dew from his face, preparatory to passing to the window, where he expected to secure the reward of his protracted terrors. But looking steadfastly at the window, he saw the faint image of a newborn child sitting upon the sill in the moonlight, with its little arms stretched toward him, and a smile so heavenly as he never beheld before.

At sight of this, strange to say, his heart entirely failed him, he looked on the figures that stood near, and beheld them gazing on the infantine form with a smile so guilty and distorted, that he felt as if he were entering alive among the scenery of hell, and shuddering, he cried in an irrepressible agony of horror—

“I’ll have nothing to say with you, and nothing to do with you; I don’t know what yez are or what yez want iv me, but let me go this minute, every one of yez, in the name of God.”

With these words there came a strange rumbling and sighing about Peter’s ears; he lost sight of everything, and felt that peculiar and not unpleasant sensation of falling softly, that sometimes supervenes in sleep, ending in a dull shock. After that he had neither dream nor consciousness till he wakened, chill and stiff, stretched between two piles of old rubbish, among the black and roofless walls of the ruined house.

We need hardly mention that the village had put on its wonted air of neglect and decay, or that Peter looked around him in vain for traces of those novelties which had so puzzled and distracted him upon the previous night.

“Aye, aye,” said his grandmother, removing her pipe, as he ended his description of the view from the bridge, “sure enough I remember myself, when I was a slip of a girl, these little white cabins among the gardens by the river side. The artillery sogers that was married, or had not room in the barracks, used to be in them, but they’re all gone long ago.”

“The Lord be merciful to us!” she resumed, when he had described the military procession, “it’s often I seen the regiment marchin’ into the town, jist as you saw it last night, acushla. Oh, voch, but it makes my heart sore to think iv them days; they were pleasant times, sure enough; but is not it terrible, avick, to think it’s what it was the ghost of the rigiment you seen? The Lord betune us an’ harm, for it was nothing else, as sure as I’m sittin’ here.”

When he mentioned the peculiar physiognomy and figure of the old officer who rode at the head of the regiment—

“That,” said the old crone, dogmatically, “was ould Colonel Grimshaw, the Lord presarve us! he’s buried in the churchyard iv Chapelizod, and well I remember him, when I was a young thing, an’ a cross ould floggin’ fellow he was wid the men, an’ a devil’s boy among the girls – rest his soul!”

“Amen!” said Peter; “it’s often I read his tombstone myself; but he’s a long time dead.”

“Sure, I tell you he died when I was no more nor a slip iv a girl – the Lord betune us and harm!”

“I’m afeard it is what I’m not long for this world myself, afther seeing such a sight as that,” said Peter, fearfully.

“Nonsinse, avourneen,” retorted his grandmother, indignantly, though she had herself misgivings on the subject; “sure there was Phil Doolan, the ferryman, that seen black Ann Scanlan in his own boat, and what harm ever kem of it?”

Peter proceeded with his narrative, but when he came to the description of the house, in which his adventure had had so sinister a conclusion, the old woman was at fault.

“I know the house and the ould walls well, an’ I can remember the time there was a roof on it, and the doors an’ windows in it, but it had a bad name about being haunted, but by who, or for what, I forget intirely.”

“Did you ever hear was there goold or silver there?” he inquired.

“No, no, avick, don’t be thinking about the likes; take a fool’s advice, and never go next or near them ugly black walls again the longest day you have to live; an’ I’d take my davy, it’s what it’s the same word the priest himself I’d be afther sayin’ to you if you wor to ax his raverence consarnin’ it, for it’s plain to be seen it was nothing good you seen there, and there’s neither luck nor grace about it.”

Peter’s adventure made no little noise in the neighbourhood, as the reader may well suppose; and a few evenings after it, being on an errand to old Major Vandeleur, who lived in a snug old-fashioned house, close by the river, under a perfect bower of ancient trees, he was called on to relate the story in the parlour.

The Major was, as I have said, an old man; he was small, lean, and upright, with a mahogany complexion, and a wooden inflexibility of face; he was a man, besides, of few words, and if he was old, it follows plainly that his mother was older still. Nobody could guess or tell how old, but it was admitted that her own generation had long passed away, and that she had not a competitor left. She had French blood in her veins, and although she did not retain her charms quite so well as Ninon de l’Enclos, she was in full possession of all her mental activity, and talked quite enough for herself and the Major.

“So, Peter,” she said, “you have seen the dear, old Royal Irish again in the streets of Chapelizod. Make him a tumbler of punch, Frank; and Peter, sit down, and while you take it let us have the story.”

Peter accordingly, seated near the door, with a tumbler of the nectarian stimulant steaming beside him, proceeded with marvellous courage, considering they had no light but the uncertain glare of the fire, to relate with minute particularity his awful adventure. The old lady listened at first with a smile of good-natured incredulity; her cross-examination touching the drinking-bout at Palmerstown had been teazing, but as the narrative proceeded she became attentive, and at length absorbed, and once or twice she uttered ejaculations of pity or awe. When it was over, the old lady looked with a somewhat sad and stern abstraction on the table, patting her cat assiduously meanwhile, and then suddenly looking upon her son, the Major, she said—

“Frank, as sure as I live he has seen the wicked Captain Devereux.”

The Major uttered an inarticulate expression of wonder.

“The house was precisely that he has described. I have told you the story often, as I heard it from your dear grandmother, about the poor young lady he ruined, and the dreadful suspicion about the little baby. She, poor thing, died in that house heartbroken, and you know he was shot shortly after in a duel.”

This was the only light that Peter ever received respecting his adventure. It was supposed, however, that he still clung to the hope that treasure of some sort was hidden about the old house, for he was often seen lurking about its walls, and at last his fate overtook him, poor fellow, in the pursuit; for climbing near the summit one day, his holding gave way, and he fell upon the hard uneven ground, fracturing a leg and a rib, and after a short interval died, and he, like the other heroes of these true tales, lies buried in the little churchyard of Chapelizod.

“Dublin University Magazine”, Jan. 1851)

Madam Crowl’s Ghost And Other Tales of Mystery (1923)

GHOST STORIES OF THE TILED HOUSE

(1861)

SOME TALK ABOUT THE HAUNTED HOUSE

Old Sally’s Tales

Old Sally always attended her young mistress while she prepared for bed – not that Lilias required help, for she had the spirit of neatness and a joyous, gentle alacrity, and only troubled the good old creature enough to prevent her thinking herself grown old and useless.

Sally, in her quiet way, was garrulous, and she had all sorts of old-world tales of wonder and adventure, to which Lilias often went pleasantly to sleep; for there was no danger while old Sally sat knitting there by the fire, and the sound of the rector’s mounting upon his chairs, as was his wont, and taking down and putting up his books in the study beneath, though muffled and faint, gave evidence that that good and loving influence was awake and busy.

Old Sally was telling her young mistress, who sometimes listened with a smile, and sometimes lost a good five minutes together of her gentle prattle, how the young gentleman, Mr. Mervyn, had taken that awful old haunted habitation, the Tiled House “beyant at Ballyfermot,” and was going to stay there, and wondered no one had told him of the mysterious dangers of that desolate mansion.

It stood by a lonely bend of the narrow road. Lilias had often looked upon the short, straight, grass-grown avenue with an awful curiosity at the old house which she had learned in childhood to fear as the abode of shadowy tenants and unearthly dangers.

“There are people, Sally, nowadays, who call themselves free-thinkers, and don’t believe in anything – even in ghosts,” said Lilias.

“A then the place he’s stopping in now, Miss Lily, ’ill soon cure him of free-thinking, if the half they say about it’s true,” answered Sally.

“But I don’t say, mind, he’s a free-thinker, for I don’t know any thing of Mr. Mervyn; but if he be not, he must be very brave, or very good, indeed. I know, Sally, I should be horribly afraid, indeed, to sleep in it myself,” answered Lilias, with a cosy little shudder, as the aerial image of the old house for a moment stood before her, with its peculiar malign, sacred, and skulking aspect, as if it had drawn back in shame and guilt among the melancholy old elms and tall hemlock and nettles.

“And now, Sally, I’m safe in bed. Stir the fire, my old darling.” For although it was the first week in May, the night was frosty. “And tell me all about the Tiled House again, and frighten me out of my wits.”

So good old Sally, whose faith in such matters was a religion, went off over the well-known ground in a gentle little amble – sometimes subsiding into a walk as she approached some special horror, and pulling up altogether – that is to say, suspending her knitting, and looking with a mysterious nod at her young mistress in the four-poster, or lowering her voice to a sort of whisper when the crisis came.

So she told her how when the neighbours hired the orchard that ran up to the windows at the back of the house, the dogs they kept there used to howl so wildly and wolfishly all night among the trees, and prowl under the walls of the house so dejectedly, that they were fain to open the door and let them in at last; and, indeed, small need was there for dogs; for no one, young or old, dared go near the orchard after nightfall. No, the golden pippins that peeped so splendid through the leaves in the western rays of evening, and made the mouths of the Ballyfermot schoolboys water, glowed undisturbed in the morning sunbeams, and secure in the mysterious tutelage of the night smiled coyly on their predatory longings. And this was no fanciful reserve and avoidance. Mick Daly, when he had the orchard, used to sleep in the loft over the kitchen; and he swore that within five or six weeks, while he lodged there, he twice saw the same thing, and that was a lady in a hood and a loose dress, her head drooping, and her finger on her lip, walking in silence among the crooked stems, with a little child by the hand, who ran smiling and skipping beside her. And the Widow Cresswell once met them at nightfall, on the path through the orchard to the back door, and she did not know what it was until she saw the men looking at one another as she told it.

“It’s often she told it to me,” said old Sally; “and how she came on them all of a sudden at the turn of the path, just by the thick clump of alder trees; and how she stopped, thinking it was some lady that had a right to be there; and how they went by as swift as the shadow of a cloud, though she only seemed to be walking slow enough, and the little child pulling by her arm, this way and that way, and took no notice of her, nor even raised her head, though she stopped and courtesied. And old Clinton, don’t you remember old Clinton, Miss Lily?”

“I think I do, the old man who limped, and wore the old black wig?”

“Yes, indeed, acushla, so he did. See how well she remembers! That was by a kick of one of the earl’s horses – he was groom then,” resumed Sally. “He used to be troubled with hearing the very sounds his master used to make to bring him and old Oliver to the door, when he came back late. It was only on very dark nights when there was no moon. They used to hear all on a sudden, the whimpering and scraping of dogs at the hall door, and the sound of the whistle, and the light stroke across the window with the lash of the whip, just like as if the earl himself – may his poor soul find rest – was there. First the wind ’id stop, like you’d be holding your breath, then came these sounds they knew so well, and when they made no sign of stirring or opening the door, the wind ’id begin again with such a hoo-hoo-o-o-high, you’d think it was laughing, and crying, and hooting all at once.”

Here old Sally’s tale and her knitting ceased for a moment, as if she were listening to the wind outside the haunted precincts of the Tiled House; and she took up her parable again.

“The very night he met his death in London, old Oliver, the butler, was listening to Clinton – for Clinton was a scholar – reading the letter that came to him through the post that day, telling him to get things ready, for his troubles were nearly over, and he expected to be with them again in a few days, and maybe almost as soon as the letter; and sure enough, while he was reading, there came a frightful rattle to the window, like some one all in a tremble, trying to shake it open, and the earl’s voice, as they both conceited, cries from outside, ‘Let me in, let me in, let me in!’ ‘It’s him,’ says the butler. ‘’Tis so, bedad,’ says Clinton, and they both looked at the windy, and at one another – and then back again – overjoyed and frightened all at onst. Old Oliver was bad with the rheumatiz in his knee, and went lame like. So away goes Clinton to the hall door, and he calls, who’s there? and no answer. Maybe, says Clinton, to himself, ’tis what he’s rid round to the back door; so to the back door with him, and there he shouts again – and no answer, and not a sound outside – and he began to feel quare, and to the hall door with him back again. ‘Who’s there? do you hear, who’s there?’ he shouts, and receiving no answer still. ‘I’ll open the door at any rate,’ says he, ‘maybe it’s what he’s made his escape,’ for they knew all about his troubles, ‘and wants to get in without noise,’ so praying all the time – for his mind misgave him, it might not be all right – he shifts the bars and unlocks the door; but neither man, woman, nor child, nor horse, nor any living shape was standing there, only something or another slipt into the house close by his leg; it might be a dog, or something that way, he could not tell, for he only seen it for a moment with the corner of his eye, and it went in just like as if it belonged to the place. He could not see which way it went, up or down, but the house was never a happy one, or a quiet house after; and Clinton bangs the hall door, and he took a sort of a turn and a trembling, and back with him to Oliver, the butler, looking as white as the blank leaf of his master’s letter that was fluttering between his finger and thumb. ‘What is it? what is it?’ says the butler, catching his crutch like a waypon, fastening his eyes on Clinton’s white face, and growing almost as pale himself. ‘The master’s dead,’ says Clinton – and so he was, signs on it.

“After the turn she got by what she seen in the orchard, when she came to know the truth of what it was, Jinny Cresswell, you may be sure, did not stay there an hour longer than she could help; and she began to take notice of things she did not mind before – such as when she went into the big bedroom over the hall that the lord used to sleep in, whenever she went in at one door the other door used to be pulled to very quick, as if some one avoiding her was getting out in haste; but the thing that frightened her most was just this – that sometimes she used to find a long, straight mark from the head to the foot of her bed, as if ’twas made by something heavy lying there, and the place where it was used to feel warm – as if – whoever it was – they only left it as she came into the room.

“But the worst of all was poor Kitty Haplin, the young woman that died of what she seen. Her mother said it was how she was kept awake all the night with the walking about of some one in the next room, tumbling about boxes and pulling over drawers and talking and sighing to himself, and she, poor thing, wishing to go asleep and wondering who it could be, when in he comes, a fine man, in a sort of loose silk morning-dress, an’ no wig, but a velvet cap on, and to the windy with him quiet and aisy, and she makes a turn in the bed to let him know there was some one there, thinking he’d go away, but instead of that, over he comes to the side of the bed, looking very bad, and says something to her – but his speech was thick and queer, like a dummy’s that ’id be trying to spake – and she grew very frightened, and says she, ‘I ask your honour’s pardon, Sir, but I can’t hear you right,’ and with that he stretches up his neck nigh out of his cravat, turning his face up towards the ceiling, and – grace between us and harm! – his throat was cut across like another mouth, wide open, laughing at her; she seen no more, but dropped in a dead faint in the bed, and back to her mother with her in the morning, and she never swallied bit or sup more, only she just sat by the fire holding her mother’s hand, crying and trembling, and peepin’ over her shoulder, and starting with every sound, till she took the fever and died, poor thing, not five weeks after.”

And so on, and on, and on flowed the stream of old Sally’s narrative, while Lilias dropped into dreamless sleep, and then the storyteller stole away to her own tidy bedroom and innocent slumbers.

NARRATIVE OF THE GHOST OF A HAND

I’m sure she believed every word she related, for old Sally was veracious. But all this was worth just so much as such talk commonly is – marvels, fabulae, what our ancestors called winter’s tales – which gathered details from every narrator, and dilated in the act of narration. Still it was not quite for nothing that the house was held to be haunted. Under all this smoke there smouldered just a little spark of truth – an authenticated mystery, for the solution of which some of my readers may possibly suggest a theory, though I confess I can’t.

Miss Rebecca Chattesworth, in a letter dated late in the autumn of 1753, gives a minute and curious relation of occurrences in the Tiled House, which, it is plain, although at starting she protests against all such fooleries, she has heard with a peculiar sort of interest, and relates it certainly with an awful sort of particularity.

I was for printing the entire letter, which is really very singular as well as characteristic. But my publisher meets me with his veto; and I believe he is right. The worthy old lady’s letter is, perhaps, too long; and I must rest content with a few hungry notes of its tenor.

~   ~   ~   ~

That year, and somewhere about the 24th October, there broke out a strange dispute between Mr. Alderman Harper, of High Street, Dublin, and my Lord Castlemallard, who, in virtue of his cousinship to the young heir’s mother, had undertaken for him the management of the tiny estate on which the Tiled or Tyled House – for I find it spelt both ways – stood.

This Alderman Harper had agreed for a lease of the house for his daughter, who was married to a gentleman named Prosser. He furnished it and put up hangings, and otherwise went to considerable expense. Mr. and Mrs. Prosser came there sometime in June, and after having parted with a good many servants in the interval, she made up her mind that she could not live in the house, and her father waited on Lord Castlemallard, and told him plainly that he would not take out the lease because the house was subjected to annoyances which he could not explain. In plain terms, he said it was haunted, and that no servants would live there more than a few weeks, and that after what his son-in-law’s family had suffered there, not only should he be excused from taking a lease of it, but that the house itself ought to be pulled down as a nuisance and the habitual haunt of something worse than human malefactors.

Lord Castlemallard filed a bill in the Equity side of the Exchequer to compel Mr. Alderman Harper to perform his contract, by taking out the lease. But the Alderman drew an answer, supported by no less than seven long affidavits, copies of all which were furnished to his lordship, and with the desired effect; for rather than compel him to place them upon the file of the court, his lordship struck, and consented to release him.

I am sorry the cause did not proceed at least far enough to place upon the files of the court the very authentic and unaccountable story which Miss Rebecca relates.

The annoyances described did not begin till the end of August, when, one evening, Mrs. Prosser, quite alone, was sitting in the twilight at the back parlour window, which was open, looking out into the orchard, and plainly saw a hand stealthily placed upon the stone windowsill outside, as if by some one beneath the window, at her right side, intending to climb up. There was nothing but the hand, which was rather short but handsomely formed, and white and plump, laid on the edge of the windowsill; and it was not a very young hand, but one aged, somewhere about forty, as she conjectured. It was only a few weeks before that the horrible robbery at Clondalkin had taken place, and the lady fancied that the hand was that of one of the miscreants who was now about to scale the windows of the Tiled House. She uttered a loud scream and an ejaculation of terror, and at the same moment the hand was quietly withdrawn.

Search was made in the orchard, but no indications of any person’s having been under the window, beneath which, ranged along the wall, stood a great column of flowerpots, which it seemed must have prevented any one’s coming within reach of it.

The same night there came a hasty tapping, every now and then, at the window of the kitchen. The women grew frightened, and the servant-man, taking firearms with him, opened the back door, but discovered nothing. As he shut it, however, he said, “a thump came on it,” and a pressure as of somebody striving to force his way in, which frightened him; and though the tapping went on upon the kitchen window panes, he made no further explorations.

About six o’clock on the Saturday evening following, the cook, “an honest, sober woman, now aged nigh sixty years,” being alone in the kitchen, saw, on looking up, it is supposed, the same fat but aristocratic-looking hand, laid with its palm against the glass, near the side of the window, and this time moving slowly up and down, pressed all the while against the glass, as if feeling carefully for some inequality in its surface. She cried out, and said something like a prayer on seeing it. But it was not withdrawn for several seconds after.

After this, for a great many nights, there came at first a low, and afterwards an angry rapping, as it seemed with a set of clenched knuckles at the back door. And the servant-man would not open it, but called to know who was there; and there came no answer, only a sound as if the palm of the hand was placed against it, and drawn slowly from side to side with a sort of soft, groping motion.

All this time, sitting in the back parlour, which, for the time, they used as a drawing-room, Mr. and Mrs. Prosser were disturbed by rappings at the window, sometimes very low and furtive, like a clandestine signal, and at others sudden and so loud as to threaten the breaking of the pane.

This was all at the back of the house, which looked upon the orchard as you know. But on a Tuesday night, at about half-past nine, there came precisely the same rapping at the hall door, and went on, to the great annoyance of the master and terror of his wife, at intervals, for nearly two hours.

After this, for several days and nights, they had no annoyance whatsoever, and began to think that the nuisance had expended itself. But on the night of the 13th September, Jane Easterbrook, an English maid, having gone into the pantry for the small silver bowl in which her mistress’s posset was served, happening to look up at the little window of only four panes, observed through an augur-hole which was drilled through the window frame, for the admission of a bolt to secure the shutter, a white pudgy finger – first the tip, and then the two first joints introduced, and turned about this way and that, crooked against the inside, as if in search of a fastening which its owner designed to push aside. When the maid got back into the kitchen, we are told “she fell into ‘a swounde,’ and was all the next day very weak.”

Mr. Prosser being, I’ve heard, a hard-headed and conceited sort of fellow, scouted the ghost, and sneered at the fears of his family. He was privately of opinion that the whole affair was a practical joke or a fraud, and waited an opportunity of catching the rogue flagrante delicto. He did not long keep this theory to himself, but let it out by degrees with no stint of oaths and threats, believing that some domestic traitor held the thread of the conspiracy.

Indeed it was time something were done; for not only his servants, but good Mrs. Prosser herself, had grown to look unhappy and anxious. They kept at home from the hour of sunset, and would not venture about the house after nightfall, except in couples.

The knocking had ceased for about a week; when one night, Mrs. Prosser being in the nursery, her husband, who was in the parlour, heard it begin very softly at the hall door. The air was quite still, which favoured his hearing distinctly. This was the first time there had been any disturbance at that side of the house, and the character of the summons was changed.

Mr. Prosser, leaving the parlour door open, it seems, went quietly into the hall. The sound was that of beating on the outside of the stout door, softly and regularly, “with the flat of the hand.” He was going to open it suddenly, but changed his mind; and went back very quietly, and on to the head of the kitchen stair, where was a “strong closet” over the pantry, in which he kept his firearms, swords, and canes.

Here he called his manservant, whom he believed to be honest, and, with a pair of loaded pistols in his own coat-pockets, and giving another pair to him, he went as lightly as he could, followed by the man, and with a stout walking-cane in his hand, forward to the door.

Everything went as Mr. Prosser wished. The besieger of his house, so far from taking fright at their approach, grew more impatient; and the sort of patting which had aroused his attention at first assumed the rhythm and emphasis of a series of double-knocks.

Mr. Prosser, angry, opened the door with his right arm across, cane in hand. Looking, he saw nothing; but his arm was jerked up oddly, as it might be with the hollow of a hand, and something passed under it, with a kind of gentle squeeze. The servant neither saw nor felt anything, and did not know why his master looked back so hastily, cutting with his cane, and shutting the door with so sudden a slam.

From that time Mr. Prosser discontinued his angry talk and swearing about it, and seemed nearly as averse from the subject as the rest of his family. He grew, in fact, very uncomfortable, feeling an inward persuasion that when, in answer to the summons, he had opened the hall door, he had actually given ad mission to the besieger.

He said nothing to Mrs. Prosser, but went up earlier to his bedroom, “where he read a while in his Bible, and said his prayers.” I hope the particular relation of this circumstance does not indicate its singularity. He lay awake a good while, it appears; and, as he supposed, about a quarter past twelve he heard the soft palm of a hand patting on the outside of the bedroom door, and then brushed slowly along it.

Up bounced Mr. Prosser, very much frightened, and locked the door, crying, “Who’s there?” but receiving no answer, but the same brushing sound of a soft hand drawn over the panels, which he knew only too well.

In the morning the housemaid was terrified by the impression of a hand in the dust of the “little parlour” table, where they had been unpacking delft and other things the day before. The print of the naked foot in the sea-sand did not frighten Robinson Crusoe half so much. They were by this time all nervous, and some of them half-crazed, about the hand.

Mr. Prosser went to examine the mark, and, made light of it, but, as he swore afterwards, rather to quiet his servants than from any comfortable feeling about it in his own mind; however, he had them all, one by one, into the room, and made each place his or her hand, palm downward, on the same table, thus taking a similar impression from every person in the house, including himself and his wife; and his “affidavit” deposed that the formation of the hand so impressed differed altogether from those of the living inhabitants of the house, and corresponded with that of the hand seen by Mrs. Prosser and by the cook.

Whoever or whatever the owner of that hand might be, they all felt this subtle demonstration to mean that it was declared he was no longer out of doors, but had established himself in the house.

And now Mrs. Prosser began to be troubled with strange and horrible dreams, some of which as set out in detail, in Aunt Rebecca’s long letter, are really very appalling nightmares. But one night, as Mr. Prosser closed his bedchamber door, he was struck somewhat by the utter silence of the room, there being no sound of breathing, which seemed unaccountable to him, as he knew his wife was in bed, and his ears were particularly sharp.

There was a candle burning on a small table at the foot of the bed, besides the one he held in one hand, a heavy ledger, connected with his father-in-law’s business being under his arm. He drew the curtain at the side of the bed, and saw Mrs. Prosser lying, as for a few seconds he mortally feared, dead, her face being motionless, white, and covered with a cold dew; and on the pillow, close beside her head, and just within the curtains, was, as he first thought, a toad – but really the same fattish hand, the wrist resting on the pillow, and the fingers extended towards her temple.

Mr. Prosser, with a horrified jerk, pitched the ledger right at the curtains, behind which the owner of the hand might be supposed to stand. The hand was instantaneously and smoothly snatched away, the curtains made a great wave, and Mr. Prosser got round the bed in time to see the closet door, which was at the other side, pulled to by the same white, puffy hand, as he believed.

He drew the door open with a fling, and stared in but the closet was empty, except for the clothes hanging from the pegs on the wall, and the dressing-table and looking-glass facing the windows, he shut it sharply, and locked it, and felt for a minute, he says, “as if he were like to lose his wits”; then, ringing at the bell, he brought the servants, and with much ado they recovered Mrs. Prosser from a sort of “trance,” in which, he says, from her looks, she seemed to have suffered “the pains of death” and Aunt Rebecca adds, “from what she told me of her visions, with her own lips, he might have added, ‘and of hell also.’”

But the occurrence which seems to have determined the crisis was the strange sickness of their eldest child, a little boy aged between two and three years. He lay awake, seemingly in paroxysms of terror, and the doctors who were called in, set down the symptoms to incipient water on the brain. Mrs. Prosser used to sit up with the nurse, by the nursery fire, much troubled in mind about the condition of her child.

His bed was placed sideways along the wall, with its head against the door of a press or cupboard, which, however, did not shut quite close. There was a little valance, about a foot deep, round the top of the child’s bed, and this descended within some ten or twelve inches of the pillow on which it lay.

They observed that the little creature was quieter whenever they took him up and held him on their laps. They had just replaced him, as he seemed to have grown quite sleepy and tranquil, but he was not five minutes in his bed when he began to scream in one of his frenzies of terror; at the same moment the nurse, for the first time, detected, and Mrs. Prosser equally plainly saw, following the direction of her eyes, the real cause of the child’s sufferings.

Protruding through the aperture of the press, and shrouded in the shade of the valance, they plainly saw the white fat hand, palm downwards, presented towards the head of the child. The mother uttered a scream, and snatched the child from his little bed, and she and the nurse ran down to the lady’s sleeping-room, where Mr. Prosser was in bed, shutting the door as they entered and they had hardly done so, when a gentle tap came to it from the outside.

There is a great deal more, but this will suffice. The singularity of the narrative seems to me to be this, that it describes the ghost of a hand, and no more. The person to whom that hand belonged never once appeared; nor was it a hand separated from a body, but only a hand so manifested and introduced that its owner was always, by some crafty accident, hidden from view.

In the year 1819, at a college breakfast, I met a Mr. Prosser – a thin, grave, but rather chatty old gentleman, with very white hair drawn back into a pigtail – and he told us all, with a concise particularity, a story of his cousin, James Prosser, who, when an infant, had slept for some time in what his mother said was a haunted nursery in an old house near Chapelizod, and who, whenever he was ill, over-fatigued, or in anywise feverish, suffered all through his life as he had done from a time he could scarce remember, from a vision of a certain gentleman, fat and pale, every curl of whose wig, every button and fold of whose laced clothes, and every feature and line of whose sensual, benignant, and unwholesome face, was as minutely engraven upon his memory as the dress and lineaments of his own grandfather’s portrait, which hung before him every day at breakfast, dinner, and supper.

Mr. Prosser mentioned this as an instance of a curiously monotonous, individualised, and persistent nightmare, and hinted the extreme horror and anxiety with which his cousin, of whom he spoke in the past tense as “poor Jemmie,” was at any time induced to mention it. I hope the reader will pardon me for loitering so long in the Tiled House, but this sort of lore has always had a charm for me; and people, you know, especially old people, will talk of what most interests themselves, too often forgetting that others may have had more than enough of it.

excerpt ch. 8 and 9 from “The House By The Churchyard”

“Dublin University Magazine”, Nov. 1861

The magazine story was somewhat expanded for book form
The House By The Churchyard (1863)

BORRHOMEO THE ASTROLOGER

A MONKISH TALE

(1862)

At the period of the famous plague of Milan in 1630, a frenzy of superstition seized upon the population high and low. Old prophecies of a diabolical visitation reserved for their city, in that particular year of grace, prepared the way for this wild panic of the imagination. When the plague broke out terror seems to have acted to a degree scarcely paralleled upon the fancy or the credulity of the people. Excitement in very many cases produced absolutely the hallucinations of madness. Persons deposed, in the most solemn and consistent terms, to having themselves witnessed diabolical processions, spoken with an awful impersonation of Satan, and been solicited amidst scenes and personages altogether supernatural, to lend their human agency to the nefarious designs of the fiend, by consenting to disseminate by certain prescribed means, the virus of the pestilence.

Some of the stories related of persons possessed by these awful fancies are in print; and by no means destitute of a certain original and romantic horror. That which I am about to tell, however, has I believe, never been printed. At all events I saw it only in MSS., sewed up in vellum, with a psaltery and half-a-dozen lives of saints, in the library of the old Dominican monastery which stands about two leagues to the north-east of the city. With your permission I am about to give you the best translation I was able to make of this short but odd story, of the truth of which, judging from the company in which I found it, the honest monks entertained no sort of doubt. You are to remember that all sorts of tales of wonder were at that time flying about and believed in Milan, and that many of these were authenticated in such a way as to leave no doubt as to the bona fides of those who believed themselves to have been eyewitnesses of what they told. Monks and country padres of course believed; but so did men who stood highest in the church, and who, unless fame belied them, believed little else. In the year of our Lord, 1630, when Satan, by divine permission, appearing among us in person, afflicted our beautiful city of Milan with a pestilence unheard of in its severity, there lived in the Strada Piana, which has lately been pulled down, an astrologer calling himself Borrhomeo. Some say he came from Perrugia, others from Venice; I know not. He it was who first predicted, in the year of our Lord, 1628, by means of his art, that the pale comet which then appeared would speedily be followed, not by war or by famine, but by pestilence; which accordingly came to pass. Beside his skill in astrology, which was wonderful, he was profoundly versed in alchymy. He was a man great in stature, and strong, though old in years, and with a most reverent beard. But though seemingly austere in his life, it is said that he was given up, in secret, to enormous wickedness. Having shut himself up in his house for more than a month, with his furnace and crucibles (truly he had made repeated and near approaches to the grand arcanum) he had arrived, as he supposed, at the moment of projection.

He collects the powder and tries it on molten lead; it was a failure. He was too wise to be angry; the long pursuit of his art had taught him patience. But while he is pondering in a profound and gloomy reverie, a retort, which he had forgotten in the furnace, explodes.

He sees in the smoke a pale young man, dressed in mourning, with black hair, and viewing him with a sad and reproachful countenance.

Borrhomeo who lived among chimeras, is not utterly overcome, as another man might be, and confronts him, amazed, indeed, but not terrified.

The stranger shook his head like a holy young confessor, who hears an evil shrift; and says he, rather sternly – “Borrhomeo! Beware of covetousness which is idolatry. On this sordid pursuit which you call a science, have you wasted your days on earth and your peace hereafter.”

“Young man,” says the alchymist, too much struck by the manner and reproof of the stranger to ask himself how he came there – “Wealth is power to do good as well as evil. To seek it is, therefore, an ambition as honourable as any other.”’

“We both know why you seek it, and how you would employ it,” answers the young man gravely.

The old man’s face flushed with anger at this rebuke, and he looked down frowningly to the table whereon lay the book of his spells. But he bethought him this must be a good spirit, and he was abashed. Nevertheless, he roused his courage, and shook his white mane back, and was on the point of answering sternly, when the young man said with a melancholy smile—

“Besides, you will never discover the grand arcanum – the elixir vitae, or the philosopher’s stone.”

His words, which were as soft as snow flakes, fell like an iron mace upon the heart of the seer.

“Perhaps not,” said the astrologer frigidly.

“Not perhaps,” said the stranger.

“At all events, young man – for as such you appear – and I know what spirits seek who take that shape, the science has its charms for me; and when the pleasures of the young are as harmless as the amusements of the aged I’ll hear you question mine.”

“You know not what spirit you are of. As for me, I am contrite and humble – well I may,” says the stranger faintly with a sigh. “Besides, what you have pursued in vain, and will never by your own researches find, I have discovered.”

“What! the—”

“Yes, the tincture that can prolong life to virtual immortality, and the dust that can change that lead into gold; but I care for neither.”

“Why, young man, if this be true,” says Borrhomeo in a rapture of wonder, “you stand before me an angel of wisdom, in power and immortality like a god!”

“No,” says the stranger, “a long-lived fellow, with a long purse – that’s all.”

“All? – everything,” cries the old man. “Will you – will you—”

“Yes, sir, you shall see,” says the young man in black. “Give me that crucible. It is all a matter of proportions. Water, clay, and air are the material of all the vegetable world – the flowers and forests, the wines and the fruits – the seed is both the laboratory and the chemist, and knows how, with the sun’s help, to apportion and combine.”

While he said this with the abstracted manner of one whose mind is mazed in a double reverie, while his hands work out some familiar problem, he tumbled over the alchymist’s papers, and unstopped and stopped his bottles of crystals, precipitates, and elixirs – taking a little from this and a little from that, and throwing all into a small gold cup that stood on the table; but like a juggler he moved those bottles so deftly, that the quick eyes and retentive soul of the old man vainly sought to catch or keep the order of the process. When he had done there was hardly a thimbleful.

“Is that it?” whispered the old man, with twinkling greedy eyes.

“No,” said the stranger, with a sly smile, “there is one very simple ingredient which you have forgotten.”

He took a large, flat, oval gold box, with some hair set under a crystal in the lid of it, and looking at it for a moment, he seemed to sigh. He tapped it like a snuffbox – there was within it a powder like vermilion, and on the inside of the lid, in the centre, was the small enamel portrait of a beautiful but sinister female face. The features were so very beautiful, and the expression so strangely blended with horror, that it fixed the gaze of the old man for a moment; and – was it illusion? – he thought he saw the face steadily dilating as if it would gradually fill the lid of the box, and even expand to human dimensions.

“Yes,” said the stranger, as having taken some of the red powder, he shut the cover down again with a snap, “she was beautiful, and her lineaments are still clear and bright – nothing like darkness to keep them from fading, and so the poor little miniature is again in prison;” and he dropped the box back into his pocket.

Then he took two iron ladles, and heating in the one his powder to a white heat, and bidding the alchymist melt a pellet of lead in the other, and pour it into the ladle which held the powder, there arose a beautiful purple fire in the bottom of it, with an intense fringe of green and yellow; and when it subsided there was a little nut of gold there of the bigness of the leaden pellet.

The fiery eyes of the alchymist almost leaped from their sockets into the iron cup, and he could have clasped his marvellous visitor round the knees and worshipped him.

“And now,” says the stranger very gently and earnestly, “in return for satisfying your curiosity, I ask only your solemn promise to prosecute this dread science no more. Ha! you’ll not give it. Take, then, my warning, and remember the wages of this knowledge is sorrow.”

“But won’t you tell me how to commute – and – and – you have not produced the elixir,” the old man cried.

“’Tis folly – and, as I’ve told you, worse – a snare,” answered the young man, sighing heavily. “I came not to satisfy but to rebuke your dangerous though fruitless frenzy. Besides, I hear my friend still pacing the street. Hark! he taps at the window.”

Then came a sharp rattle as of a cane tapping angrily on the window.

The young man bowed, smiling sadly, and somehow got himself away, without hurry, yet so quickly that the old man could not reach the door till after it had closed and he was gone.

“Oaf that I am!” cried the astrologer, losing patience and stamping on the ground, “how have I let him go? He hesitated – he would have yielded – his scruples, benevolent perhaps, I could have quieted – and yet in the very crisis I was tongue-tied and motionless, and let him go!”

He pushed open the little window, from which he observed the street, and thought he saw the stranger walking round the corner, conversing with a little hunchback in a red cloak, and followed by an ugly dog.

At sight of the great white head and beard, and the fierce features of the alchymist, bleared and tanned in the smoke of his furnace,, people stopped and looked. So he withdrew, and in haste got him ready for the street, waiting for no refreshment, though he had fasted long; for he had the strength as well as the stature of a giant, and forth he went.

By this time the twilight had passed into night. He had his mantle about him, and his rapier and dagger – for the streets were dangerous – and a feather in his cap, and his white beard hidden behind the fold of his cloak. So he might hate passed for a tall soldier of the guard.

The pestilence kept people much within doors, and the streets more solitary than was customary. He had walked through the town two hours and more, before he met with anything to speak of. Then – lo! – on a sudden, near the Fountain of the Lion – it being then moonlight – he discovers, in a solitude, the figure of his visitor, standing with the hunchback and the dog, which he knew by its ungainly bones, and its carrying its huge head so near the ground.

So he shouts along the silent street, “Stay a moment, signor,” and he mends his pace.

But they were parting company there, it seemed, and away went the deformed, with his unsightly beast at his heels, and this way came the youth in black.

So standing full in his way, and doffing his cap, and throwing back his cloak, that his snowy beard and head might appear, and the stranger recognize him when he drew nigh. He cried—

“Borrhomeo implores thee to take pity on his ignorance.”

“What! still mad?” said the young man. “This man will waste the small remnant of his years in godless search after gold and immortality; better he should know all, and feel their vanity.”

“Better a thousand times!” cried the old man, in ecstasy.

“There is in this city, signor, at this time, in great secrecy, the master who taught me,” says the youth, “the master of all alchymists. Many centuries since he found out the elixir vitae. From him I’ve learned the few secrets that I know, and without his leave I dare not impart them. If you desire it, I will bring you before him; but, once in his presence, you cannot recede, and his conditions you must accept.”

“All, all, with my whole heart. But some reasonable pleasures—”

“With your pleasures he will not interfere; he cannot change your heart,” said the young man, with one of his heavy sighs; “but you know what gold is, and what the elixir is, and power and immortality are not to be had for nothing.”

“Lead on, signor, I’m ready,” cries the old man, whose face flushed, and his eyes burned with the fires of an evil rapture.

“Take my hand,” said the young man, more stern and pale than he had yet appeared. So he did, and his conductor seized it with a cold grip, and they walked swiftly on.

Now he led him through several streets, and on their way Borrhomeo passes his notary, and, lingering a moment, asks him whether he has a bond, signed by a certain merchant, with whom he had contracted for a loan. The notary, who was talking to another, says, suddenly, to that other—

“Per Baccho! I’ve just called to mind a matter that must be looked after for Signor Borrhomeo;” and he called him a nickname, which incensed the astrologer, who struck him a lusty box upon the ear.

“There’s a humming in my ear tonight,” said the notary, going into his house; “I hope it is no sign of the plague.”

So on they walked, side by side, till they reached the shop of a vintner of no good repute. It was well known to Borrhomeo – a house of evil resort, where the philosopher sometimes stole, disguised, by night, to be no longer a necromancer, but a man, and, so, from a man to become a beast.

They passed through the shop. The host, with a fat pale face and a villanous smile, was drawing wine, which a handsome damsel was waiting to take away with her. He kissed her as she paid, and she gave him a cuff on his fat white chops, and laughed.

“What’s become of Signor Borrhomeo,” said the girl, “that he never comes here now.”

“Why, here he is!” cries Borrhomeo, with a saturnine smile, and he slaps his broad palm on her shoulder.

But the girl only shrugged, with a little shiver, and said, “What a chill down my back – they’re walking over my grave now.”

[The Italian phrase here is very nearly equivalent].

“Why, they neither hear nor see me!” said the astrologer, amazed.

They went into the inner room, where guests used to sit and drink. But the plague had stopped all that, and the room was empty.

“He’s in there,” said the young man; “you’ll see him presently.”

Borrhomeo was filled with an awful curiosity. He knew the room, he thought, well; and there never had been, he thought, a door where the young man had pointed; but there was now a drapery there like what covers a doorway, and it swelled and swayed slowly in the wind.

“Some centuries!” said the astrologer, looking on the dark drapery. “Geber, perhaps, or Alfarabi—”

“It matters not a pin’s point what his name; you’ll call him ‘my lord,’ simply; and – observe – we alchymists are a potent order, and it behoves you to keep your word with us.”

“I will be true,” said Borrhomeo.

“And use the powers you gain, beneficently,” repeated his guide.

“I’m but a sinner. I will strive, with only an exception, in favour of such things as make wealth and life worth having,” answered the philosopher.

“See, take this, and do as I bid you,” said the youth, giving him a thin round film of human skin.

[How the honest monk who wrote the tale, or even Borrhomeo himself, knew this and many other matters he describes, ’tis for him to say.]

“Breathe on it,” said he.

And when he did so he made him stretch it to the size of a sheet of paper, which he did quite easily.

“Now cover your face with it as with a napkin.”

So he did.

“’Twill do; give it to me. It is but a picture. See.”

And it slowly shrunk until its disc was just the same as that of the lady’s miniature in the lid of the box, over which he fixed it.

Borrhomeo beheld his own picture.

“Every adept has his portrait here,” said the young man. “So good a likeness is always pleasant; but these have a power beside, and establish a sympathy between their originals and their possessor which secures discipline and silence.”

“How does it work?” asked Borrhomeo.

“Have I not been your good angel?” said the young man, sitting before him. He extends his legs – pushing out his feet, and letting his chin sink on his chest – he fixes his eyes upon him with a horrible and sarcastic glare, and one of his feet contracts and divides into a goatish stump.

Borrhomeo would have burst into a yell, but he could not.

“It is a nightmare, is it not?” said the stranger, who seemed delighted to hold him, minute after minute, in that spell. At last the shoe and hose that seemed to have shrunk apart like burning parchment, closed over the goatish shin and hoof; and rising, he shook him by the shoulder. With a gasp, the astrologer started to his feet.

“There, I told you it was a nightmare, or – or what you please. I could not have done it but through the picture. You see how fast we have you. You must for once resemble a Christian, Borrhomeo, and with us deal truly and honestly.”

“You’ve promised me the elixir vitae,” the old man said, fearful lest the secret should escape him.

“And you shall have it. Go, bring a cup of wine. He’ll not see you, nor the wine, nor the cup.”

So he brought a cup of Falernian, which he loved the best.

“There’s fifty years of life for every drop,” said the youth.

“Let me live a thousand years, to begin with,” cries Borrhomeo.

“Beware. You’ll tire of it”—

“Nay. Give me the twenty drops.”

So he took the cup, and measured the drops; and as they fell, the wine was agitated with a gentle simmer all over, and threw out ring after ring of purple, green, and gold. And Borrhomeo drank it, and sucked in the last drop in ecstasy, and cried out, blaspheming, with joy and sensual delight—

“And I’m to have this secret, too.”

“This and all others, when you claim them,” said the young man. “See, ’tis time,” he added.

And Borrhomeo saw that the great misshapen dog he had seen in the street, was sniffing by the stranger’s feet.

When they went into the inner room, there was a large table, and many men at either side; and at the head a gigantic man, with a face like the face of a beast, but the flesh was as of a man. Borrhomeo quaked in his presence.

“I am aware of what hath passed, Borrhomeo,” he said. “The condition is this: You take this vial, and with the fluid it contains and with the sponge trace the letter S on every door of every church and religious house within the walls of Milan. The dog will go with you.”

It was a fiend in dog’s shape, says the monkish writer; and had he failed in his task would have torn him in pieces.

So Borrhomeo, that old arch-villain, undertook this office cheerfully, well knowing what its purpose was. For it was a thing notorious, that Satan was himself in a bodily, though phantasmal, shape seen before in Milan, and that he had tempted others to a like fascinorous action; but, happily for their souls, in vain. The Stygian satellites of the fiend had power to smear the door of every unconsecrated house in Milan with that pestilential virus, as, indeed, the citizens with their own eyes, when first the plague broke out, beheld upon their own doors. But they could not defile the church gates, nor the doors of the monasteries; and according to the conditions under which their infernal malice is bound, they could in no wise effect it save by the hand of one who was baptised, which, to the baleful abuse of that holy sacrament, the wretch, Borrhomeo, had been.

He did his accursed and murderous office well and fearlessly. His reward mammon and indefinite long life. The hell-dog by his side compelling him, and the belief in his invisibility making him confident withal. But therein was shown forth to all the world the craft of the fiend, and the just judgment of heaven; for lie was plainly seen in the very act by the Sexton of the Church of Saint Mary of the Passion, and by the Pastor of the convent of Saint Justina of Padua, and the same officer of the Olivetans of Saint Victor. So, finding in the morning the only too plain and fatal traces of what he had been doing, with a mob at their heels, who would have had his life but for the guard, they arrested him in his house next morning, and the mob breaking in, smashed all the instruments of his infernal art, and would have burnt the house had they been allowed.

He being duly arraigned was, according to law, put to the torture, and forthwith confessed all the particulars I have related. So he was cast into a dungeon to await execution, which secretly he dreaded not, being confident in the efficacy of the elixir he had swallowed.

He was not to be put to death by decapitation. It was justly thought too honourable for so sordid a miscreant. He was sentenced to be hanged, and after hanging a day and a night he was to be laid in an open grave outside the gate on the Roman road, and there impaled, and after three days’ exposure to be covered in, and so committed to the keeping of the earth, no more to groan under his living enormities.

The night before his execution, thinking deeply on the virtue of the elixir, and having assured himself, by many notable instances, which he easily brought to remembrance, that they could not deprive him, even by this severity, of his life, he lifted up his eyes and beheld the young man, in mourning suit, whose visit had been his ruin, standing near him in the cell.

This slave of Satan affected a sad countenance at first; and said he, “We are cast down, Borrhomeo, by reason of thy sentence.”

“But we’ve cheated them,” answers he, pretending, maybe, more confidence than he had; “they can’t kill me.”

“That’s certain,” rejoins the fiend.

“I shall live for a thousand years,” says he.

“Aye, you must continue to live for full one thousand years; ’tis a fair term – is it not?”

“A great deal may be done in that time,” says the old man, while beads of perspiration covered his puckered forehead, and he thought that, perhaps, he might cheat him too, and make his peace with heaven.

“They can’t hang me,” says Borrhomeo.

“Oh! yes, they will certainly hang you; but, then, you’ll live through it.”

“Aye, the elixir,” cried the prisoner.

“Thus stands the case: when an ordinary man is hanged he dies outright; but you can’t die.”

“No – ha, ha! – I can’t die!”

“Therefore, when you are hanged, you feel, think, hear, and so forth during the process.”

“St. Anthony! But then ’tis only an hour – one hour of agony – and it ends.”

“You are to hang for a whole day and night,” continued the fiend; “but that don’t signify. Then when they take you down, you continue to feel, hear, think, and, if they leave your eyes open, to see, just as usual.”

“Why, yes, certainly, I’m alive,” cries Borrhomeo.

“Yes, alive, quite alive, although you appear to be dead,” says the demon with a smile.

“Aye; but what’s the best moment to make my escape?” says Borrhomeo.

“Escape! why, you have escaped. They can’t kill you. No one can kill you, until your time is out. Then you know they lay you in an open grave and impale you.”

“What! ah, ha!” roared the old sinner, “you are jesting.”

“Hush! depend upon it they will go through with it.”

The old man shook in every joint.

“Then, after three days and nights, they bury you,” said his visitor.

“I’ll lose my life, or I’ll break from them!” shouts the gigantic astrologer.

“But you can’t lose your life, and you can’t break from them,” says the fiend, softly.

“Why not? Oh! blessed saints! I’m stronger than you think.”

“Aye, muscle, bones – you are an old giant!”

“Surely,” cries the old man, “and the terror of a dead man rising; ha! don’t you see? They fly before me, and so I escape.”

“But you can’t rise.”

“Say – say in heaven’s name what you mean,” thundered old Borrhomeo.

“Do you remember, signor, that nightmare, as we jocularly called it, at the sign of the ‘Red Hat’?”

“Yes.”

“Well, a man who having swallowed the elixir vitae, suffers that sort of shock which in other mortals is a violent death, is afflicted during the remainder of his period of life, whether he be decapitated, or dismembered, or is laid unmutilated in the grave, with that sort of catalepsy, which you experienced for a minute – a catalepsy that does not relax or intermit. For that reason you ought to have carefully avoided this predicament.”

“’Tis a lie,” roared the old man, and he ground his teeth, “that’s not living.”

“You’ll find, upon my honour, that it is living,” answered the fiend, with a gentle smile, and withdrawing from the cell.

Borrhomeo told all this to a priest, not under seal of confession, but to induce him to plead for his life. But the good man seeing he had already made himself the liegeman and accomplice of Satan, refused. Nor would his intercession have prevailed in any wise.

So Borrhomeo was hanged, impaled, and buried, according to his sentence; and it came to pass that fourteen years afterwards, that grave was opened in making a great drain from the group of houses thereby, and Borrhomeo was found just as he was laid therein, in no wise decayed, but fresh and sound, which, indeed, showed that there did remain in him that sort of life which was supposed to ward off the common consequences of death.

So he was thrown into a great pit, and with many curses, covered in with stones and earth, where his stupendous punishment proceeds.

Get thee hence, Satan.

“Dublin University Magazine”, Jan. 1862

AN AUTHENTIC NARRATIVE OF A HAUNTED HOUSE

(1862)

[The Editor of the University Magazine submits the following very remarkable statement, with every detail of which he has been for some years acquainted, upon the ground that it affords the most authentic and ample relation of a series of marvellous phenomena, in nowise connected with what is technically termed “spiritualism,” which he has anywhere met with. All the persons – and there are many of them living – upon whose separate evidence some parts, and upon whose united testimony others, of this most singular recital depend, are, in their several walks of life, respectable, and such as would in any matter of judicial investigation be deemed wholly unexceptionable witnesses. There is not an incident here recorded which would not have been distinctly deposed to on oath had any necessity existed, by the persons who severally, and some of them in great fear, related their own distinct experiences. The Editor begs most pointedly to meet in limine the suspicion, that he is elaborating a trick, or vouching for another ghost of Mrs. Veal. As a mere story the narrative is valueless: its sole claim to attention is its absolute truth. For the good faith of its relator he pledges his own and the character of this Magazine. With the Editor’s concurrence, the name of the watering-place, and some special circumstances in no essential way bearing upon the peculiar character of the story, but which might have indicated the locality, and possibly annoyed persons interested in house property there, have been suppressed by the narrator. Not the slightest liberty has been taken with the narrative, which is presented precisely in the terms in which the writer of it, who employs throughout the first person, would, if need were, fix it in the form of an affidavit.]

Within the last eight years – the precise date I purposely omit – I was ordered by my physician, my health being in an unsatisfactory state, to change my residence to one upon the sea-coast; and accordingly, I took a house for a year in a fashionable watering-place, at a moderate distance from the city in which I had previously resided, and connected with it by a railway.

Winter was setting in when my removal thither was decided upon; but there was nothing whatever dismal or depressing in the change. The house I had taken was to all appearance, and in point of convenience, too, quite a modern one. It formed one in a cheerful row, with small gardens in front, facing the sea, and commanding sea air and sea views in perfection. In the rear it had coachhouse and stable, and between them and the house a considerable grass plot, with some flowerbeds, interposed.

Our family consisted of my wife and myself, with three children, the eldest about nine years old, she and the next in age being girls; and the youngest, between six and seven, a boy. To these were added six servants, whom, although for certain reasons I decline giving their real names, I shall indicate, for the sake of clearness, by arbitrary ones. There was a nurse, Mrs. Southerland; a nursery-maid, Ellen Page; the cook, Mrs. Greenwood; and the housemaid, Ellen Faith; a butler, whom I shall call Smith, and his son, James, about two-and-twenty.

We came out to take possession at about seven o’clock in the evening; everything was comfortable and cheery; good fires lighted, the rooms neat and airy, and a general air of preparation and comfort, highly conducive to good spirits and pleasant anticipations.

The sitting-rooms were large and cheerful, and they and the bedrooms more than ordinarily lofty, the kitchen and servants’ rooms, on the same level, were well and comfortably furnished, and had, like the rest of the house, an air of recent painting and fitting up, and a completely modern character, which imparted a very cheerful air of cleanliness and convenience.

There had been just enough of the fuss of settling agreeably to occupy us, and to give a pleasant turn to our thoughts after we had retired to our rooms. Being an invalid, I had a small bed to myself – resigning the four-poster to my wife. The candle was extinguished, but a night-light was burning. I was coming up stairs, and she, already in bed, had just dismissed her maid, when we were both startled by a wild scream from her room; I found her in a state of the extremest agitation and terror. She insisted that she had seen an unnaturally tall figure come beside her bed and stand there. The light was too faint to enable her to define anything respecting this apparition, beyond the fact of her having most distinctly seen such a shape, colourless from the insufficiency of the light to disclose more than its dark outline.

We both endeavoured to reassure her. The room once more looked so cheerful in the candlelight, that we were quite uninfluenced by the contagion of her terrors. The movements and voices of the servants down stairs still getting things into their places and completing our comfortable arrangements, had also their effect in steeling us against any such influence, and we set the whole thing down as a dream, or an imperfectly-seen outline of the bed-curtains. When, however, we were alone, my wife reiterated, still in great agitation, her clear assertion that she had most positively seen, being at the time as completely awake as ever she was, precisely what she had described to us. And in this conviction she continued perfectly firm.

A day or two after this, it came out that our servants were under an apprehension that, somehow or other, thieves had established a secret mode of access to the lower part of the house. The butler, Smith, had seen an ill-looking woman in his room on the first night of our arrival; and he and other servants constantly saw, for many days subsequently, glimpses of a retreating figure, which corresponded with that so seen by him, passing through a passage which led to a back area in which were some coal-vaults.

This figure was seen always in the act of retreating, its back turned, generally getting round the corner of the passage into the area, in a stealthy and hurried way, and, when closely followed, imperfectly seen again entering one of the coal-vaults, and when pursued into it, nowhere to be found.

The idea of anything supernatural in the matter had, strange to say, not yet entered the mind of any one of the servants. They had heard some stories of smugglers having secret passages into houses, and using their means of access for purposes of pillage, or with a view to frighten superstitious people out of houses which they needed for their own objects, and a suspicion of similar practices here, caused them extreme uneasiness. The apparent anxiety also manifested by this retreating figure to escape observation, and her always appearing to make her egress at the same point, favoured this romantic hypothesis. The men, however, made a most careful examination of the back area, and of the coal-vaults, with a view to discover some mode of egress, but entirely without success. On the contrary, the result was, so far as it went, subversive of the theory; solid masonry met them on every hand.

I called the man, Smith, up, to hear from his own lips the particulars of what he had seen; and certainly his report was very curious. I give it as literally as my memory enables me:

His son slept in the same room, and was sound asleep; but he lay awake, as men sometimes will on a change of bed, and having many things on his mind. He was lying with his face towards the wall, but observing a light and some little stir in the room, he turned round in his bed, and saw the figure of a woman, squalid, and ragged in dress; her figure rather low and broad; as well as I recollect, she had something – either a cloak or shawl – on, and wore a bonnet. Her back was turned, and she appeared to be searching or rummaging for something on the floor, and, without appearing to observe him, she turned in doing so towards him. The light, which was more like the intense glow of a coal, as he described it, being of a deep red colour, proceeded from the hollow of her hand, which she held beside her head, and he saw her perfectly distinctly. She appeared middle-aged, was deeply pitted with the smallpox, and blind of one eye. His phrase in describing her general appearance was, that she was “a miserable, poor-looking creature.”

He was under the impression that she must be the woman who had been left by the proprietor in charge of the house, and who had that evening, after having given up the keys, remained for some little time with the female servants. He coughed, therefore, to apprise her of his presence, and turned again towards the wall. When he again looked round she and the light were gone; and odd as was her method of lighting herself in her search, the circumstances excited neither uneasiness nor curiosity in his mind, until he discovered next morning that the woman in question had left the house long before he had gone to his bed.

I examined the man very closely as to the appearance of the person who had visited him, and the result was what I have described. It struck me as an odd thing, that even then, considering how prone to superstition persons in his rank of life usually are, he did not seem to suspect anything supernatural in the occurrence; and, on the contrary, was thoroughly persuaded that his visitant was a living person, who had got into the house by some hidden entrance.

On Sunday, on his return from his place of worship, he told me that, when the service was ended, and the congregation making their way slowly out, he saw the very woman in the crowd, and kept his eye upon her for several minutes, but such was the crush, that all his efforts to reach her were unavailing, and when he got into the open street she was gone. He was quite positive as to his having distinctly seen her, however, for several minutes, and scouted the possibility of any mistake as to identity; and fully impressed with the substantial and living reality of his visitant, he was very much provoked at her having escaped him. He made inquiries also in the neighbourhood, but could procure no information, nor hear of any other persons having seen any woman corresponding with his visitant.

The cook and the housemaid occupied a bedroom on the kitchen floor. It had whitewashed walls, and they were actually terrified by the appearance of the shadow of a woman passing and re passing across the side wall opposite to their beds. They suspected that this had been going on much longer than they were aware, for its presence was discovered by a sort of accident, its movements happening to take a direction in distinct contrariety to theirs.

This shadow always moved upon one particular wall, returning after short intervals, and causing them extreme terror. They placed the candle, as the most obvious specific, so close to the infested wall, that the flame all but touched it; and believed for some time that they had effectually got rid of this annoyance; but one night, notwithstanding this arrangement of the light, the shadow returned, passing and re passing, as heretofore, upon the same wall, although their only candle was burning within an inch of it, and it was obvious that no substance capable of casting such a shadow could have interposed; and, indeed, as they described it, the shadow seemed to have no sort of relation to the position of the light, and appeared, as I have said, in manifest defiance of the laws of optics.

I ought to mention that the housemaid was a particularly fearless sort of person, as well as a very honest one; and her companion, the cook, a scrupulously religious woman, and both agreed in every particular in their relation of what occurred.

Meanwhile, the nursery was not without its annoyances, though as yet of a comparatively trivial kind. Sometimes, at night, the handle of the door was turned hurriedly as if by a person trying to come in, and at others a knocking was made at it. These sounds occurred after the children had settled to sleep, and while the nurse still remained awake. Whenever she called to know “who is there,” the sounds ceased; but several times, and particularly at first, she was under the impression that they were caused by her mistress, who had come to see the children, and thus impressed she had got up and opened the door, expecting to see her, but discovering only darkness, and receiving no answer to her inquiries.

With respect to this nurse, I must mention that I believe no more perfectly trustworthy servant was ever employed in her capacity; and, in addition to her integrity, she was remarkably gifted with sound common sense.

One morning, I think about three or four weeks after our arrival, I was sitting at the parlour window which looked to the front, when I saw the little iron door which admitted into the small garden that lay between the window where I was sitting and the public road, pushed open by a woman who so exactly answered the description given by Smith of the woman who had visited his room on the night of his arrival as instantaneously to impress me with the conviction that she must be the identical person. She was a square, short woman, dressed in soiled and tattered clothes, scarred and pitted with smallpox, and blind of an eye. She stepped hurriedly into the little enclosure, and peered from a distance of a few yards into the room where I was sitting. I felt that now was the moment to clear the matter up; but there was something stealthy in the manner and look of the woman which convinced me that I must not appear to notice her until her retreat was fairly cut off. Unfortunately, I was suffering from a lame foot, and could not reach the bell as quickly as I wished. I made all the haste I could, and rang violently to bring up the servant Smith. In the short interval that intervened, I observed the woman from the window, who having in a leisurely way, and with a kind of scrutiny, looked along the front windows of the house, passed quickly out again, closing the gate after her, and followed a lady who was walking along the footpath at a quick pace, as if with the intention of begging from her. The moment the man entered I told him – “the blind woman you described to me has this instant followed a lady in that direction, try to overtake her.” He was, if possible, more eager than I in the chase, but returned in a short time after a vain pursuit, very hot, and utterly disappointed. And, thereafter, we saw her face no more.

All this time, and up to the period of our leaving the house, which was not for two or three months later, there occurred at intervals the only phenomenon in the entire series having any resemblance to what we hear described of “Spiritualism.” This was a knocking, like a soft hammering with a wooden mallet, as it seemed in the timbers between the bedroom ceilings and the roof. It had this special peculiarity, that it was always rhythmical, and, I think, invariably, the emphasis upon the last stroke. It would sound rapidly “one, two, three, four – one, two, three, four;” or “one, two, three – one, two, three,” and sometimes “one, two – one, two,” &c., and this, with intervals and resumptions, monotonously for hours at a time.

At first this caused my wife, who was a good deal confined to her bed, much annoyance; and we sent to our neighbours to inquire if any hammering or carpentering was going on in their houses but were informed that nothing of the sort was taking place. I have myself heard it frequently, always in the same inaccessible part of the house, and with the same monotonous emphasis. One odd thing about it was, that on my wife’s calling out, as she used to do when it became more than usually troublesome, “stop that noise,” it was invariably arrested for a longer or shorter time.

Of course none of these occurrences were ever mentioned in hearing of the children. They would have been, no doubt, like most children, greatly terrified had they heard anything of the matter, and known that their elders were unable to account for what was passing; and their fears would have made them wretched and troublesome.

They used to play for some hours every day in the back garden – the house forming one end of this oblong enclosure, the stable and coach-house the other, and two parallel walls of considerable height the sides. Here, as it afforded a perfectly safe playground, they were frequently left quite to themselves; and in talking over their days’ adventures, as children will, they happened to mention a woman, or rather the woman, for they had long grown familiar with her appearance, whom they used to see in the garden while they were at play. They assumed that she came in and went out at the stable door, but they never actually saw her enter or depart. They merely saw a figure – that of a very poor woman, soiled and ragged – near the stable wall, stooping over the ground, and apparently grubbing in the loose clay in search of something. She did not disturb, or appear to observe them; and they left her in undisturbed possession of her nook of ground. When seen it was always in the same spot, and similarly occupied; and the description they gave of her general appearance – for they never saw her face – corresponded with that of the one-eyed woman whom Smith, and subsequently as it seemed, I had seen.

The other man, James, who looked after a mare which I had purchased for the purpose of riding exercise, had, like everyone else in the house, his little trouble to report, though it was not much. The stall in which, as the most comfortable, it was decided to place her, she peremptorily declined to enter. Though a very docile and gentle little animal, there was no getting her into it. She would snort and rear, and, in fact, do or suffer anything rather than set her hoof in it. He was fain, therefore, to place her in another. And on several occasions he found her there, exhibiting all the equine symptoms of extreme fear. Like the rest of us, however, this man was not troubled in the particular case with any superstitious qualms. The mare had evidently been frightened; and he was puzzled to find out how, or by whom, for the stable was well-secured, and had, I am nearly certain, a lock-up yard outside.

One morning I was greeted with the intelligence that robbers had certainly got into the house in the night; and that one of them had actually been seen in the nursery. The witness, I found, was my eldest child, then, as I have said, about nine years of age. Having awoke in the night, and lain awake for some time in her bed, she heard the handle of the door turn, and a person whom she distinctly saw – for it was a light night, and the window-shutters unclosed – but whom she had never seen before, stepped in on tiptoe, and with an appearance of great caution. He was a rather small man, with a very red face; he wore an oddly cut frock coat, the collar of which stood up, and trousers, rough and wide, like those of a sailor, turned up at the ankles, and either short boots or clumsy shoes, covered with mud. This man listened beside the nurse’s bed, which stood next the door, as if to satisfy himself that she was sleeping soundly; and having done so for some seconds, he began to move cautiously in a diagonal line, across the room to the chimney-piece, where he stood for a while, and so resumed his tiptoe walk, skirting the wall, until he reached a chest of drawers, some of which were open, and into which he looked, and began to rummage in a hurried way, as the child supposed, making search for something worth taking away. He then passed on to the window, where was a dressing-table, at which he also stopped, turning over the things upon it, and standing for some time at the window as if looking out, and then resuming his walk by the side wall opposite to that by which he had moved up to the window, he returned in the same way toward the nurse’s bed, so as to reach it at the foot. With its side to the end wall, in which was the door, was placed the little bed in which lay my eldest child, who watched his proceedings with the extremest terror. As he drew near she instinctively moved herself in the bed, with her head and shoulders to the wall, drawing up her feet; but he passed by without appearing to observe, or, at least, to care for her presence. Immediately after the nurse turned in her bed as if about to waken; and when the child, who had drawn the clothes about her head, again ventured to peep out, the man was gone.

The child had no idea of her having seen anything more formidable than a thief. With the prowling, cautious, and noiseless manner of proceeding common to such marauders, the air and movements of the man whom she had seen entirely corresponded. And on hearing her perfectly distinct and consistent account, I could myself arrive at no other conclusion than that a stranger had actually got into the house. I had, therefore, in the first instance, a most careful examination made to discover any traces of an entrance having been made by any window into the house. The doors had been found barred and locked as usual; but no sign of anything of the sort was discernible. I then had the various articles – plate, wearing apparel, books, &c., counted; and after having conned over and reckoned up everything, it became quite clear that nothing whatever had been removed from the house, nor was there the slightest indication of anything having been so much as disturbed there. I must here state that this child was remarkably clear, intelligent, and observant; and that her description of the man, and of all that had occurred, was most exact, and as detailed as the want of perfect light rendered possible.

I felt assured that an entrance had actually been effected into the house, though for what purpose was not easily to be conjectured. The man, Smith, was equally confident upon this point; and his theory was that the object was simply to frighten us out of the house by making us believe it haunted; and he was more than ever anxious and on the alert to discover the conspirators. It often since appeared to me odd. Every year, indeed, more odd, as this cumulative case of the marvellous becomes to my mind more and more inexplicable – that underlying my sense of mystery and puzzle, was all along the quiet assumption that all these occurrences were one way or another referable to natural causes. I could not account for them, indeed, myself; but during the whole period I inhabited that house, I never once felt, though much alone, and often up very late at night, any of those tremors and thrills which everyone has at times experienced when situation and the hour are favourable. Except the cook and housemaid, who were plagued with the shadow I mentioned crossing and recrossing upon the bedroom wall, we all, without exception, experienced the same strange sense of security, and regarded these phenomena rather with a perplexed sort of interest and curiosity, than with any more unpleasant sensations.

The knockings which I have mentioned at the nursery door, preceded generally by the sound of a step on the lobby, meanwhile continued. At that time (for my wife, like myself, was an invalid) two eminent physicians, who came out occasionally by rail, were attending us. These gentlemen were at first only amused, but ultimately interested, and very much puzzled by the occurrences which we described. One of them, at last, recommended that a candle should be kept burning upon the lobby. It was in fact a recurrence to an old woman’s recipe against ghosts – of course it might be serviceable, too, against impostors; at all events, seeming, as I have said, very much interested and puzzled, he advised it, and it was tried. We fancied that it was successful; for there was an interval of quiet for, I think, three or four nights. But after that, the noises – the footsteps on the lobby – the knocking at the door, and the turning of the handle recommenced in full force, notwithstanding the light upon the table outside; and these particular phenomena became only more perplexing than ever.

The alarm of robbers and smugglers gradually subsided after a week or two; but we were again to hear news from the nursery. Our second little girl, then between seven and eight years of age, saw in the night time – she alone being awake – a young woman, with black, or very dark hair, which hung loose, and with a black cloak on, standing near the middle of the floor, opposite the hearthstone, and fronting the foot of her bed. She appeared quite unobservant of the children and nurse sleeping in the room. She was very pale, and looked, the child said, both “sorry and frightened,” and with something very peculiar and terrible about her eyes, which made the child conclude that she was dead. She was looking, not at, but in the direction of the child’s bed, and there was a dark streak across her throat, like a scar with blood upon it. This figure was not motionless; but once or twice turned slowly, and without appearing to be conscious of the presence of the child, or the other occupants of the room, like a person in vacancy or abstraction. There was on this occasion a night-light burning in the chamber; and the child saw, or thought she saw, all these particulars with the most perfect distinctness. She got her head under the bedclothes; and although a good many years have passed since then, she cannot recall the spectacle without feelings of peculiar horror.

One day, when the children were playing in the back garden, I asked them to point out to me the spot where they were accustomed to see the woman who occasionally showed herself as I have described, near the stable wall. There was no division of opinion as to this precise point, which they indicated in the most distinct and confident way. I suggested that, perhaps, something might be hidden there in the ground; and advised them digging a hole there with their little spades, to try for it. Accordingly, to work they went, and by my return in the evening they had grubbed up a piece of a jawbone, with several teeth in it. The bone was very much decayed, and ready to crumble to pieces, but the teeth were quite sound. I could not tell whether they were human grinders; but I showed the fossil to one of the physicians I have mentioned, who came out the next evening, and he pronounced them human teeth. The same conclusion was come to a day or two later by the other medical man. It appears to me now, on reviewing the whole matter, almost unaccountable that, with such evidence before me, I should not have got in a labourer, and had the spot effectually dug and searched. I can only say, that so it was. I was quite satisfied of the moral truth of every word that had been related to me, and which I have here set down with scrupulous accuracy. But I experienced an apathy, for which neither then nor afterwards did I quite know how to account. I had a vague, but immovable impression that the whole affair was referable to natural agencies. It was not until some time after we had left the house, which, by-the-by, we afterwards found had had the reputation of being haunted before we had come to live in it, that on reconsideration I discovered the serious difficulty of accounting satisfactorily for all that had occurred upon ordinary principles. A great deal we might arbitrarily set down to imagination. But even in so doing there was, in limine, the oddity, not to say improbability, of so many different persons having nearly simultaneously suffered from different spectral and other illusions during the short period for which we had occupied that house, who never before, nor so far as we learned, afterwards were troubled by any fears or fancies of the sort. There were other things, too, not to be so accounted for. The odd knockings in the roof I frequently heard myself.

There were also, which I before forgot to mention, in the daytime, rappings at the doors of the sitting-rooms, which constantly deceived us; and it was not till our “come in” was unanswered, and the hall or passage outside the door was discovered to be empty, that we learned that whatever else caused them, human hands did not. All the persons who reported having seen the different persons or appearances here described by me, were just as confident of having literally and distinctly seen them, as I was of having seen the hard-featured woman with the blind eye, so remarkably corresponding with Smith’s description.

About a week after the discovery of the teeth, which were found, I think, about two feet under the ground, a friend, much advanced in years, and who remembered the town in which we had now taken up our abode, for a very long time, happened to pay us a visit. He good-humouredly pooh-poohed the whole thing; but at the same time was evidently curious about it. “We might construct a sort of story,” said I (I am giving, of course, the substance and purport, not the exact words, of our dialogue), “and assign to each of the three figures who appeared their respective parts in some dreadful tragedy enacted in this house. The male figure represents the murderer; the ill-looking, one-eyed woman his accomplice, who, we will suppose, buried the body where she is now so often seen grubbing in the earth, and where the human teeth and jawbone have so lately been disinterred; and the young woman with dishevelled tresses, and black cloak, and the bloody scar across her throat, their victim. A difficulty, however, which I cannot get over, exists in the cheerfulness, the great publicity, and the evident very recent date of the house.”

“Why, as to that,” said he, “the house is not modern; it and those beside it formed an old government store, altered and fitted up recently as you see. I remember it well in my young days, fifty years ago, before the town had grown out in this direction, and a more entirely lonely spot, or one more fitted for the commission of a secret crime, could not have been imagined.”

I have nothing to add, for very soon after this my physician pronounced a longer stay unnecessary for my health, and we took our departure for another place of abode. I may add, that although I have resided for considerable periods in many other houses, I never experienced any annoyances of a similar kind elsewhere; neither have I made (stupid dog! you will say), any inquiries respecting either the antecedents or subsequent history of the house in which we made so disturbed a sojourn. I was content with what I knew, and have here related as clearly as I could, and I think it a very pretty puzzle as it stands.

~   ~   ~   ~

[Thus ends the statement, which we abandon to the ingenuity of our readers, having ourselves no satisfactory explanation to suggest; and simply repeating the assurance with which we prefaced it, namely, that we can vouch for the perfect good faith and the accuracy of the narrator. – Ed.D.U.M.]

aka “A Haunted House”

“Dublin University Magazine”, Oct. 1862

WICKED CAPTAIN WALSHAWE, OF WAULING

(1864)

CHAPTER I

PEG O’NEILL PAYS THE CAPTAIN’S DEBTS

A very odd thing happened to my uncle, Mr. Watson, of Haddlestone; and to enable you to understand it, I must begin at the beginning.

In the year 1822, Mr. James Walshawe, more commonly known as Captain Walshawe, died at the age of eighty-one years. The Captain in his early days, and so long as health and strength permitted, was a scamp of the active, intriguing sort; and spent his days and nights in sowing his wild oats, of which he seemed to have an inexhaustible stock. The harvest of this tillage was plentifully interspersed with thorns, nettles, and thistles, which stung the husbandman unpleasantly, and did not enrich him.

Captain Walshawe was very well known in the neighbourhood of Wauling, and very generally avoided there. A “captain” by courtesy, for he had never reached that rank in the army list. He had quitted the service in 1766, at the age of twenty-five; immediately previous to which period his debts had grown so troublesome, that he was induced to extricate himself by running away with and marrying an heiress.

Though not so wealthy quite as he had imagined, she proved a very comfortable investment for what remained of his shattered affections; and he lived and enjoyed himself very much in his old way, upon her income, getting into no end of scrapes and scandals, and a good deal of debt and money trouble.

When he married his wife, he was quartered in Ireland, at Clonmel, where was a nunnery, in which, as pensioner, resided Miss O’Neill, or as she was called in the country, Peg O’Neill – the heiress of whom I have spoken.

Her situation was the only ingredient of romance in the affair, for the young lady was decidedly plain, though good-humoured looking, with that style of features which is termed potato; and in figure she was a little too plump, and rather short. But she was impressible; and the handsome young English Lieutenant was too much for her monastic tendencies, and she eloped.

In England there are traditions of Irish fortune-hunters, and in Ireland of English. The fact is, it was the vagrant class of each country that chiefly visited the other in old times; and a handsome vagabond, whether at home or abroad, I suppose, made the most of his face, which was also his fortune.

At all events, he carried off the fair one from the sanctuary; and for some sufficient reason, I suppose, they took up their abode at Wauling, in Lancashire.

Here the gallant captain amused himself after his fashion, sometimes running up, of course on business, to London. I believe few wives have ever cried more in a given time than did that poor, dumpy, potato-faced heiress, who got over the nunnery garden wall, and jumped into the handsome Captain’s arms, for love.

He spent her income, frightened her out of her wits with oaths and threats, and broke her heart.

Latterly she shut herself up pretty nearly altogether in her room. She had an old, rather grim, Irish servant-woman in attendance upon her. This domestic was tall, lean, and religious, and the Captain knew instinctively she hated him; and he hated her in return, and often threatened to put her out of the house, and sometimes even to kick her out of the window. And whenever a wet day confined him to the house, or the stable, and he grew tired of smoking, he would begin to swear and curse at her for a diddled old mischief-maker, that could never be easy, and was always troubling the house with her cursed stories, and so forth.

But years passed away, and old Molly Doyle remained still in her original position. Perhaps he thought that there must be somebody there, and that he was not, after all, very likely to change for the better.

CHAPTER II

THE BLESSED CANDLE

He tolerated another intrusion, too, and thought himself a paragon of patience and easy good-nature for so doing. A Roman Catholic clergyman, in a long black frock, with a low standing collar, and a little white muslin fillet round his neck – tall, sallow, with blue chin, and dark steady eyes – used to glide up and down the stairs, and through the passages; and the Captain sometimes met him in one place and sometimes in another. But by a caprice incident to such tempers he treated this cleric exceptionally, and even with a surly sort of courtesy, though he grumbled about his visits behind his back.

I do not know that he had a great deal of moral courage, and the ecclesiastic looked severe and self-possessed; and somehow he thought he had no good opinion of him, and if a natural occasion were offered, might say extremely unpleasant things, and hard to be answered.

Well the time came at last, when poor Peg O’Neill – in an evil hour Mrs. James Walshawe – must cry, and quake, and pray her last. The doctor came from Penlynden, and was just as vague as usual, but more gloomy, and for about a week came and went oftener. The cleric in the long black frock was also daily there. And at last came that last sacrament in the gates of death, when the sinner is traversing those dread steps that never can be retraced; when the face is turned forever from life, and we see a receding shape, and hear a voice already irrevocably in the land of spirits.

So the poor lady died; and some people said the Captain “felt it very much.” I don’t think he did. But he was not very well just then, and looked the part of mourner and penitent to admiration – being seedy and sick. He drank a great deal of brandy and water that night, and called in Farmer Dobbs, for want of better company, to drink with him; and told him all his grievances, and how happy he and “the poor lady upstairs” might have been, had it not been for liars, and pick-thanks, and tale-bearers, and the like, who came between them – meaning Molly Doyle – whom, as he waxed eloquent over his liquor, he came at last to curse and rail at by name, with more than his accustomed freedom. And he described his own natural character and amiability in such moving terms, that he wept maudlin tears of sensibility over his theme; and when Dobbs was gone, drank some more grog, and took to railing and cursing again by himself; and then mounted the stairs unsteadily, to see “what the devil Doyle and the other damned old witches were about in poor Peg’s room.”

When he pushed open the door, he found some half-dozen crones, chiefly Irish, from the neighbouring town of Hackleton, sitting over tea and snuff, etc., with candles lighted round the corpse, which was arrayed in a strangely cut robe of brown serge. She had secretly belonged to some order – I think the Carmelite, but I am not certain – and wore the habit in her coffin.

“What the devil are you doing with my wife?” cried the Captain, rather thickly. “How dare you dress her up in this damned trumpery, you – you cheating old witch; and what’s that candle doing in her hand?”

I think he was a little startled, for the spectacle was grisly enough. The dead lady was arrayed in this strange brown robe, and in her rigid fingers, as in a socket, with the large wooden beads and cross wound round it, burned a wax candle, shedding its white light over the sharp features of the corpse. Moll Doyle was not to be put down by the Captain, whom she hated, and accordingly, in her phrase, “he got as good as he gave.” And the Captain’s wrath waxed fiercer, and he chucked the wax taper from the dead hand, and was on the point of flinging it at the old serving-woman’s head.

“The holy candle, you sinner!” cried she.

“I’ve a mind to make you eat it, you beast,” cried the Captain.

But I think he had not known before what it was, for he subsided a little sulkily, and he stuffed his hand with the candle (quite extinct by this time) into his pocket, and said he—

“You know devilish well you had no business going on with y-y-your damn witch-craft about my poor wife, without my leave – you do – and you’ll please to take off that damn brown pinafore, and get her decently into her coffin, and I’ll pitch your devil’s waxlight into the sink.”

And the Captain stalked out of the room.

“An’ now her poor sowl’s in prison, you wretch, be the mains o’ ye; an’ may yer own be shut into the wick o’ that same candle, till it’s burned out, ye savage.”

“I’d have you ducked for a witch, for two-pence,” roared the Captain up the staircase, with his hand on the banisters, standing on the lobby. But the door of the chamber of death clapped angrily, and he went down to the parlour, where he examined the holy candle for a while, with a tipsy gravity, and then with something of that reverential feeling for the symbolic, which is not uncommon in rakes and scamps, he thoughtfully locked it up in a press, where were accumulated all sorts of obsolete rubbish – soiled packs of cards, disused tobacco-pipes, broken powder-flasks, his military sword, and a dusky bundle of the “Flash Songster,” and other questionable literature.

He did not trouble the dead lady’s room any more. Being a volatile man it is probable that more cheerful plans and occupations began to entertain his fancy.

CHAPTER III

MY UNCLE WATSON VISITS WAULING

So the poor lady was buried decently, and Captain Walshawe reigned alone for many years at Wauling. He was too shrewd and too experienced by this time to run violently down the steep hill that leads to ruin. So there was a method in his madness; and after a widowed career of more than forty years, he, too, died at last with some guineas in his purse.

Forty years and upwards is a great edax rerum, and a wonderful chemical power. It acted forcibly upon the gay Captain Walshawe. Gout supervened, and was no more conducive to temper than to enjoyment, and made his elegant hands lumpy at all the small joints, and turned them slowly into crippled claws. He grew stout when his exercise was interfered with, and ultimately almost corpulent. He suffered from what Mr. Holloway calls “bad legs,” and was wheeled about in a great leathern-backed chair, and his infirmities went on accumulating with his years.

I am sorry to say, I never heard that he repented, or turned his thoughts seriously to the future. On the contrary, his talk grew fouler, and his fun ran upon his favourite sins, and his temper waxed more truculent. But he did not sink into dotage. Considering his bodily infirmities, his energies and his malignities, which were many and active, were marvellously little abated by time. So he went on to the close. When his temper was stirred, he cursed and swore in a way that made decent people tremble. It was a word and a blow with him; the latter, luckily, not very sure now. But he would seize his crutch and make a swoop or a pound at the offender, or shy his medicine-bottle, or his tumbler, at his head.

It was a peculiarity of Captain Walshawe, that he, by this time, hated nearly everybody. My Uncle, Mr. Watson, of Haddlestone, was cousin to the Captain, and his heir-at-law. But my uncle had lent him money on mortgage of his estates, and there had been a treaty to sell, and terms and a price were agreed upon, in “articles” which the lawyers said were still in force.

I think the ill-conditioned Captain bore him a grudge for being richer than he, and would have liked to do him an ill turn. But it did not lie in his way; at least while he was living.

My Uncle Watson was a Methodist, and what they call a “class-leader”; and, on the whole, a very good man. He was now near fifty – grave, as beseemed his profession – somewhat dry – and a little severe, perhaps – but a just man.

A letter from the Penlynden doctor reached him at Haddlestone, announcing the death of the wicked old Captain; and suggesting his attendance at the funeral, and the expediency of his being on the spot to look after things at Wauling. The reasonableness of this striking my good Uncle, he made his journey to the old house in Lancashire incontinently, and reached it in time for the funeral.

My Uncle, whose traditions of the Captain were derived from his mother, who remembered him in his slim, handsome youth – in shorts, cocked-hat and lace, was amazed at the bulk of the coffin which contained his mortal remains; but the lid being already screwed down, he did not see the face of the bloated old sinner.

CHAPTER IV

IN THE PARLOUR

What I relate, I had from the lips of my uncle, who was a truthful man, and not prone to fancies.

The day turning out awfully rainy and tempestuous, he persuaded the doctor and the attorney to remain for the night at Wauling.

There was no will – the attorney was sure of that; for the Captain’s enmities were perpetually shifting, and he could never quite make up his mind, as to how best to give effect to a malignity whose direction was being constantly modified. He had had instructions for drawing a will a dozen times over. But the process had always been arrested by the intending testator.

Search being made, no will was found. The papers, indeed were all right, with one important exception: the leases were nowhere to be seen. There were special circumstances connected with several of the principal tenancies on the estate – unnecessary here to detail – which rendered the loss of these documents one of very serious moment, and even of very obvious danger.

My uncle, therefore, searched strenuously. The attorney was at his elbow, and the doctor helped with a suggestion now and then. The old serving-man seemed an honest deaf creature, and really knew nothing.

My Uncle Watson was very much perturbed. He fancied – but this possibly was only fancy – that he had detected for a moment a queer look in the attorney’s face; and from that instant it became fixed in his mind that he knew all about the leases. Mr. Watson expounded that evening in the parlour to the doctor, the attorney, and the deaf servant. Ananias and Sapphira figured in the foreground; and the awful nature of fraud and theft, or tampering in anywise with the plain rule of honesty in matters pertaining to estates, etc., were pointedly dwelt upon; and then came a long and strenuous prayer, in which he entreated with fervour and aplomb that the hard heart of the sinner who had abstracted the leases might be softened or broken in such a way as to lead to their restitution; or that, if he continued reserved and contumacious, it might at least be the will of Heaven to bring him to public justice and the documents to light. The fact is, that he was praying all this time at the attorney.

When these religious exercises were over, the visitors retired to their rooms, and my Uncle Watson wrote two or three pressing letters by the fire. When his task was done, it had grown late; the candles were flaring in their sockets, and all in bed, and, I suppose, asleep, but he.

The fire was nearly out, he chilly, and the flame of the candles throbbing strangely in their sockets shed alternate glare and shadow round the old wainscoted room and its quaint furniture. Outside were the wild thunder and piping of the storm; and the rattling of distant windows sounded through the passages, and down the stairs, like angry people astir in the house.

My Uncle Watson belonged to a sect who by no means reject the supernatural, and whose founder, on the contrary, has sanctioned ghosts in the most emphatic way. He was glad therefore to remember, that in prosecuting his search that day, he had seen some six inches of wax candle in the press in the parlour; for he had no fancy to be overtaken by darkness in his present situation. He had no time to lose; and taking the bunch of keys – of which he was now master – he soon fitted the lock, and secured the candle – a treasure in his circumstances; and lighting it, he stuffed it into the socket of one of the expiring candles, and extinguishing the other, he looked round the room in the steady light reassured. At the same moment, an unusually violent gust of the storm blew a handful of gravel against the parlour window, with a sharp rattle that startled him in the midst of the roar and hubbub; and the flame of the candle itself was agitated by the air.

CHAPTER V

THE BED-CHAMBER

My Uncle walked up to bed, guarding his candle with his hand, for the lobby windows were rattling furiously, and he disliked the idea of being left in the dark more than ever.

His bedroom was comfortable, though old-fashioned. He shut and bolted the door. There was a tall looking-glass opposite the foot of his four-poster, on the dressing-table between the windows. He tried to make the curtains meet, but they would not draw; and like many a gentleman in a like perplexity, he did not possess a pin, nor was there one in the huge pincushion beneath the glass.

He turned the face of the mirror away therefore, so that its back was presented to the bed, pulled the curtains together, and placed a chair against them, to prevent their falling open again. There was a good fire, and a reinforcement of round coal and wood inside the fender. So he piled it up to ensure a cheerful blaze through the night, and placing a little black mahogany table, with the legs of a Satyr, beside the bed, and his candle upon it, he got between the sheets, and laid his red nightcapped head upon his pillow, and disposed himself to sleep.

The first thing that made him uncomfortable was a sound at the foot of his bed, quite distinct in a momentary lull of the storm. It was only the gentle rustle and rush of the curtains, which fell open again; and as his eyes opened, he saw them resuming their perpendicular dependence, and sat up in his bed almost expecting to see something uncanny in the aperture.

There was nothing, however, but the dressing-table, and other dark furniture, and the window-curtains faintly undulating in the violence of the storm. He did not care to get up, therefore – the fire being bright and cheery – to replace the curtains by a chair, in the position in which he had left them, anticipating possibly a new recurrence of the relapse which had startled him from his incipient doze.

So he got to sleep in a little while again, but he was disturbed by a sound, as he fancied, at the table on which stood the candle. He could not say what it was, only that he wakened with a start, and lying so in some amaze, he did distinctly hear a sound which startled him a good deal, though there was nothing necessarily supernatural in it. He described it as resembling what would occur if you fancied a thinnish table-leaf, with a convex warp in it, depressed the reverse way, and suddenly with a spring recovering its natural convexity. It was a loud, sudden thump, which made the heavy candlestick jump, and there was an end, except that my uncle did not get again into a doze for ten minutes at least.

The next time he awoke, it was in that odd, serene way that sometimes occurs. We open our eyes, we know not why, quite placidly, and are on the instant wide awake. He had had a nap of some duration this time, for his candle-flame was fluttering and flaring, in articulo, in the silver socket. But the fire was still bright and cheery; so he popped the extinguisher on the socket, and almost at the same time there came a tap at his door, and a sort of crescendo “hush-sh-sh!” Once more my Uncle was sitting up, scared and perturbed, in his bed. He recollected, however, that he had bolted his door; and such inveterate materialists are we in the midst of our spiritualism, that this reassured him, and he breathed a deep sigh, and began to grow tranquil. But after a rest of a minute or two, there came a louder and sharper knock at his door; so that instinctively he called out, “Who’s there?” in a loud, stern key. There was no sort of response, however. The nervous effect of the start subsided; and I think my uncle must have remembered how constantly, especially on a stormy night, these creaks or cracks which simulate all manner of goblin noises, make themselves naturally audible.

CHAPTER VI

THE EXTINGUISHER IS LIFTED

After a while, then, he lay down with his back turned toward that side of the bed at which was the door, and his face toward the table on which stood the massive old candlestick, capped with its extinguisher, and in that position he closed his eyes. But sleep would not revisit them. All kinds of queer fancies began to trouble him – some of them I remember.

He felt the point of a finger, he averred, pressed most distinctly on the tip of his great toe, as if a living hand were between his sheets, and making a sort of signal of attention or silence. Then again he felt something as large as a rat make a sudden bounce in the middle of his bolster, just under his head. Then a voice said “Oh!” very gently, close at the back of his head. All these things he felt certain of, and yet investigation led to nothing. He felt odd little cramps stealing now and then about him; and then, on a sudden, the middle finger of his right hand was plucked backwards, with a light playful jerk that frightened him awfully.

Meanwhile the storm kept singing, and howling, and ha-ha-hooing hoarsely among the limbs of the old trees and the chimney-pots; and my Uncle Watson, although he prayed and meditated as was his wont when he lay awake, felt his heart throb excitedly, and sometimes thought he was beset with evil spirits, and at others that he was in the early stage of a fever.

He resolutely kept his eyes closed, however, and, like St. Paul’s shipwrecked companions, wished for the day. At last another little doze seems to have stolen upon his senses, for he awoke quietly and completely as before – opening his eyes all at once, and seeing everything as if he had not slept for a moment.

The fire was still blazing redly – nothing uncertain in the light – the massive silver candlestick, topped with its tall extinguisher, stood on the centre of the black mahogany table as before; and, looking by what seemed a sort of accident to the apex of this, he beheld something which made him quite misdoubt the evidence of his eyes.

He saw the extinguisher lifted by a tiny hand, from beneath, and a small human face, no bigger than a thumbnail, with nicely proportioned features peep from beneath it. In this Lilliputian countenance was such a ghastly consternation as horrified my Uncle unspeakably. Out came a little foot then and there, and a pair of wee legs, in short silk stockings and buckled shoes, then the rest of the figure; and, with the arms holding about the socket, the little legs stretched and stretched, hanging about the stem of the candlestick till the feet reached the base, and so down the Satyr-like leg of the table, till they reached the floor, extending elastically, and strangely enlarging in all proportions as they approached the ground, where the feet and buckles were those of a well-shaped, full grown man, and the figure tapering upward until it dwindled to its original fairy dimensions at the top, like an object seen in some strangely curved mirror.

Standing upon the floor he expanded, my amazed uncle could not tell how, into his proper proportions; and stood pretty nearly in profile at the bedside, a handsome and elegantly shaped young man, in a bygone military costume, with a small laced, three-cocked hat and plume on his head, but looking like a man going to be hanged – in unspeakable despair.

He stepped lightly to the hearth, and turned for a few seconds very dejectedly with his back toward the bed and the mantelpiece, and he saw the hilt of his rapier glittering in the firelight; and then walking across the room he placed himself at the dressing-table, visible through the divided curtains at the foot of the bed. The fire was blazing still so brightly that my uncle saw him as distinctly as if half a dozen candles were burning.

CHAPTER VII

THE VISITATION CULMINATES

The looking-glass was an old-fashioned piece of furniture, and had a drawer beneath it. My Uncle had searched it carefully for the papers in the daytime; but the silent figure pulled the drawer quite out, pressed a spring at the side, disclosing a false receptacle behind it, and from this he drew a parcel of papers tied together with pink tape.

All this time my Uncle was staring at him in a horrified state, neither winking nor breathing, and the apparition had not once given the smallest intimation of consciousness that a living person was in the same room. But now, for the first time, it turned its livid stare full upon my Uncle with a hateful smile of significance, lifting up the little parcel of papers between his slender finger and thumb. Then he made a long, cunning wink at him, and seemed to blow out one of his cheeks in a burlesque grimace, which, but for the horrific circumstances, would have been ludicrous. My Uncle could not tell whether this was really an intentional distortion or only one of those horrid ripples and deflections which were constantly disturbing the proportions of the figure, as if it were seen through some unequal and perverting medium.

The figure now approached the bed, seeming to grow exhausted and malignant as it did so. My Uncle’s terror nearly culminated at this point, for he believed it was drawing near him with an evil purpose. But it was not so; for the soldier, over whom twenty years seemed to have passed in his brief transit to the dressing-table and back again, threw himself into a great high-backed armchair of stuffed leather at the far side of the fire, and placed his heels on the fender. His feet and legs seemed indistinctly to swell, and swathings showed themselves round them, and they grew into something enormous, and the upper figure swayed and shaped itself into corresponding proportions, a great mass of corpulence, with a cadaverous and malignant face, and the furrows of a great old age, and colourless glassy eyes; and with these changes, which came indefinitely but rapidly as those of a sunset cloud, the fine regimentals faded away, and a loose, grey, woollen drapery, somehow, was there in its stead; and all seemed to be stained and rotten, for swarms of worms seemed creeping in and out, while the figure grew paler and paler, till my Uncle, who liked his pipe, and employed the simile naturally, said the whole effigy grew to the colour of tobacco ashes, and the clusters of worms into little wriggling knots of sparks such as we see running over the residuum of a burnt sheet of paper. And so with the strong draught caused by the fire, and the current of air from the window, which was rattling in the storm, the feet seemed to be drawn into the fireplace, and the whole figure, light as ashes, floated away with them, and disappeared with a whisk up the capacious old chimney.

It seemed to my Uncle that the fire suddenly darkened and the air grew icy cold, and there came an awful roar and riot of tempest, which shook the old house from top to base, and sounded like the yelling of a bloodthirsty mob on receiving a new and long-expected victim.

Good Uncle Watson used to say, “I have been in many situations of fear and danger in the course of my life, but never did I pray with so much agony before or since; for then, as now, it was clear beyond a cavil that I had actually beheld the phantom of an evil spirit.”

CONCLUSION

Now there are two curious circumstances to be observed in this relation of my Uncle’s, who was, as I have said, a perfectly veracious man.

First – The wax candle which he took from the press in the parlour and burnt at his bedside on that horrible night was unquestionably, according to the testimony of the old deaf servant, who had been fifty years at Wauling, that identical piece of “holy candle” which had stood in the fingers of the poor lady’s corpse, and concerning which the old Irish crone, long since dead, had delivered the curious curse I have mentioned against the Captain.

Secondly – Behind the drawer under the looking-glass, he did actually discover a second but secret drawer, in which were concealed the identical papers which he had suspected the attorney of having made away with. There were circumstances, too, afterwards disclosed which convinced my Uncle that the old man had deposited them there preparatory to burning them, which he had nearly made up his mind to do.

Now, a very remarkable ingredient in this tale of my Uncle Watson was this, that so far as my father, who had never seen Captain Walshawe in the course of his life, could gather, the phantom had exhibited a horrible and grotesque, but unmistakeable resemblance to that defunct scamp in the various stages of his long life.

Wauling was sold in the year 1837, and the old house shortly after pulled down, and a new one built nearer to the river. I often wonder whether it was rumoured to be haunted, and, if so, what stories were current about it. It was a commodious and staunch old house, and withal rather handsome; and its demolition was certainly suspicious.

“Dublin University Magazine”, Apr. 1864

Madam Crowl’s Ghost And Other Tales of Mystery (1923)

MY AUNT MARGARET’S ADVENTURE

(1864)

CHAPTER I

AUNT MARGARET AT HOME

My Aunt Margaret was what is termed a clever woman – that is to say, she was keen and resolute, prompt and active, and difficult to overreach in matters of money or business. Of the former she was, people said, a little too fond. At all events she hated waste, and lived frugally on a dietary which leaned much upon tea and eggs, and sometimes omitted dinner altogether. But though light, her housekeeping was neither beggarly nor altogether uncomfortable.

Aunt Margaret, as I remember her – dear me, how many years ago! – was rather tall, if anything, and decidedly slim and erect, with a countenance which, though shrewd and energetic, had yet something kindly in it Her features were small and nicely turned, and one could quite suppose that she might have been a pretty girl once on a time.

She held herself well, and stepped with a good, firm tread, and lightly withal. Hers was a rustic life, somewhat lonely, in a three-storied house, with three rooms on a floor, and a gable at front – steep-roofed and tiled, and with a great growth of jessamine and woodbine about the porch and the windows. Half a dozen tall, dark elms made a comfortable shadow about the house; and a white paling in front enclosed, by the roadside, the little flower garden, with an old mulberry tree in the centre.

In the rear was a lock-up yard with coachhouse and stable, and a comfortable room in which old Tom Clinton slept with a blunderbuss and back-sword in case of robbers. On weekdays Aunt Margaret dressed very plainly – stuff in winter, cotton in summer; but on Sundays she went to church in thick old satins or ancient brocades, so stiff that the squire’s lady across the aisle used to talk of them covetously for days after, and wonder why such things were not to be had now-a-days.

Aunt Margaret was always particularly neat She used to carry her keys in an old-fashioned way, on a ribbon by her side, a neat little pincushion, her scissors, and I forget what else. It was the tradition of that chatelaine which I saw revived lung after poor Aunt Margaret had gone to her rest She had long and very pretty hands – her years considered; and, in fact, the only thing I remember decidedly against her was her enamelled box of rappee (snuff), and the habit to which it ministered.

Her prime-minister was Winnifred Dobbs – fattish, rosy, ancient Time had thinned her flowing hair, and bleached it somewhat; but she smiled largely, and was good-humoured; although not very quick, was steady and sure, and chatted volubly, though not always much to the purpose; and Aunt Margaret gave her her tea in the drawing-room, which was an excuse for keeping her there for the rest of the evening; and so Aunt Margret was not quite so lonely as she might have been.

There was a young and stumpy girl beside, who washed, and did nearly everything, and must have found these young days rather dull. To her the view of the road from the kitchen window was a resource, and the occasional calls of the baker, butcher, and dairyman were precious. She talked and laughed with herself; she sang a great deal in the scullery, and joked with the cat in the kitchen.

Among Aunt Margaret’s sources of revenue was her moiety of what she called the Winderbrooke property. Everybody, of course, knows the old town of Winderbrooke. Three houses in the main street belonged to her and her sister. Of these, for convenience, they made a division, the best they could. Aunt Margaret had for her share a tobacconist and half a tailor. The latter was punctual; but the tobacconist owed a whole year’s rent, and was already some way in his third half-year. His letters were highly unsatisfactory. The tailor’s answers to her inquiries about his defaulting neighbour were reserved and evasive. But that Be had a wise terror of law and lawyers my Aunt would have retained an attorney forthwith.

“I’m not surprised, Winnie,” said my Aunt, snuffing her candle, as she and her confidential handmaid sat by the fire, in her diminutive drawing room, at their tea; “not the least. Did you ever know one man tell of another when a woman was concerned? John Pendle has been my tenant eleven years and knows all about that roguish snuff-man; but he won’t tell me one iota about him. Not that Browning is anything on earth to him. I suppose he doesn’t care if Browning was hanged; but simply Browning is a man, and I a woman. That’s it, Winnie – that’s all – I’m to be robbed and no one to prevent it A conspiracy I call it. I tell you, Winnie, I never knew one man prevent another’s robbing a woman, except when he hoped to rob her himself.”

Honest Dobbs’s fat face and round eyes looked distressed over her teacup at her mistress, while she discoursed; and she made answer only by that expressive but unspellable tick-tick-ticking made by the tip of the tongue at the back of the teeth.

“And rob me they would, Winnie, if I were half such a fool as you, for instance. But I’ll show them there are women who do know something of business.”

And she nodded mysteriously, but briskly, on her maid with a side-glance of her dark eye.

“I mean to start tomorrow morning, after breakfast, at eight o’clock. You come with me, Winnie, and we’ll sleep tomorrow night at Winderbrooke, and that, I think, will surprise them.

CHAPTER II

MY AUNT MARGARET ON THE ROAD

Old Tom Teukesbury, from the “Bull,” was not at the little wicket of Aunt Margaret’s habitation until sixteen minutes past nine.

As Tom drew up, driving a one-horse covered vehicle, the name and fashion of which have long passed away, my Aunt, fully equipped was standing on the step of her open door, with her watch in her right hand, the dial of which she presented grimly at Tom, perched in the distance on the box.

Tom’s lean, mulberry-coloured face, sharp nose, and cold grey eyes winced not at the taunt “It’s easy a showin’ a watch. I’d like to know where the ’oss is to come from, if maister sends the grey to Huntley, and Jack can’t go in harness noways; and here’s the bay can’t go neither without a brushing boot; and I’m to go down to Hoxton to borrow one of Squire; there’s a raw there as big as my’ hand – you don’t want her to founder ’twixt this and Muckleston, I’m sure; and you wouldn’t be so hard on the brute, to drive her without one – and that’s why, ma’am.”

Tom’s way with women when he was late, was to complicate the case, with an issue on farriery, which soon shuts them up.

So Winnifred got in with a basket of edibles, and the carpetbag on the seat beside my Aunt, who entered the vehicle severely.

It was a journey of nearly forty miles, by crossroads, to Winderbrooke. All geographers well know the range of bills that lie between Hoxton and that town. The landscape is charming – the air invigorating. But the pull up the steep road that scales the side of the hill, is severe. The bay mare showed signs of her soft feeding. She was hirsute, clumsy, and sudorous. She had a paunch, and now and then a cavernous cough.

The progress was, therefore, slow; and the ladies, every here and there, up particulars stiff bits, were obliged to get out and walk, which, although my Aunt might not mind it much, distressed good Winnifred Dobbs, who was in no condition for executing an excelsior movement on foot.

Near the summit of the hill the ladies waxed hungry; so, it was presumed, did the mare. The party halted; the nosebag was applied; the basket was opened: Tom had a couple of clumsy sandwiches; the ladies partook; and the bay mare enjoyed her repast with that pleasant crisp crunching, which agreeably suggests good grinders and a good grist There was still a little pull before reaching the crown of the hill Winnifred could walk no more; but my Aunt trod nimbly up the ascent, and on reaching the summit, made a halt, and, like an invading general, viewed with an eye at once curious and commanding, the country that lay beneath.

She was looking for Winderbrooke close by the foot of the hill.

“Where’s the town?” demanded my Aunt.

“Wat toon, ma’am?” inquired Tom. “Winderbrooke, to be sure.”

“Well, Winderbrooke will be there.” Tom was pistoling Winderbrooke with his whip.

“Where?”

“You see the steeple there?”

“Aye.”

“Well, that isn’t it.”

“No?”

“Now, ye’ll see a bit of a rock or a hillock atop o’ that hill.”

“That hill – well?”

“Now, follow that line on past that whitish thing ye see.”

“You don’t mean on that remote plain? Why, man, that’s the horizon.”

“Well, it’s beyond that a little bit, over the rising ground that will be jest there; and folks say, on a clear day, you may see the smoke o’ the toon over it, though I never did.

There was a pause, and my Aunt looked stern and black toward the remote objects which he indicated and neither could see, and then she looked back over her shoulder in the direction of home. I can’t say what was passing in her mind; but she looked forward again, and with an angry side-glance at Tom, she said – Why, it’s a perfect journey!” There was another pause, and she said with a dry abruptness, “Let me in, please;” and in the same defiant tone, “Go on!”

And she drew up the window with a sharp clang in Tom’s face.

She sat stiff and silent, and sniffed as she looked sternly through the window, and answered Winnifred Dobbs, who was under the same comfortable delusion about the vicinity of Winderbrooke, sharply and suddenly, when she asked how far they still had to go, before reaching that resting place.

“Fifty miles, and another range of mountains.”

CHAPTER III

THE MOON RISES

Downhill was pleasanter, and the bay mare did wonders, and my Aunt, who was not more unjust than the rest of her sex, soon forgave her companion, and talked affably enough with fat old Winnie Dobbs.

About two miles beyond the foot of the hill, in a pretty hollow, lies the pleasant little town of Dramworth, with old red brick gables and many tall poplars, where at the small inn, the party changed horses.

It was not far from three o’clock in the afternoon when they arrived there. One horse they found in the inn stable, but nothing less than a postchaise, and no driver on the premises, men and vehicles being away on other travels.

Tom being well known there, and fortunately being well esteemed, there was no great hesitation in trusting the horse in his hands. So the bay mare took her place in the stable, and the Dramworth steed was put to in her place. It was a long drive – three-and-twenty miles – still to Winderbrooke, and the horse and the roads indifferent The season was pretty well on in the autumn, and the evenings were not so long as they had been at midsummer, and as it was some time past three when they started, Tom could not undertake to reach their destination before nightfall.

From Dramworth to Winderbrooke was by no means so familiar a route to Tom Teukesbury as the road they had travelled hitherto. He conferred, however, with mine host under the porch, and gathered in brief hints and notes, the landmarks of his journey, and resumed the whip and reins with a serious but tolerably confident countenance.

Tom being under promise to spare the horse, drove drowsily. It is a very pretty country, though but thinly inhabited. The sun was by this time at the verge of those low hills that lie to the westward. They had just crossed a narrow old bridge over a little stream, and there was an ascent at the other side, which their horse refused to mount until the ladies had descended. In fact he was an unsatisfactory brute and, Tom feared, had been out that morning.

My Aunt and Winnifred got down and trudged on, this time in front of the vehicle, which came tinkling up the slope, in the slanting light, with Tom at the horse’s head. In this lonely region a solitary little boy came over a stile by the roadside, and looking back, Aunt Margaret saw Tom at a standstill, conversing with the urchin, and pointing in various directions in illustration of his discourse, or his questioning.

“Well, Tom, what does he say? How far is it to Winderbrooke?”

“He is a stoopid, that boy, and knows nout – no more than that post, ma’am – he doan’t.”

I think Tom was uneasy by this time, for he did not know the country. He was gaping about him vainly for a sight of a human being, and standing up in the “dickey” and beckoning with his whip whenever he fancied he saw one. But each in succession turned out to be a horse or a goat, or a post. Sometimes he got up a brisk trot, and sometimes subsided almost to a walk, as his doubts or his hopes prevailed. But though he affected in replying to my Aunt’s queries through the front window, a confidence as to their whereabouts, and promised the early appearance of certain landmarks which he named, yet I think by this time honest Tom was strongly of opinion that he had lost his way.

By the time the sun went down they had got upon a wild moorland with patches of stunted old wood, and heathy undulations, and distant boundaries of low hills, crowned irregularly with trees.

“Get on a little faster, please; I don’t like being out in the dark,” urged my Aunt who, as a spinster, and in charge beside of Winnie Dobbs, felt her responsibilities duly.

Tom muttered to himself, and got into a trot which, however, soon abated. Twilight was deepening and a round harvest moon soon began to shine solemnly over the broad and solitary landscape.

“How many miles now, Tom?” asked my Aunt sharply from the window.

“It’ll be about five from Winderbrooke, ma’am.”

“And what’s this place?”

“Well, it’s the moor, I suppose.”

“I’d like a glass of water. Is there a house near?”

“We’ll be soon at the cross-mills – round that bit of a clump o’ trees there.”

But when they passed the dump there was neither river nor mills, and Tom stood up uneasily in the dickey, and made a dreary survey.

“Are we at the mills, Tom?”

“Not yet a bit, ma’am – I’m a looking if there’s a house near.”

But there was no friendly red twinkle from cottage window, and Tom, with his two maidens in charge, was growing very uncomfortable.

CHAPTER IV

PERTURBATION

They drove very slowly. Tom was groping in a geographical chaos, and paused every now and then. My Aunt inquired angrily, demanding the production of the cross-mills. Tom asked ten minutes, and half a mile more, and promised the profert; but after half an hour’s driving, with no result, my Aunt grew extremely frightened and exasperated, and Tom sulkily admitted that he had his doubts as to their topographical position.

Tom halted, and stood up in the dickey, as before. My Aunt Margaret descended, and looking at the moonlit prospect from the bank by the roadside, harangued the troubled driver in strong and shrill language; and Winnie, whose grief was more sedentary, sat in the vehicle, and spoke not but stared through the window, with a fat and fatigued sadness, in vague apprehension.

There were plenty of old stories of highwaymen afloat through their scared fancies; and here was a lonely heath – two helpless maidens also, with a trunk, a basket of “prog,” and four pounds seven and sixpence in a purse, and a driver without small or back-sword, and no pistols!

“We’ll sure get on the London road in two miles more or less, and then we’re all right,” said Tom.

“London, fiddle! It’s my belief, Thomas Teukesbury, you nave not the faintest idea where we are; you haven’t, sir, no more than myself. There isn’t a light nor a house.”

“Damn the place!” retorted Tom, bitterly.

“Don’t curse – we’re bad enough. No impiety, please. You should command yourself, I think, if I do, while we are in this helpless and utterly unprotected situation.”

“There’s a man coming,” said Tom, hopefully.

“Good gracious!” cried my Aunt.

“No, there ain’t,” said Tom, dejectedly.

“Heaven be praised!” said my Aunt, with a gasp. “I look on it sir, we’re in danger here on this dreadful moor, to which you, sir, have brought us. What a shame, Thomas, to pretend you knew the way! Winnie, Winnie Dobbs, we’re lost – lost on a heath! Tom has lost us!”

Winnie’s fat, forlorn face filled the back window of the vehicle.

“Lost on a heath, Winnie, in the middle of the night!”

“What’ll we best do ma’am?” imploringly asked Winnie, who was accustomed to derive her stock of wisdom in all emergencies from my Aunt Margaret’s inspiration.

“Ask Thomas Teukesbury up there – he’s our guide. He brought us here, though he does not seem to know a way out Ask him. I don’t know, no more than the man in the moon there.”

“I dessay we’re all right enough, after all,” said Tom, “only I don’t know it by this light Will you get in, ma’am, and well git on a bit, and we’ll, sure, light on a hinn or a public afore long.”

Well, she did get in. The horse was unmistakably fatigued, with a disposition to draw up every now and then, by an old tree, or under a steep bank, or sometimes without any special landmark to invite.

Tom got down, and walked by the brute’s adjected head; and my Aunt, who had given up the sarcastic and ironical mood as her alarms deepened, scolded him occasionally from the front window. As the back of his head and shoulders were presented, Tom walked on, not caring to turn about to reply, but, I am afraid, making some disrespectful remarks in the dark.

In fact, the poor horse, who, if he had but understood and spoken our language, could, probably, have saved them and himself a world of trouble, was so evidently done up that Tom insisted he must have his oats, and accordingly, he partook of that refreshment in a nosebag. Here was another delay. My Aunt’s watch had been frequently consulted, by the moonlight, during that anxious journey. It was now out again. The night was a little sharp, too; and the whole party, who had made no provision for such a climate and such hours, were rather cold. You may be sure my Aunt’s temper was not growing more agreeable.

There was just the alternative of a bivouac where they stood, or following, on chance, the road they had been pursuing. My Aunt adopted the latter. Affairs had grown so serious that she now never removed her face from the little front window, through which she looked ahead, with hope deferred, and a sick heart.

She had been so often deceived by marly banks and thickets, that it was not until they had almost reached it, to her inexpressible relief, she plainly saw the whitewashed front of a low, two-storied public, standing back from the road a few yards, and snugly sheltered among some thick and stunted trees.

My Aunt held the reins through the window, and Tom got down and summoned mine host. A red streak of candlelight shot out through the door of the pot-house, and there was a parley which she could not hear.

CHAPTER V

“THE GOOD WOMAN”

“Only two rooms, ma’am, and lofts above, and the house full o’ tipsy colliers, dancing. But there’s an inn, called The Good Woman, only half a mile on, and lots o’ room.”

My Aunt breathed a sigh of relief, and was silently thankful. Then she repeated the news to Winnie, who joined in the jubilation.

About ten minutes more brought them, after a slight ascent, on a sudden, to a hollow, expanding to an amphitheatrical plain, encompassed by wooded, rising grounds, and near the centre of which rose two abrupt and oddly-shaped hillocks, like islands from a lake, and a very large pond from under a thick screen of trees, and the clustered gables and chimneys of The Good Woman shone mistily in the moonlight They drew up before the door of the inn. Old-fashioned and weather-stained it looked in the faint beams. The door was closed – it was past ten o’clock – but a glimmer of candle or firelight shone through the shutter chink at the right. My Aunt did not wait. There was no need to hold the reins of the timid horse, who coughed, snorted, and shook himself, with his nose near the ground.

My Aunt Margaret ran up the three broad steps, the dingy Good Woman, without a head, sarcastically swinging between the sign-posts at her left. With the carpetbag in one hand, she hammered lustily at the knocker with the other. Tom, a little in the rear, with one foot on the steps, rested the trunk on his knee; and Winnie, with the basket of “prog” on her arm, stood dejectedly beside him.

There was some delay about opening the door, and when it was done, it was with a chain across, and a woman, with a coarse voice, and strong Irish accent, asked, not pleasantly, who was there.

“Travellers,” said my Aunt, “who have been led astray by the driver.”

“Where are yez from?”

“From Dramworth to Winderbrooke.”

“From Dhramworth to Windherbrooke! an’ he dhruv yez here! How many iv yez is in it?”

“Two ladies, a horse, a vehicle, and the driver.” Tom, the culprit, was degraded, and my Aunt placed him after the vehicle.

The maid of the inn, with high cheek bones, and a determined countenance, was looking over the chain.

“Did yez come through the village, or over the moor?”

“Over the moor, I suppose; from that direction,” answered my Aunt

“And why didn’t yez stop at The Cat and Fiddle?”

“You mean the small ale-house near this. It was full of inebriated men,” answered Aunt Margaret, with dignity.

“Well, you may come in, ma’am, and the leedy that’s widge ye; but we can’t accommodate yer man, and he must only take the horse an’ carriage back to The Cat an’ Fiddle, an’ if that’ll answer, yez may come in; if not, yez must all go on, for we won’t let a man in after ten o’clock.”

My Aunt expostulated, but the portress was inexorable.

“We won’t let a man in after ten o’clock for Saint Payther, and that’s the holy all iv it,” she answered, firmly.

So, my Aunt submitted, and softening at the parting, gave Tom some shillings on account, and wished him goodnight; and when he had got upon the box, and started afresh for The Cat and Fiddle, and had made some way in his return, the door was shut in the faces of the spinsters, who stood, with their modest luggage, upon the steps, in the moonlight. The chain was withdrawn, and the hall of The Good Woman stood open to receive them.

I don’t know whether my Aunt had read “Ferdinand Count Fathom,” or ever seen the “Bleeding Nun” performed on any stage; but if she had I venture to say she was reminded of both before morning.

The woman with high cheekbones, and somewhat forbidding face, stood before them on their entrance, with a brass candlestick raised in her hand, so that the light fell from above her head on the faces of the guests. She had allowed them without a helping hand to pull in their luggage, and was now maxing a steady and somewhat scowling scrutiny of my Aunt and Winnie.

“And yez come from Windberbrooke?” she said, after an interval, with a jealous glance still upon them.

My Aunt nodded.

“Yer mighty tall, the two o’ yez, I’m thinkin’,” (another pause.) “Will I help yez off widge yer cloaks?”

My Aunt would nave probably been tart enough upon this uncivil damsel, had it not been that her attention was a little called of! by the sound of female lamentation indistinctly audible from a chamber near the hall.

She proceeded to remove their mantles, eyeing them, at the same time, with a surly sort of curiosity.

“We are cold, my good woman; we can sit for a while by the kitchen fire,” said my Aunt, recollecting herself.

“The kitchen’s all through other wid the sutt that’s tumbled down the chimbley; bud I’ll light yez a bit o’ fire in a brace o’ shakes in your bedroom. Is it dinner yez’ill be wanting?” (“Tea, please,” said my Aunt), “and lend a hand i’ ye plase, Mississ, wid them things,” said she to Winnie, whom, with the quick instinct of her kind, she discovered to be the subordinate.

CHAPTER VI

THE WHITE CHAMBER

A fat slatternly woman, by no means young, with a face swollen and red with weeping, pushed open a side door, and standing behind the portress, gaped on them, and asked – “Is it them, Nell?”

“Arra, ma’am, can’t ye keep quite. No it isn’t no one, but here’s two leedies ye see, that wants a bed an’ a fire, and a cup o’ tay in the white room. Come along i’ ye plase, my leedy.”

And in an’ aside, as she passed, my Aunt heard her say, close in the blubbered face of the fat woman – “Arrah, ma’am, dear, will ye get in out o’ that, an’ shut the doore.”

The stout woman complied; and as they mounted the broad stairs, they again heard the sounds of crying.

This certainly savoured in no wise of the warm welcome for which inns are famous. The mansion, too, old wainscoted, and palpably altogether too large for its business. They met the Boots coming down the stairs with a dingy kitchen candle and a hammer in his hand; a pallid fellow, with the sort of inquiring hangdog look that seemed to belong to the staff of The Good Woman. He stood close by the wall in the corner of the lobby as they passed by, and did not offer to carry up the trunk.

“Bring a guvvaul o’ wudd, will ye, Barney, jewel, to the white room?” said the handmaid over her shoulder.

My Aunt and Winnie followed her to the head of the stairs, where she placed the trunk, and this slight circumstance I mention, because it was immediately connected with my Aunt’s adventure, and she took a coalscuttle instead, and conducting by two turns into a long wainscoted gallery, she opened a door on the right, and they entered a large square room, with a recess near one angle, two tall narrow windows, with white curtains rather yellow, and one very capacious bed, with curtains of the same. There was a skimpy bit of carpet near the hearth, and very scant and plain furniture.

The wood having arrived, Nell made a good fire, placed the deal table and two chairs near it, lighted a large mould of four to the pound, such as Molly Dumpling sported on the night of her dreadful adventure with William Gardner, and altogether the room began to put on its cheeriest looks. And when the tea-things, eggs, and battered toast arrived, my Aunt and Winnie being well warmed by this time, sat down with their feet on the fender, the one mollified and the other consoled.

After tea, my Aunt, who was a fidgety person, made a tour of the room, and a scrutiny of the open cupboard and drawers, but she found nothing, except an old black glove for the left hand, in one of the drawers.

When this was over she sat by the fire again, and speculated for Winnie’s instruction upon their geographical probabilities. But Winnie was growing sleepy.

“A double-bedded room would have been more comme il faut; but it is plainly a poor place, and after all the bed is unusually large,” thought my Aunt.

And so, indeed, it was, extraordinarily large, and of an old-fashioned construction.

My Aunt, who was of an active inquiring genius, opened a bit of one of the shutters and peeped out. It showed a view of the inn yard. The side next her had been formed by a wing of the house; but that now stood up a gaunt roofless wall, with the broad moon shining through its sashless windows. On the left was a row of tall and dingy stables and offices, and opposite, another ruined building, a shed, and a tall arched gate. The pavement was grass-grown and rutty, and the whole thing looked awfully seedy, and not the less gloomy for some great trees that darkly overhung the buildings from the outside.

Having made her survey, my Aunt would have closed the shutter, but that she saw a man walk lazily from the side beneath her, his hands in his pockets, across the yard, casting an undulating and misshapen shadow over the uneven pavement.

When he reached the gate at the other side, he took a key from his pocket, and unlocked a wicket in it, and setting his foot on the plank beneath, leaned his elbow on the side, and lazily looked out, as if on the watch for somebody. A huge dog came pattering out of a kennel in the shadow, and placing his great head by the man’s leg, sniffed gloomily into the darkness.

“Are ye expectin’ any friends, ma’am?” asked Nell’s coarse voice over my Aunt’s shoulder, so sharply and suddenly that the start brought the blood to her thin cheeks.

“Not very likely to see friends here,” replied my Aunt, Very tartly. “What do you mean, woman, by talking that way over my shoulder?”

The grim chambermaid by this time had seen the man, and was eyeing him under her projecting and somewhat shrewish brows.

“An’ ye come from Hoxton?” she said rather slowly and sharply.

“I told you so, woman.”

“It wasn’t from Westerton, ye’re sure?”

“I’ve told you where we came from, though it is no business of yours. I never heard of Westerton.”

My Aunt added this a little emphatically, owing to an undefined feeling that a suspicion of having come from Westerton was likely in some mysterious way to prejudice her.

The maid replied nothing, but said a little gruffly, “By your lave, ma’am,” and pushing by her, she closed the shutters, and drew a great wooden sliding bolt across with a jerk.

My Aunt was so taken by surprise that she lost her time for retorting with effect, as she would have done, but she was so incensed, that from the fireplace she could not forbear saying, “I think you a most impertinent woman.”

To which the maid made no reply, but turned down the bedclothes, and arranged the curtains; and gathering together the tea equipage, carried the tray away, shutting the door.

CHAPTER VII

AN ACCIDENT BEFALLS THE CANDLE

My Aunt Margaret stood for a while with her back to the fire, very erect, and her nose in air, sniffing defiantly toward the door through which that “most impertinent woman” had disappeared. Winnie was nodding profoundly in her chair by the fire. My Aunt with a toss of her head walked off again to the window, jerked back the bolt, and looked once more into the stable-yard.

She saw Nell at the wicket-door, the man who had taken his stand there with the dog. Nell seemed to prevail with him, for he whistled back the dog, who had gone out, and locking the door again, he returned across the yard with Nell, who continued talking volubly as they walked side by side, and pointed up at my Aunt’s window. On seeing the shutter again open and my Aunt’s head and shoulders revealed against the light, both maid and man stopped in amaze, and silently gazed at her for some moments. I dare say, as my Aunt observed the evident impression produced upon those mysterious persons, she regretted inwardly the act of defiance which had removed the bolt and replaced her at the window. The woman walked into the house without speaking; the man called the dog, and strolled away towards the stable.

My Aunt closed the shutter, drew the bolt, and coming again to the fire, shook Winnie up from her sleep, and ordered her to say her prayers and get to bed.

These orders were soon complied with, and honest Winnie slept the sleep of a good conscience and a good digestion, sweetened by fatigue, while her mistress, who was cursed with an active mind, sat by the fire, with a well-snuffed candle, and conned over her correspondence and her figures, and prepared for the critical interview with the defaulting tobacconist next day. Then she fell into a reverie with her foot on the fender. I don’t think she dozed; but the fire grew low, and the snuff of the candle waxed long and heavy at top like a fungus, and the room was tenebrose and silent, as indeed was the house, for by this time it was very late.

After a while, my Aunt fancied she heard someone approaching her chamber door very softly. It was the stealthy creaking of the boards that warned her; she could not hear the tread of the foot. She held her breath, sitting straight upon her chair, and gazing at the door with such faint light as her unsnuffed taper afforded her; and I dare say she looked extremely frightened.

She heard someone breathing close outside the door, then a hand softly laid on the door-handle; the door gently opened, and the face of the woman of the high cheek bones, pale and lowering, looked in. Her ill-omened stare encountered my Aunt’s gaze, and each was perhaps unpleasantly surprised.

Both looked on, pale enough, for some time without speaking. At last my Aunt stood up and said sharply – “What’s your business here, pray?”

“’Tis late to be burnin’ candle and fire, mississ – half-past twelve, no less,” said the maid with cool asperity. “We’re an airly house, ma’am, here, and keeps dacent hours. Mebbe it’s that ye’d like supper – there’s cowld corn-beef and bacon,” she added after a pause.

“Not any, thanks; had I wished supper, I would have rung for it,” said Aunt Margaret, loftily.

“Thrue for you, mississ, only there’s no bell,” answered the woman, coolly.

“More shame for you,” retorted my Aunt, with a little flush, glancing along the walls innocent of bell-rope, for this “most impertinent woman” made her feel a little small.

“I seen you lookin’ out again, ma’am, through the windy, I don’t know after who.”

The aplomb of this woman’s attacks deprived my Aunt of breath and presence of mind, and she was amazed afterwards at the perplexed sort of patience with which she submitted to her impertinence.

“Yes: I looked out of the window.”

“We would not like people stoppin’ here that had friends outside,” said the woman, with a searching glance and a sulky wag of her head.

“I don’t know what you mean, woman.”

“Oh, ho! thankee – I know very well what I mane – an’ maebbe you’re not quite sich a fool yourself but what you can make a guess. At any rate it is not a lady’s part to be furretin’ about the room, an pimpin’ an’ spyin’, ma’am.”

“Leave the room, please,” exclaimed my Aunt.

“An’ mebbe signin’ and beckonin’ out o’ the windies be night. Oh, ho! thankee – I know well enough what belongs to a lady.”

“I repeat, woman, you had better leave the room.”

“Woman, yourself! – I’m not goin’ to be woman’d be you – an’ the big lump iv a woman ye brought widge ye. Who’s that? eh?”

“My housekeeper,” replied my Aunt, with a fierce dignity.

“An’ a strappin’ ould one she is,” retorted the woman, with a hoarse sneer. She was turning over Winnie’s clothes, which lay on a chair.

“Your conduct is intolerable. I shall see the proprietor in the morning.”

“An’ welcome!” said the woman, coolly. “You closed the shutters again, I suppose?” and she walked round the bed to the window, from which my Aunt had made her observations.

I do believe that, if she was enraged, Aunt Margaret was also the least bit in the world cowed by this woman. But observing a little trembling in the bed-curtains, to the far side of which her ugly visitor had passed, my Aunt made a quick step to the side of the bed next her, and drawing the curtain, saw this unpleasant woman at the opposite side with the bedclothes raised in her hand from Winnie’s feet and ankles, which she was inspecting.

“Big feet! Where’s her boots, ma’am?” said the maid across the bed, eyeing my Aunt aslant, and replacing the bedclothes.

“Boots or shoes, on the floor by the fire, and I wish you’d be gone.”

“I’ll take your own, too, ma’am,” answered she.

“Well, yes; that is, I’ll leave them outside the door.”

“As ye plase: only get to yer bed, at wonst – it s all hours;” and without more preparation, she chucked my Aunt’s mould candle from its socket into the fire, where, lying on its side it blazed up merrily.

“What do you mean? How dare you, huzzy! Fetch a candle this moment.”

“Arra go to yer bed, woman, while ye have light, will ye?” and with these words the attendant withdrew, shutting the door with a clap.

CHAPTER VIII

OF A FIGURE SEEN BY MY AUNT

My Aunt opened the door, very angry. She was about to walk down stairs to insist on trying the delinquent by court-martial before the “Proprietor;” but she recollected that he was probably in his bed and asleep by this time. She contented herself, therefore, by calling after her.

“Rely on it, I’ll complain in the morning – so sure as I live.”

And so she shut the door, and the candle making a glorious blaze in the grate my Aunt thought the chambermaid’s advice worth following, and did get into her bed while there was light. I dare say her collision with the chambermaid cost her more than twenty minutes’ sleep. When her anger subsided there remained a different sort of uneasiness, for there was something ill-omened and menacing in the unintelligible ways of this inn and its people. My Aunt Margaret, however, was really tired, and eventually fell into a slumber, deep and dreamless, from which she awakened with a start.

She fancied that she had been disturbed by a sound as of some heavy weight pulled along the floor close to the room in which she slept. The sound had ceased before she was fully awake; but it left her with a most disagreeable sensation of fear and uncertainty, for, undefinably, it was connected in her mind with the idea of mischief designed to herself.

All of a sudden she remembered her trunk, left at the head of the staircase, and the idea rushed upon her, “They are stealing my trunk!” The sound resembled the rumble of it along the floor.

My Aunt had a keen sense of property, and was not wanting in pluck. She jumped out of bed, opened her door softly, and listened. But everything was perfectly quiet “It was in order to confine me to my room that that odious woman deprived me of my candle,” thought my Aunt, although even if she had had it at her bedside she could not have lighted it, for the fire had gone quite out. She listened, but there was nothing stirring; and, in extreme déshabille, as she was, my Aunt, full of anxieties, crept out on the lobby, and made her way through the passages to the stairhead.

There stood the old hair trunk on its end, with its rows of dim brass nails, plain enough in the faint light from the lobby window. My Aunt was relieved. She would have been very glad to pull it into her room; but the distance was considerable, and the noise would have brought the people about her, and she was in no state to receive company.

Having stood affectionately and anxiously by the friendly trunk for a minute or two, irresolute, she began to find it too cold to stay longer; so, with an easier mind, she groped her way back again.

It was easier to find the lobby than to discover in the dark her own bedroom door. She groped along the passages; she had counted the steps, but now was not quite sure whether it was thirty-five, or forty-five; she stopped now and then to listen in her groping return, and began to grow rather confused; and wished, as active-minded persons not unfrequently do, that she had remained quietly as she was.

In fact, she was precisely in the situation to lose her way, and step into a wrong bedroom, and was extremely uncomfortable in mind and cold in body; and very nervous beside, lest anyone should chance to come that way with a candle, and discover the nakedness of the land.

In this state my Aunt’s deliberations were of the very fussiest sort, and her exertions great; but I doubt if she could hare recovered her room, at least at the first venture, without light. Light, however, did come, and this was the manner of its arrival. On a sudden a door opened below stairs – near the foot of the staircase it must have been, she heard so clearly; and voices, before inaudible, now reached her ear.

A female was weeping loudly, and uttering broken sentences through her sobs.

“They’ve killed him – he’s murdered – they’ve murdered him!” and similar ejaculations came rapidly tumbling one over the other in her ululation.

“Arra, ma’am, go back again, and stay where ye wor. We’ll be even wid them yet, for it is murdher, the villians!” said a voice, which my Aunt had no difficulty in recognising as that of the Irish chambermaid. “Bud don’t be rousin’ the people – it must be done quiet.”

There was more sobbing, and more talk, and the weeping female gave way, and was again shut into her room, and a gleam of an approaching candle sent an angular shadow on the ceiling at the end of the passage in which my Aunt stood. Extremely frightened, she crouched down close to the ground, and the forbidding-looking woman, with the high cheek bones, walked stealthily in from the stairhead passage, and stood, as pale as death, with her shoes off, and a candle in her hand, listening, as it seemed, at the far end of the gallery. She looked over her shoulder, and said, in a hard whisper—

“Stop there, wid their heavy shoes.” She had a hammer in her hand, and looked unspeakably repulsive in her pallor. She lifted the candle above her head and listened. My Aunt was staring full at her from her place of semi-concealment, in a recess of one of the doors, with her face close to the ground.

If the woman saw her, she had presence of mind to make no sign; but with the hand in which the hammer was, she drew her dress up a little to enable her to step more freely, and, with a light, soft tread, passed across the entrance of the gallery.

CHAPTER IX

THE FUNERAL VISITATION

My Aunt was impressed with the most dismal and terrific ideas of what was going forward. She was quite unnerved. She saw, sometimes the shadow of this woman, and sometimes the full light of the candle, still thrown upon the floor and walls at the end of the lobby, and dared not move.

Quickly the woman returned. She had now the hammer under the arm which bore the candlestick, and whispered—

“Barney!”

Then she raised in her other hand a long, rather slender, steel blade, as it appeared to my aunt, quite straight, and whispered—

“That’s the thing – betther nor the hammer; there’s no one awake but herself – for the life o’ ye, make no noise.”

She was crossing the far end of the passage as she said this, and she and the light of her candle quickly disappeared.

The last gleam threw the shadow of a pair of shoes from outside a bedroom door, along the floor, towards my Aunt. The door was next that in which she was crouched, and was a little open. She was now sure that she had discovered her room.

The moment the light had quite disappeared, she entered, and shut the door softly, and groped her way to the bed, and got in at her own side; and, being very cold, lay close to her companion for warmth. My Aunt envied Winnie her sound sleep. She vainly tried to compose herself, wildly conjecturing about unknown horrors, and longing for morning, and an escape from this suspected and mysterious house.

She was miserably cold, too. The night was sharp, and the fire long out. The bedclothes were insufficient, and Winnie also as cold as stone.

My Aunt had been in this state – freezing and listening, and awfully frightened for some ten minutes, perhaps, when she distinctly heard breathing near her door, and the muffled tread of shoeless feet, and then a whispering.

The door opened, and two men came in, carrying a coffin, on the lid of which a kitchen candle was burning dimly; and the ugly woman, Nell, between whom and my Aunt there had grown up, so fast, an unaccountable antipathy, followed, carrying in her hand the steel instrument which Aunt Margaret had observed before with so unpleasant a suspicion, and which was, in fact, a turnscrew.

The whole of this funereal pageant of a dream. The men paused for a moment, while the woman placed the candle on a chest of drawers, and slid the coffin-lid off, leaning it against the wall. They drew near; and as they laid their awful burthen lengthways on the bed by her side, one of the two men said—

“I’ll go to the feet, and do you go to the head.”

Upon this my Aunt, almost beside herself with terror, bounced up in the bed; and, instead of despatching her as she had expected, with a horrid roar and a screech, the men and woman fled from the room, and along the passage, leaving the coffin on the bed beside her.

“Winnie, Winnie – what is it?” cried my Aunt. But no Winnie was there. In her stead lay a dead man, with a white-fringed cap on, and a black, stubbled beard, the growth of some three or four days, and a little line of the white of one eye shining between its half-closed lids.

It was now; my Aunt’s turn, and with a loud yell, and overturning the coffin, she jumped out of the bed, and ran screaming along the gallery, where she fell, and fainted on the floor.

When she came to herself, she was in her own room and bed once more, with Winnie beside her: and she exclaimed, so soon as recollection quite returned—

“Oh, save me, Winnie, save me.”

“You’re quite safe, ma’am, dear.”

“Where are we?”

“In the inn, ma’am.”

“Bolt the door, Winnie; bolt the door, and lock it – they’re all murderers.”

“Drink some water, ma’am.”

“Lock the door, you fool! We shall be murdered.”

“The maid was here, ma’am, very sorry you were so frightened; but you went into the wrong room, and they could not help it.”

CHAPTER X

HOW IT ALL HAPPENED

Gradually the facts came to light, though not fully for a long time afterward.

The Good Woman was one of those inns pleasantly known to our great-grandfathers. The old London road had run by its steps; and the wheels of old stagecoaches, post-chaises, and wagons had dustied its windows once. But unluckily for The Good Woman, she stood upon the apex of a curve of that great channel of traffic which modern reform and a county presentment cut off; and the London road, henceforward running in a straight line from Dwiddleston to Huxbridge – fifteen miles – leaves The Good Woman full three miles on one side.

With the opening of the new line, and the Crottworthy Arms, the halcyon days of the old inn ended. Its gabled frontage, steep roofs, and capacious premises – a world too wide for its shrunk business – fell gradually to decay. The old proprietor retired to his farm in Cheshire; and his nephew succeeded, got desperately into debt, was sued in all directions, and judgments wielded by exasperated creditors glimmered terribly through the storm, threatening to dash him to pieces. At this crisis, the ill-starred innkeeper, having ventured by night to Maryston – all his excursions of late had been in the dark – took cold, and died of a catarrh in three days.

The inn, nearly reduced to a state of siege; the innkeeper himself having long been an invisible and intangible substance, hid away from warrants, arrests, and other personal dangers, among the dilapidated lumber rooms and garrets of the old house; the people thinking more of a moonlit flitting than of improving the traffic of the forlorn Good Woman when the proprietor died, that procedure upon his part was kept as secret as every other of late had been, and not altogether without cause, for there were those among his incensed creditors who were by no means incapable of the legal barbarity of arresting his corpse.

Thus came the mystery and suspicion with which my Aunt and Winnie were received – the coffin being expected hourly, and a grave opened, in the dark, in the neighbouring churchyard. The Irish maid, whose head was full of the disguises and stratagems of which she had heard so much in her own ingenious and turbulent country, was for a while, disposed to think that the unseasonable visitors were myrmidons of the law in disguise. The fat, dowdy woman, who emerged, with blubbered cheeks, when they entered, and whose lamentations subsequently my Aunt heard when she visited her trunk on the stairhead, was the widow of the departed proprietor.

The rest, I think, explains itself; and the reader will be, no doubt glad to learn that my Aunt’s visit to Winderbrooke was, on the whole, satisfactory, and that she lived for many years to recount, by the fireside, to hushed listeners, this “winter’s tale” of her adventures in The Good Woman.

“Dublin University Magazine”, 1864

THE LEGEND OF DUNBLANE

(1869)

CHAPTER I.

“It was in the year 1793,” said my uncle, “that I made the acquaintance of William Dunblane, afterwards Lord Dunblane, at the University of St. Andrews. His bachelor uncle, the then lord, was not a very rich man, and he was a stingy one. William’s father, too, was still alive, so that the young man was somewhat straitened as to money. We were just of an age, and my father was very liberal to me. Our relative positions, therefore, were more equal at that time than they afterwards became; and, in spite of the great difference of rank, Dunblane singled me out to be his favourite companion. I cannot say why this was, unless it may have been that I was a more patient listener than many other young fellows, to his long stories about his ancestry, and that while I always endeavoured to tell him the truth, I was more indulgent to this weakness of family pride than the rest were. They used to laugh at him, at first; but that, he soon showed them, he would never stand. He was very strong, and very passionate; and his face at such moments became as that of one possessed with a devil.”

It was in these words that my uncle, Mr. Carthews, senior partner in the firm of Carthews and Bontor, of Aberdeen and Calcutta, used generally to begin the following strange narrative. Like many Scotchmen of his day, he had a somewhat inordinate reverence for rank; but it was balanced, in his case, by a businesslike appreciation of the value of money. What is of more import, however, to the matter in hand, was his strict and fearless adherence to truth, joined to an extremely kind nature. These characteristics were conspicuous in every transaction of a long life. He was a shrewd, upright man, universally respected in the city where he passed the best part of his life: “stiff in opinions,” occasionally prolix, but of a sound, clear judgment, and unimpeached honesty. In the narrative, therefore, which I shall try to give, as far as possible, in my uncle’s own words, there is, I am confident, no wilful misrepresentation, no jot or tittle added to the facts, as he believed them to be. And his opinion of those facts, I take it, was formed very deliberately. I heard him tell the story repeatedly, yet it never varied in the smallest particular; and I know it invariably impressed his hearers with a sense of horrible reality. Imagine that the ladies have left the room; three or four men are seated round the polished mahogany; my uncle, a white-haired, keen-eyed man of seventy, bids us draw our chairs nearer the fire, and, passing round a magnum of his fine old port, he thus continues the story, of which I have given the opening words, with that incisive Scotch accent, and in that measured phrase, which seems to weigh each word in the balance, and reject it if found wanting.

~   ~   ~   ~

Dunblane was an unpopular man. Men could not make him out. His manner was often disagreeable, and he was subject to moody fits, when he would speak to no one. He was capable of kind and generous acts, but implacable in his dislikes; and he never forgot an injury. I could manage him better than anyone, and he would generally stand the truth from me; but his rage was a terrible thing to witness. I have never seen anything like it. Men used to say, “Keep clear of Dunblane when the fit is on him; he will stick at nothing.”

The French Revolution was then at its height. Dunblane was a hot royalist, and used to be thrown into fresh transports of fury with the news of every act subversive of the king’s authority. One night a man, in my room, who professed Republican sentiments, defended the conduct of the Assembly in imprisoning the royal family. Dunblane got up and flung a bottle at his head. There was a fine row, and it was arranged that the two men must fight the next morning. I secretly gave notice to the authorities, however, who interfered, and some sort of peace was patched up; but Dunblane never spoke to his antagonist again as long as he was in the university. I mention this, as I happen to recall the circumstance, just to give you an idea of the man’s violence, and of the depth of his resentment.

I can remember, too, a conversation we had one day about marriage. He had been complaining of his poverty, but said that, nevertheless, he meant to marry early.

“You see, it is necessary that I should have an heir, lest the direct line become extinct. There is no one, after me.”

“Do nothing in a hurry,” I replied. “It would be a great misfortune, no doubt, that the title and estates should pass away to another branch of the family, but it would be a still greater one to have your whole life embittered by an unhappy marriage. You are young; you have life before you. Be quite sure it is for your happiness, ere you take such a step as this.”

His reply was very characteristic.

“Oh,” he said, “it is all very well for you to talk, who have plenty of money, and have no great name as an inheritance. We trace back our descent for six hundred years; it is a duty we owe to the country to keep up the family. If I was fortunate enough to be in your position, I should please myself. But, as it is, everything else is of secondary importance. My lord is always telling me so, and I suppose he is right. I must marry a woman with money, and I must have an heir. You don’t know,” he added, with the black look gathering on his brow, “how essential this is.”

I assured him that I fully recognised the obligations which a great name and title entail, but that I could not think that to contract a hasty, ill-considered marriage could ever answer in the long run.

“Ah!” he said. “Then you have never heard the old prophecy in the family:

“When five Dunblanes have had no son,

Then shall the line direct be run.

“My uncle is the fourth lord who has had no son. If he should survive my father, and that I should succeed him, I shall be the fifth. You see now how necessary it is I should marry early.”

“On account of a foolish distich!” I replied. His superstition almost amounted to an insanity; and I never would give in to it, though I confess that I have known more curious cases of such prophecies being fulfilled than any sceptical Englishman would believe. However, that has nothing to say to the matter in hand. Dunblane repeatedly referred to this prediction, which had evidently taken a hold upon his mind, not to be shaken by any words of mine. He would brood for hours over this and similar subjects. And among them, I have little doubt was one to which he never referred at that time, seeing that I treated his superstitions with unbecoming levity – a subject of which I had no knowledge for many years afterwards, but which was destined to have a fatal influence on his life.

In ’96 I left college, and was sent out to our branch house in Calcutta. I heard the following year of Dunblane’s marriage to a Miss Cameron, an orphan of good family, though not noble, said to possess both wealth and beauty; and I heard no more. He never wrote to me, nor did I expect it. Our lines of life were now quite different, and though I knew that he would always retain a friendly recollection of me, correspondence was another matter. I was a man of business, and engrossed in affairs in which he could take no interest; while I, on the other hand, knew nothing of the persons and the circumstances by which he was surrounded. I shall always regret that he did not write to me during those years; though probably no written words of mine could have been of any avail in arresting him: but I have occasionally found, in life, that the truth, though discarded at the time, will come back at some unexpected moment and give the devil the lie. Now the devil had it all his own way with Dunblane for years. His father, to whom I think he was really attached, was dead; his uncle, whom he disliked and feared, would not die. The uncle, I am told, proposed this marriage to him, and though Dunblane was indifferent – or more than indifferent – to the lady, he consented to marry her. This was the fatal error which nothing could retrieve. It was the first step downhill, after which the descent became more and more rapid every year.

In 1803 Lord Dunblane did, at last, die, and, a few months later, my own father’s death recalled me to Aberdeen, where I took his place as head of the house. One day, about a year after my return, George Pilson (you remember Pilson and Pilson, the attorneys? very respectable firm) was in my office, and chanced to speak of Dunblane Castle, where he had lately been. His father, I found out, was Lord Dunblane’s man of business; and I questioned George as to his lordship’s present condition and mode of life. His answer was far from satisfactory.

“His lordship’s strangeness, and his violent ebullitions of temper have increased very much upon him of late,” he said. “It is supposed that this is greatly owing to the fact that after nearly eight years of marriage there is no heir to the title. Then his wife is a person singularly unsuited to him in all ways. Her ladyship is handsome, but wanting in common sense, garrulous in the extreme, laughing immoderately in and out of season, and, if I may be allowed to express an opinion on such a point, deficient in the dignity befitting her station. These things are perpetual blisters, I fancy, to his lordship. Her ladyship, in a word, is what may be called a ‘provoking woman,’ and as his lordship is not the most patient of men you may guess the consequences.”

I replied that I was more sorry than surprised: from what I knew of Lord Dunblane I never expected that such a marriage – one purely of interest – could turn out well. “And yet,” I added, “if he had fallen into other hands, I think he might have become a very different man. There were germs of good in him.”

At this George Pilson remained silent for a few moments, a silence which I thought most eloquent. He then proceeded to speak of the castle, which he described as one of the finest monuments of the fifteenth century remaining in the country.

“His lordship is very justly proud of it,” he said, “though with his pride is mingled a certain superstitious awe, as, no doubt, you know? I dare say he has often spoken to you of the secret room in the castle?”

“No,” I replied, “I do not remember that he ever did. What is there special about this room?”

He replied, “No one knows exactly where it is except the owner, the heir, and one other person; who happens, at present, to be my father. The family superstition concerning this room is very strong, and I believe they shrink from speaking of it,”

“But what does it arise from?” I inquired.

He said, “The legend runs that some former Lord of Dunblane sold himself to the devil in this room; the plain English of which is, I imagine, that he committed some foul crime there. At all events, this room has remained shut up for centuries; and it was predicted by one of those sibyls, who were given to such utterances, that, if ever the secret were made known the ruin of the house would follow.”

“Why,” I exclaimed, “this is the second prophecy that has been made about the Dunblanes! One pays dearly for belonging to these great families if one is to be subject to all these superstitions. Do you know if the room is ever opened?”

“Yes, I believe so, once a year; when, if possible, the three who are in possession of the secret meet here. My father never speaks on the subject, of course, nor does Lord Dunblane.”

I asked who the heir-at-law was. He told me they had had difficulty in finding him out. He was in some office in London, and in very poor circumstances, being descended from a younger branch of the Dunblanes, who had gone to settle in England in the beginning of the last century.

After some further conversation, Pilson took his leave, and I thought very little more about Lord Dunblane and his affairs, having concerns of my own which fully occupied my thoughts at that time.

Some weeks later I received, to my surprise, a letter from Lord Dunblane, saying that he had just heard from his man of business, Mr. Pilson, that I was returned from India, and living in Aberdeen; and that it would give him great pleasure to see me again, if I would pay him a visit at Dunblane Castle. He named a day when he was expecting a party; but added that if this time was not convenient to me, I could write myself, and propose some later date. It would have been ungracious to have refused such an invitation. Indeed, I was fully sensible of the honour, though I anticipated but little pleasure from this visit, under the present circumstances. A press of business retained me in Aberdeen just then, but I promised to write, and I did write, some weeks later, to his lordship, proposing to accompany Mr. Pilson, who informed me that he was going to Dunblane Castle: for I reflected that as the stage would take me no further than Nairn, we could share a post-chaise together, which would lighten the cost of a journey, in which business had no part. His lordship replied, in a few lines, to say I should be welcome; and accordingly, on the tenth of April, 1804, Pilson and I left Aberdeen by the stage, which started at six a.m., and reached Dunblane Castle late that afternoon.

It was getting dusk as we drove up to this magnificent remnant of the feudal age – a pile which impressed one with a sense of the power which must have belonged to the Dunblanes in past ages, and heightened their claim to consideration, in my eyes at least, more than the finest modern palace could have done. It was the grandest specimen of this style of architecture I ever saw, of vast extent, its sky-outline bristling with pointed turrets, its grey walls crowning a steep height covered with venerable Scotch firs, a dry moat surrounding it, and a gateway leading into a courtyard, which occupied nearly an acre, and round which the castle was built.

Lord Dunblane met us in the hall. The nine years which had elapsed since we had parted had wrought changes in us both, no doubt; but in the man I saw before me I should scarcely have recognised my fellow-student had I met him in the streets of Aberdeen. He was grown very large, and on his face, which was lined far beyond his years, the hard, wild look which had been transient formerly, had settled down, apparently, into its habitual expression. He received me kindly, but there was no smile, as he shook my hand. The light had died out of the face, never to be rekindled. He told me I should have but a dull visit, he feared. “Had you come six weeks ago when I wanted you, you would have met a country gathering: not that I like that sort of thing: I hate it; but you and I were always very different, Carthews. Now you will find no one; and I have a good deal of business with Mr. Pilson, so that I must leave Lady Dunblane to entertain you.” I assured him that I should be perfectly happy, exploring the beauties of the park and adjoining forest, and begged him not to consider me for a moment. After that he led me upstairs to the drawing-room, where Lady Dunblane was seated alone.

The first impression produced on everyone by her ladyship’s beauty could not but be favourable. She was a brunette; tall, with lively eyes and brilliant teeth, which she showed a great deal when she laughed, and dark brown hair, cut short and dishevelled in loose waves over her head. Upon this occasion, however, I saw nothing but a curl or two; for she wore a species of helmet, much affected, as I afterwards learned, by women of condition, in that day, whose husbands commanded regiments of yeomanry, as did Lord Dunblane. Being the first headgear of the kind which I had seen, its singularity struck me; but her ladyship carried this curious erection of buckram, fur, and tinsel, with a grace which forbade a thought of ridicule. Her beautiful figure was set off by a spenser of scarlet cloth, and a tight-fitting skirt of some white material which appeared to have been damped, it clung so close to her person. It was evident that her ladyship was not neglectful of her appearance, nor unmindful of the impression she made upon even a humble individual like myself. She came forward and greeted me with infinite suavity, saying:

“It is amiable of you, Mr. Carthews, to come and take pity on our solitude. We see no one from one week’s end to another in this castle of Otranto (you have read Mr. Walpole’s romance?), where all is so gloomy and mysterious that, as I tell my lord, I am really alarmed sometimes at the sound of my own voice!”

“I wish that occurred rather oftener,” muttered his lordship. She continued, laughing, “Our only society are the ghosts. You don’t mind them, I hope? They are all of the oldest families, for we are mighty select here, you must know. If they visit you, you must esteem it a great honour, Mr. Carthews.”

I replied in the same strain, that I felt myself to be wholly unworthy of that honour; but that, if they came, I would try and receive them with becoming courtesy.

“Like my parrot,” cried her ladyship, laughing. “He and my spaniel sleep in my room; and sometimes, in the dead of night, he calls out, ‘Pray, come in, and take a chair!’ which startles me from my sleep, and frightens me out of my senses!”

His lordship said something about her having no senses to be frightened out of, I believe, and something about “brutes.” She caught up the word, with a laugh.

“Brutes? Oh, yes; one gets accustomed to the society of brutes of any sort, when one has nothing else all day.”

Such amenities passed between the two were of constant occurrence, I suppose, for they produced little effect beyond deepening the scowl on his lordship’s face. As to me, I felt very uncomfortable, and the charm of Lady Dunblane’s beauty had already melted away. Though not a stupid woman, I saw she was a very foolish one. How she dared to aggravate a man of such a temperament as her husband’s amazed me. It was just like a child handling fire. She rattled away and laughed all that evening with little intermission. Lord Dunblane scarcely opened his lips. Over the wine Pilson and I talked; but his lordship stared moodily at the fire, and said nothing. I began to think I had made a mistake in coming all the way from Aberdeen for this. To play the part of chorus to a matrimonial duet of the most discordant character was not pleasant; and if my former friend was so self-absorbed as to be unable to speak to me, the sooner I left him the better. I suppose something of this sort struck him, for he said, as he wished me good night, “You must not mind my silence and absence of mind, Carthews. I am very glad to see you here; but my present position gives me many anxieties. I am irritated and worried until, by Heaven! I feel at times as if I should go mad.”

Well, I went to bed, and slept soundly. I never was an imaginative man, you see, or the room I was in might have conjured up some of those spiritual visitants her ladyship had joked about, evidently to her lord’s annoyance. Not that it was any worse than the other rooms in the castle. I take it they were all oak-panelled, with hideous family portraits grinning from the wall upon the occupants of the vast draperied beds, in one of which I slept without waking, until the servant brought in my hot water for shaving. It was a bright morning, and at breakfast I found my host in better spirits than he had seemed the previous evening. I could not help speculating whether this could be in consequence of Lady Dunblane’s absence. She never came down to breakfast, I found. Her maid, a most formidable-looking female, with red hair, and the muscles of a gillie, came in, I remember, with a tray, and took her ladyship’s chocolate up to her. This person, I was afterwards told, had been born on the estate, and was devoted to Dunblane. She had been ill spoken of as a girl; but Dunblane’s mother had befriended and made this Elspie her body servant, and Dunblane had insisted, when he married, on her filling the same office to his wife, much to that lady’s annoyance, who wished for a modish waiting-woman from Edinburgh or London. So much for this ill-favoured specimen of her sex, to whom I never spoke in my life, but who impressed me very unfavourably whenever I saw her.

After breakfast his lordship took me over the castle, and gave me all the historical associations connected with it, showing me, with great pride, the bed in which Queen Mary had slept, a yew tree said to have been planted by Robert Bruce, and the suit of armour borne by Dunblane of Dunblane at the battle of Bannockburn. He dilated on the glories of his house with more animation than I had yet observed: then suddenly the cloud came over him.

“And to think,” he said, “that all this must pass into another line – into hands that have been debased by trade” (which was not polite to me; but he entirely forgot my presence for the moment, I am sure); “to think that people who have hardly a drop of old blood in their veins, who have intermarried for generations with Smiths and Browns, and plebeian names of that kind, should come to inherit this, which they have no feeling for, no pride in – by God, it is enough to wring one’s heart!”

And this was the way he went on, from time to time, bursting out in imprecations on his fate in having no heir, and upon the evil star which had risen over his house. It was in vain that I pointed out that he was young still, and in good health, and must not abandon hope. He shook his head gloomily. “The prophecy is against me: it is no use.

When five Dunblanes have had no son,

Then shall the line direct be run.

It is clear enough, is it not? I am doomed. I should have known it. When did such a prophecy ever come wrong? What a cursed fool I was to marry!”

So I thought; to marry, that is to say, as he had done; but I abstained from saying so. By-and-by his lordship took Mr. Pilson to his study, where they were engaged for some hours over business; and I was left alone to ramble about the castle, inside and out, as I would.

Remembering the story I had heard of a secret room, I counted all the windows outside, and then, returning to the castle, traversed every passage, mounted every turret, and opened every door I could, to see if the number of windows corresponded. With the help of the serving man whom I met on the stairs, and who knew all the rooms in the castle, he said, I accounted for each window satisfactorily. And after two hours’ diligent endeavour to solve this mystery, I arrived at the conclusion that there could be no room – it was all humbug. I was at a time of life, you see, when over-confidence in one’s own powers is apt to lead one to very false conclusions.

At luncheon Lady Dunblane appeared, and an incident, which left a painful impression on my mind, took place on that occasion. Dunblane had a peculiar aversion to her ladyship’s spaniel. Strict orders were given that he was to be confined to her ladyship’s own suite of rooms, and on no account to be allowed beyond them. But some door had inadvertently been left open, and, while we were at luncheon, the spaniel ran barking into the room, round and round the table, and finally straight between his lordship’s legs, who was at that moment smarting under one of his wife’s sallies. He roared out in a voice of thunder:

“How often have I told you, ma’am, to keep that infernal little beast in your own room?” and he kicked out so viciously, that he sent the poor animal spinning along the oak floor to the further end of the room, where he lay howling. His mistress ran up, and seized him in her arms; the creature’s leg was broken. Her ladyship shrieked, and stamped, and my lord swore; and, thoroughly sickened with the whole scene, I rose and left the room. Pilson joined me in the hall.

“What is to be the end of all this?” I said to him.

His answer was, “I am afraid to think.”

“Lord Dunblane,” I said, “seems to me to be losing all self-restraint. If he goes on thus, what will become of him?”

Pilson looked round him, then leaned forward and whispered, “He will end his days in a madhouse.” Dunblane shut himself into his room for the rest of the afternoon. By-and-by her ladyship drove out in her coach and four, and carried her dog in her arms to a veterinary surgeon some miles off. At dinner she appeared in as brilliant spirits as ever. How much of this was real I cannot say; nor, supposing her hilarity to be assumed, whether it was done for the purpose of aggravating her lord. It certainly succeeded, if so. His moroseness was enlivened by several ferocious sallies. The conversation turned upon France, I remember, and on the probabilities of the First Consul’s being made emperor, a subject that engrossed all minds just then.

“How I admire that little man!” exclaimed her ladyship. “How much greater to found a dynasty, as he is doing, than to inherit all the crowns in Europe! I begin to wish I was a Frenchwoman!”

“I begin to wish you were!” cried my lord. “There is not another British peeress who would disgrace herself by uttering such a sentiment.”

She laughed aloud, and replied, “Oh! because they are less frank than I am. All women admire Le Petit Caporal in their hearts. What fun it will be if he comes over here, and conquers us! It will be much nicer being the subjects of a great hero, instead of the subjects of a mad old king who—”

“Hold your tongue, ma’am!” shouted Dunblane, bringing his fist down upon the table with a force which made the glasses clatter: “or, if you will talk your low treasonous rubbish, go and talk it in the kitchen. You shall not talk it here!”

She only laughed in reply. She certainly seemed to take a delight in provoking him; and, as she knew his sensitive points, this was not difficult. I found an opportunity, over a game of cribbage, later in the evening, of asking her why she acted thus. No doubt this was somewhat of a liberty, considering our short acquaintance; but I felt I could not remain longer in the house without trying to amend matters.

“Oh!” she said, “anything for a little excitement in this horridly monotonous life. I should die of ennui if it wasn’t for the tiffs with my lord.”

I told her she did not know what harm she was doing; and I asked if she never felt afraid of irritating a man so passionate as his lordship.

“Bless you, no,” was her reply. “It is he who is afraid, really, of me – of my tongue, you see. Ha, ha! No one ever answered him before; his mother, his servants, his friends, – why, you yourself, I daresay, you never contradicted him? Now, I always do, and I always say just what I like. He hates me, of course, but he is afraid of me, Mr. Carthews. Ha, ha, ha!”

Good heavens! I thought to myself, and these two people are tied to each other for life. Both have a fair chance of living for the next forty years. What a prospect! Even before we separated for the night she had stung him with another of her irritating speeches. There had been some talk of the steward’s boy, who had tumbled from a tree, and had broken his leg…. “Children are a horrid bore,” said Lady Dunblane. “Thank Heaven, I have no brat to be tumbling from trees, and worrying one’s life out.”

I dare say she did not mean it. It is hardly possible that, under the circumstances, she should not have wished for a child. The devil was in the woman, constantly prompting something to aggravate her husband. His back was towards me, on this occasion, and he said nothing, so I could only judge of the effect produced upon him by his instantly lighting a chamber candlestick and leaving the room. We saw him no more that night.

The next day and the day following only further developed the hopeless condition of affairs between Lord and Lady Dunblane. I tried once to speak to him on the subject, but I found it was in vain. An ineradicable hatred of his wife had grown up in him, which he did not attempt to conceal. When alone with him, he would occasionally converse; in her presence he seemed to be perpetually on the lookout for what might drop from her irrepressible tongue. The fourth day of my stay at the castle – the day before I was obliged to return to Aberdeen – arrived, and with it came a guest, who, although expected, was evidently anything but welcome. This was Mr. James Dunblane, the heir-at-law, who had only lately been traced, and between whom and Lord Dunblane certain communications had passed by letter. This was his first visit to the castle – a visit which, as I afterwards learned, was a matter almost of necessity. He seemed to feel the awkwardness of his position. I do not remember much about the young man, except that he was plain in person, and very quiet. Lord Dunblane received him coldly, but politely. Lady Dunblane, after the usual fashion, plunged at once into the subject of all others his lordship shrunk from any notice of.

“So you are come, as heir-at-law, to be let into the secret of this famous room, are you? Why, it is as bad as being made a freemason…! Can you keep a secret, Mr. Dunblane? because, if not, untold misfortunes are to befall us.” And the laugh with which she concluded sounded to me like the screech of an owl forboding evil. Lord Dunblane looked as if he could have stabbed her, but he only muttered an oath under his breath, and clenched his fist – a movement which no one saw but myself.

Every incident of that evening is fresh in my recollection. I remember how she returned again and again to that subject, as though it had a fatal fascination for her, but more likely, I fear, because she saw that her husband writhed under it. She ridiculed the prophecy, and laughed at all those superstitions, which his lordship cherished as his religion. It was distressing to watch him the while. He was far quieter than usual, scarcely spoke, but sat, his arms crossed, staring at the fire, with eyes which burnt, themselves, like coals, and when he swore, which he did once or twice, it was in a suppressed voice, contrasting strangely with his usual violence. But there was a vibration in the tone which showed how strongly he was stirred.

At last, it was late in the evening, and we were sitting round her ladyship’s tea-table, when she committed her crowning act of folly by offering to lay a wager with anyone that she would find out the secret room herself. I need hardly say no one accepted the challenge. But she was not to be discouraged. She had seen her husband’s face go white, and the look which he had shot at her gave a zest to her audacious scheme. She repeated her declaration that she would penetrate this wonderful mystery. Such things were well enough to frighten old women with in the middle ages, but how anyone could believe in predictions and other rubbish of this kind in the present day passed her comprehension. For her part she had no faith in anything of the kind, and to prove what folly it was, she should leave no stone unturned to discover this room about which such a fuss was made: after which the secret, she declared, should remain one no longer. I tried to stop her; Pilson tried to stop her: it was all no use. She had got the bit between her teeth, so to speak, and away she went, partly to show off, and partly out of spite, regardless what she said, provided it produced an effect and inflamed my lord yet more. She pictured, laughingly, the cobwebbed condition of the room, and how she would turn in the housemaid with broom and duster; after which she would give an evening party there, and invite all the ghosts to come, if they chose – “indeed the black gentleman himself!” … Poor woman, she little knew what she was invoking.

No one laughed. Even the heir, who, being shy, always smiled when required, looked too stupefied to comply with the demand on this occasion. To glance at Lord Dunblane’s face was enough to check any inclination to hilarity. I have never forgotten its expression. I had witnessed his ungovernable passion scores of times, prompting him to sudden acts of violence. But now, there was a certain admixture of fear (she had divined rightly, I saw, when she said he was afraid of her) with the rage which trembled through his whole frame, the like of which I have never beheld but once since in my life. I saw a beast-tamer enter the hyenas’ den at the show last year. The aspect of their malignant fury cowed by terror, but watching for its opportunity to burst forth, the savage hissing wherewith they received the lash and showed their fangs, recalled to me Dunblane’s demeanour as he listened to his wife…. At last, I could stand it no longer, and made up my mind to tell a lie.

“Lady Dunblane,” I said, “like most Scotchmen, I am a trifle superstitious. This is my last night under your hospitable roof, and I am sure you would not willingly disturb its rest. You are so happily constituted as to be above fear of any kind. Others are weaker. Let me earnestly advise you to leave all the superstitions connected with Dunblane Castle alone. Believe me, ‘there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your ladyship’s philosophy.’”

She burst out a-laughing, as usual. “Oh, Mr. Carthews, I’m ashamed of you. But I see what it is. You are afraid, not of the ghosts and the predictions, but of my lord. Well, I shall see you in May, when I pass through Aberdeen on my way south, and I shall tell you all about it then; for, depend upon it, I shall have found out the secret by that time.”

And so, in the insolence of youth and high spirits and an indomitable will, she bade me good-night, poor woman, and I never saw her again.

Dunblane had left the room. Whether it was prearranged that Pilson and the young heir were to join him in his study, and that later in the night the door of the secret room should be unclosed, I know not. I am inclined, from one or two circumstances, to think that it was so; but, again, there are other things which have made me doubt it. At all events, when we three bade each other good-night, neither Pilson nor young Dunblane dropped anything which should lead me to suppose they were not going straight to their own rooms. They were not to leave the castle till the day after me. It was quite possible, therefore, that the chamber was to be unlocked after my departure.

CHAPTER II

I slept soundly during the first part of the night. But about three o’clock I woke suddenly – I might almost say, I started from my sleep. I had not been dreaming; I was not conscious of having heard any noise; but my sleep, somehow or other, was broken suddenly, and I sat up in my bed with a sense of undefined alarm. I listened: all was still: the soughing of the wind among the Scotch firs below the rampart-wall was the only thing I heard. But, feeling restless, I jumped out of bed, went to the window and opened it. There was no moon, but it was a light night. I could distinguish the ivy on the wall beneath; the little door in the angle of the turret opposite, and the dusky forms of the owls that flew past the window. Almost immediately beneath it was a curious old well said to be of wonderful depth, but long since unused. If one dropped a stone in there an interval which seemed like half a minute elapsed before a faint splash told that it had reached the bottom.

I had been at the window a few minutes when the door in the turret opposite opened, with a slight grating sound which attracted my attention. A figure glided forth, and ran swiftly towards the well. I distinguished that it was a woman by the long drapery, and as she came under the window I could just make out that she carried some sort of vessel in her hand. Whatever it was she threw it in, and waited, leaning over the side, until she caught the distant thud of the object as it met the water. Then she returned rather more leisurely than she had come, the door was shut, and, though I waited at the window a full hour, I saw and heard no more.

I do not know that at any other place, at any other time, this circumstance would have aroused my curiosity. As it was, I could not get to sleep again for thinking of it, and speculating what could have been the motive that induced any female of the establishment to rise in the dead of night in order to cast something into the well.

I had to be stirring very early, and I was at my solitary breakfast when Lord Dunblane entered. He looked ghastly, so much so, that I could not help asking if he was ill. He turned fiercely round upon me, demanding why I asked.

“Because you look as if you had not slept,” I said.

“And you? Pray how did you sleep?” he inquired, knitting his brows. “You were not disturbed? You had no nightmare after Lady Dunblane’s conversation last night?”

I had resolved to say nothing of what I had seen, and replied that I had rested pretty well. I was then proceeding to express my thanks to him for his hospitality, when he interrupted me. “If you wish to show yourself a friend, say as little as possible about your visit here to anyone. I am going abroad at once. I have made up my mind that Lady Dunblane can live here no longer. You have heard enough to know how she hates the place – and it disagrees with her, moreover. She has had several epileptic attacks – a severe one this very night; it is evident that the climate does not suit her, and I am recommended to take her to Italy. My lady and I can never agree here. She does all she can to goad me to madness – and perhaps she has succeeded: who can say? People will gossip, Carthews, when we are gone. Prove yourself a friend, and say nothing about our quarrels while you have been here.”

I was a good deal surprised at the tenor of this speech, but thought it reasonable upon the whole. There was something in his eye, nevertheless, which disquieted me. Coupling it with Pilson’s words, two days previously, and with my own observations, I could not avoid the conviction that the fate to which he himself had just now alluded was imminent. It might be warded off, perhaps, by change of scene, and the removal of the causes of irritation; but it was impossible to look at him steadily, and to doubt that incipient insanity was there. I begged him to act upon his determination of going abroad without loss of time; and then, shaking his hand, I stepped into the chaise, and drove off.

Well, I returned to Aberdeen; and some days after this Pilson called on me. I asked what news he brought of Lord and Lady Dunblane.

“They are gone abroad. I suppose it is the best thing he could do. Her ladyship had a succession of such severe fits that she was unable to leave her room, or to see anyone but her maid after you left. I did see her once at the window, and her look quite alarmed me. His lordship was much calmer, but he scarcely spoke. His wife’s sudden prostration, after all their violent bickerings, affected him a good deal. He is in a bad way, I think, Carthews. I mean that I am very much afraid” – and he pointed significantly to his head.

I told him that I fully shared his apprehensions, and then asked him more particularly to describe the change in Lady Dunblane’s appearance.

“The morning I left I was walking round the rampart when I heard one of the windows rattle. I looked up, and there was Lady Dunblane, her head pressed against the panes, and with such a terrible expression of agony in her face as I shall never forget. She kept opening her mouth, and making the most hideous grimaces at me, so that it was clear that she was not quite in her right senses at the moment. She disappeared suddenly.”

“Did you ever see any indication of a tendency to such a malady in her ladyship?” I asked.

“No. I cannot say I ever did,” he replied.

“Was no doctor sent for?”

“Yes, the country apothecary came once.”

“And what did he say? Did you speak to him?”

“Yes. I saw him in the hall as he was stepping into his buggy. I asked how he found her ladyship. He said she was much prostrated by the violence of the attack, but he seemed a puzzle-headed fellow. No doubt he was awed by the honour of being sent for to the castle; for I could not get much out of him. He seemed dazed; but muttered something about change being good for her ladyship.”

“And who attended her during these attacks?” I inquired.

“No one but his lordship and the maid Elspie. My lord told me that his wife was very violent; but he would not suffer any of the men to be sent for, to hold her. He and Elspie, who is a very powerful woman, managed her between them. He said that he had found it necessary to tie her hands. I do not envy him his journey. They left in the family coach an hour after our departure, and were to travel night and day to Leith, where they took ship for Holland.”

He then went on to say that the young heir-at-law had returned to London much depressed with his visit, and that the necessary formalities having now been gone through (which I understand to mean that the secret of the haunted room had been duly communicated to him), Mr. Dunblane would in all probability never see the castle again during my lord’s lifetime.

I seldom saw Pilson for some time after this conversation; when I did, he told me what little he knew of the Dunblanes; but months often elapsed without his having any direct communication with my lord, and even then the letters he received were mere bald statements and inquiries, exclusively upon matters of business. These, however, were sufficient to show that his mind had not given way; they were lucid and perspicuous in every detail. There was never any mention of her ladyship, for the obvious reason, as it transpired after a while, that she and my lord were separated. He was travelling now in Italy, now in Hungary, now in the East, while she remained – no one knew exactly where – in Switzerland.

At the end of the third year he returned to Dunblane, and shut himself up there, refusing to see any of the neighbours who called. In reply to every inquiry for her ladyship (more especially those which a distant cousin, her only relation, made about this time), he stated that her ladyship’s health obliged her to remain on the Continent; her mind had been much weakened by continued epileptic attacks, and she was unequal to correspondence. He stated, further, that she was under excellent medical care, and that though, by reason of the excitement under which she sometimes laboured, it was not deemed advisable that he should visit her often, he made a point of doing so once a year.

This statement seems to have been considered satisfactory. Lady Dunblane’s friends – and she had very few – were not suspicious, and the world at large troubled itself but little with the domestic concerns of a couple who had lived in isolated grandeur, with rare exceptions, since his lordship’s accession to the title. Pilson went twice to the castle, during that year, and, as far as I know, he was the only guest. He gave a gloomy picture of the solitary man shut up in that big place. We both avoided all mention of her ladyship’s name; but I now know that he was no easier than I was on that head.

It was towards the close of 1808 that he called on me one morning, at an unusually early hour. His face, his whole manner, betokened that my grave, quiet friend was unusually perturbed. He looked round the room – this very room where we are sitting – drew his chair close to mine, and said in a whisper:

“Carthews, I have come to you in a very distressing emergency. I hardly know whether I am justified in taking this step, but I do know that I can depend on you, and you may materially help me in a most painful and difficult situation.”

Without more ado, he then proceeded to say that a young Frenchmen, who gave his name as Jean Marcel, had called upon him the previous night, stating that he had lately come from Geneva, where he was in a wine merchant’s office, and had been sent on business to Aberdeen. He was the bearer of a small crumpled note, addressed in nearly illegible characters, to M. Pilson, Attorney, Aberdeen. He stated that he had come by it thus. Shortly before leaving Geneva, it had been his duty to inspect the “recolte” of various vineyards: among them one belonging to the Château d’Osman some miles distant. The house itself was tenanted by an English lady, who was said to be mad or imbecile. At all events she was never heard to speak, and was closely watched by her attendants night and day. She walked on a terrace overlooking the vineyard, but it was never out of sight of a gaunt woman, who was, no doubt, her keeper. The intendant of the estate, who told Jean Marcel these particulars, walked through the vineyard with him, when they saw the unhappy lady on the terrace above. Her appearance had much interested Marcel. He described her as a handsome woman, but with a fixed, woe-begone expression of face, and wearing a black cloak, which entirely concealed her person. In the course of Marcel’s inspection, they stood for some time just under the terrace wall, and he spoke to the intendant of his approaching voyage to Aberdeen. There was no doubt but that he was overheard by the lady on the terrace. She disappeared, but a quarter of an hour later, while they were still near the wall, the two men heard the sound of a running footstep upon the terrace, followed by a plaintive moaning, like that of a wounded bird. They looked up, and there she stood, glancing round with an expression of terror to see if she was followed, and of earnest supplication towards the two men beneath. She opened her mouth wide – a clear proof, the intendant seemed to think, of the poor creature’s imbecility – then raised both arms up high, when, to his horror, he perceived that she had lost her right hand. With her left, she then suddenly dropped over the wall a paper with a stone inside, and had scarcely done this, when her gaunt attendant appeared upon the terrace. The poor lady’s whole demeanour changed; the old fixed look returned, and she began once more, with slow uncertain steps, to pace the terrace. To gratify her, Marcel picked up the paper, and pocketed it, as he walked away. As soon as he was out of sight he examined it.

Outside was scrawled, “Pour l’amour de Dieu remettez cette lettre a son adresse.” Within was the note addressed to Pilson. The intendant laughed at the affair, and tried to persuade Marcel to tear up the note. “All mad people imagine themselves to be sane, and this one no doubt wants to persuade her friends that she is unjustly confined; but you need only look at her to see that she is a lunatic.”

Marcel admitted the probability of this, but he could not bring himself to destroy the paper. Whether she was mad or not, the condition of this maimed unhappy creature had aroused his compassion so deeply, that he declared the first thing he would do on arriving at Aberdeen would be to find out the person to whom this note was addressed. And he had done so.

When he had finished this strange narrative, Pilson laid before me a scrap of paper evidently the blank page torn out of the end of a book on which was scrawled:

“Help! for God’s sake, help! before they kill me. Oh, save me, Mr. Pilson, save me, as you hope to be saved hereafter. E. Dunblane.”

We looked at each other for some minutes without speaking. At last Pilson said:

“If I consulted my own interest, I should remain silent, or simply enclose these lines to his lordship. Her ladyship’s condition, no doubt, justifies any steps that have been taken. I cannot suspect my lord; and if he discovers that I have interfered in his domestic concerns, he will certainly take the management of his affairs out of my hands. But, on the other hand, does not humanity call for some investigation into this? I could not die at peace, remembering that I had turned a deaf ear to such a cry; but I am puzzled what to do, Mr. Carthews. It has occurred to me that you may have business connections with Geneva, and might, perhaps, make inquiries which would not compromise you as they would me.”

In other words, Pilson was anxious to ease his conscience at as little risk to himself as might be. I did not blame him; my interest was too deeply stirred for me not to follow up the inquiry with the keenest avidity. But then, as Pilson had hinted, it is true that I had nothing to lose. I promised him that I would write that very day to a correspondent at Geneva, and desire him to leave no stone unturned towards discovering the truth.

I had to wait some weeks for the answer. The commission was one the execution of which was beset with difficulties. The village pasteur, the doctor, the intendant of the vineyards, and all the neighbours were applied to, but little additional information could be gathered. At last the maire of the district was induced to investigate the case, upon representations being made to him that there existed suspicions as to the treatment which the incarcerated lady – whether insane or only imbecile – met with. After a vigorous resistance they forced an entry into the château. The sight that met them was heart-rending. The poor creature lay dying upon her bed, and but for this intervention would have been denied the last consolations of religion. When the pasteur knelt down, however, and questioned her, she only shook her head and moaned. Then, with an effort, she opened her mouth wide, and, to their horror, they perceived that she had no tongue.

They implored her to write down the name of the perpetrator of this barbarous crime. But either she had no strength, or else she was praying, poor soul, for grace to forgive her persecutors, rather than for retribution. She listened devoutly to the good pasteur’s prayers, and a glorious smile lighted up her tear-worn eyes as the death-film gathered over them. So the unhappy lady passed away.

The woman Elspie was, of course, seized, and subjected to a rigorous cross-examination. She declared that the lady who was just dead had been thus mutilated by her husband one night when goaded into a state of insane rage by his wife’s discovery of a secret, to which he attached a superstitious importance, and which she threatened to proclaim to all the world. In the struggle to defend herself, her right wrist was also severed. The woman maintained that her mistress had ever since been subject to violent fits of delirium, necessitating restraint. This I do not believe; there is no proof of it whatever.

How far the rest of her story was true, it was impossible to say, and will never now be known. There were probabilities in favour of it; but, on the other hand, might not this wretch herself have been the instrument? I did not forget that I had seen her (as I have now no sort of doubt) on that fatal night stealing out to throw something into the well. Of her complicity, at all events, there was ample proof, since from the first she was the attendant upon her ill-fated mistress. But the hand of justice, for all that, was stayed.

The very same day that I received the letter containing the foregoing particulars, and while Pilson and I were deliberating what steps must now be taken, the news of an appalling catastrophe, which had happened thirty-six hours previously, reached us. Lord Dunblane had been burnt in his bed, and the greater part of the castle destroyed. How the fire originated was never known, but it broke out from his lordship’s room in the dead of night, and three sides of the quadrangle were burnt to the ground before the flames could be got under. The lovers of coincidences tried afterwards to make out that Lord Dunblane and his wife died the same night; the superstitions even fabricated a theory that, struck with remorse, upon learning, by second sight, of his wife’s death, he had himself fired the castle, and resolutely perished in the flames. But all this is purely imaginary. It is sufficiently remarkable that these deaths should have been so near one another; but Lady Dunblane died at least five days before her husband; and as to the supposition of his lordship’s self-destruction, the only ground for it was his strange mental condition, which was no worse than it had been for the last four years.

The woman Elspie was set at large by the authorities at Geneva, no one coming forward as her accuser. Mr. Pilson thought, and I believe he was right, that now both Lord and Lady Dunblane were dead it was better this terrible story should not be made public. It oozed out, in the course of time, as almost all such scandals do, but not through me. It was only when I found that all sorts of false or garbled versions of the circumstances were current in society that I ever mentioned what I knew, and that was years afterwards, when, in default of heirs, the title of Dunblane had become extinct.

“All The Year Round” magazine, 20 and 27 Nov. 1869

THE CHILD THAT WENT WITH THE FAIRIES

(1870)

Eastward of the old city of Limerick, about ten Irish miles under the range of mountains known as the Slieveelim hills, famous as having afforded Sarsfield a shelter among their rocks and hollows, when he crossed them in his gallant descent upon the cannon and ammunition of King William, on its way to the beleaguering army, there runs a very old and narrow road. It connects the Limerick road to Tipperary with the old road from Limerick to Dublin, and runs by bog and pasture, hill and hollow, straw-thatched village, and roofless castle, not far from twenty miles.

Skirting the heathy mountains of which I have spoken, at one part it becomes singularly lonely. For more than three Irish miles it traverses a deserted country. A wide, black bog, level as a lake, skirted with copse, spreads at the left, as you journey northward, and the long and irregular line of mountain rises at the right, clothed in heath, broken with lines of grey rock that resemble the bold and irregular outlines of fortifications, and riven with many a gully, expanding here and there into rocky and wooded glens, which open as they approach the road.

A scanty pasturage, on which browsed a few scattered sheep or kine, skirts this solitary road for some miles, and under shelter of a hillock, and of two or three great ash-trees, stood, not many years ago, the little thatched cabin of a widow named Mary Ryan.

Poor was this widow in a land of poverty. The thatch had acquired the grey tint and sunken outlines, that show how the alternations of rain and sun have told upon that perishable shelter.

But whatever other dangers threatened, there was one well provided against by the care of other times. Round the cabin stood half a dozen mountain ashes, as the rowans, inimical to witches, are there called. On the worn planks of the door were nailed two horseshoes, and over the lintel and spreading along the thatch, grew, luxuriant, patches of that ancient cure for many maladies, and prophylactic against the machinations of the evil one, the house-leek. Descending into the doorway, in the chiaroscuro of the interior, when your eye grew sufficiently accustomed to that dim light, you might discover, hanging at the head of the widow’s wooden-roofed bed, her beads and a phial of holy water.

Here certainly were defences and bulwarks against the intrusion of that unearthly and evil power, of whose vicinity this solitary family were constantly reminded by the outline of Lisnavoura, that lonely hill-haunt of the “Good people,” as the fairies are called euphemistically, whose strangely dome-like summit rose not half a mile away, looking like an outwork of the long line of mountain that sweeps by it.

It was at the fall of the leaf, and an autumnal sunset threw the lengthening shadow of haunted Lisnavoura, close in front of the solitary little cabin, over the undulating slopes and sides of Slieveelim. The birds were singing among the branches in the thinning leaves of the melancholy ash-trees that grew at the roadside in front of the door. The widow’s three younger children were playing on the road, and their voices mingled with the evening song of the birds. Their elder sister, Nell, was “within in the house,” as their phrase is, seeing after the boiling of the potatoes for supper.

Their mother had gone down to the bog, to carry up a hamper of turf on her back. It is, or was at least, a charitable custom – and if not disused, long may it continue – for the wealthier people when cutting their turf and stacking it in the bog, to make a smaller stack for the behoof of the poor, who were welcome to take from it so long as it lasted, and thus the potato pot was kept boiling, and the hearth warm that would have been cold enough but for that good-natured bounty, through wintry months.

Moll Ryan trudged up the steep “bohereen” whose banks were overgrown with thorn and brambles, and stooping under her burden, re-entered her door, where her dark-haired daughter Nell met her with a welcome, and relieved her of her hamper.

Moll Ryan looked round with a sigh of relief, and drying her forehead, uttered the Munster ejaculation:

“Eiah, wisha! It’s tired I am with it, God bless it. And where’s the craythurs, Nell?”

“Playin’ out on the road, mother; didn’t ye see them and you comin’ up?”

“No; there was no one before me on the road,” she said, uneasily; “not a soul, Nell; and why didn’t ye keep an eye on them?”

“Well, they’re in the haggard, playin’ there, or round by the back o’ the house. Will I call them in?”

“Do so, good girl, in the name o’ God. The hens is comin’ home, see, and the sun was just down over Knockdoulah, an’ I comin’ up.”

So out ran tall, dark-haired Nell, and standing on the road, looked up and down it; but not a sign of her two little brothers, Con and Bill, or her little sister, Peg, could she see. She called them; but no answer came from the little haggard, fenced with straggling bushes. She listened, but the sound of their voices was missing. Over the stile, and behind the house she ran – but there all was silent and deserted.

She looked down toward the bog, as far as she could see; but they did not appear. Again she listened – but in vain. At first she had felt angry, but now a different feeling overcame her, and she grew pale. With an undefined boding she looked toward the heathy boss of Lisnavoura, now darkening into the deepest purple against the flaming sky of sunset.

Again she listened with a sinking heart, and heard nothing but the farewell twitter and whistle of the birds in the bushes around. How many stories had she listened to by the winter hearth, of children stolen by the fairies, at nightfall, in lonely places! With this fear she knew her mother was haunted.

No one in the country round gathered her little flock about her so early as this frightened widow, and no door “in the seven parishes” was barred so early.

Sufficiently fearful, as all young people in that part of the world are of such dreaded and subtle agents, Nell was even more than usually afraid of them, for her terrors were infected and redoubled by her mother’s. She was looking towards Lisnavoura in a trance of fear, and crossed herself again and again, and whispered prayer after prayer. She was interrupted by her mother’s voice on the road calling her loudly. She answered, and ran round to the front of the cabin, where she found her standing.

“And where in the world’s the craythurs – did ye see sight o’ them anywhere?” cried Mrs. Ryan, as the girl came over the stile.

“Arrah! mother, ’tis only what they’re run down the road a bit. We’ll see them this minute coming back. It’s like goats they are, climbin’ here and runnin’ there; an’ if I had them here, in my hand, maybe I wouldn’t give them a hiding all round.”

“May the Lord forgive you, Nell! the childhers gone. They’re took, and not a soul near us, and Father Tom three miles away! And what’ll I do, or who’s to help us this night? Oh, wirristhru, wirristhru! The craythurs is gone!”

“Whisht, mother, be aisy; don’t ye see them comin’ up.”

And then she shouted in menacing accents, waving her arm, and beckoning the children, who were seen approaching on the road, which some little way off made a slight dip, which had concealed them. They were approaching from the westward, and from the direction of the dreaded hill of Lisnavoura.

But there were only two of the children, and one of them, the little girl, was crying. Their mother and sister hurried forward to meet them, more alarmed than ever.

“Where is Billy – where is he?” cried the mother, nearly breathless, so soon as she was within hearing.

“He’s gone – they took him away; but they said he’ll come back again,” answered little Con, with the dark brown hair.

“He’s gone away with the grand ladies,” blubbered the little girl.

“What ladies – where? Oh, Leum, asthora! My darlin’, are you gone away at last? Where is he? Who took him? What ladies are you talkin’ about? What way did he go?” she cried in distraction.

“I couldn’t see where he went, mother; ’twas like as if he was going to Lisnavoura.”

With a wild exclamation the distracted woman ran on towards the hill alone, clapping her hands, and crying aloud the name of her lost child.

Scared and horrified, Nell, not daring to follow, gazed after her, and burst into tears; and the other children raised high their lamentations in shrill rivalry.

Twilight was deepening. It was long past the time when they were usually barred securely within their habitation. Nell led the younger children into the cabin, and made them sit down by the turf fire, while she stood in the open door, watching in great fear for the return of her mother.

After a long while they did see their mother return. She came in and sat down by the fire, and cried as if her heart would break.

“Will I bar the doore, mother?” asked Nell.

“Aye, do – didn’t I lose enough, this night, without lavin’ the doore open, for more o’ yez to go; but first take an’ sprinkle a dust o’ the holy waters over ye, acushla, and bring it here till I throw a taste iv it over myself and the craythurs; an’ I wondher, Nell, you’d forget to do the like yourself, lettin’ the craythurs out so near nightfall. Come here and sit on my knees, asthora, come to me, mavourneen, and hould me fast, in the name o’ God, and I’ll hould you fast that none can take yez from me, and tell me all about it, and what it was – the Lord between us and harm – an’ how it happened, and who was in it.”

And the door being barred, the two children, sometimes speaking together, often interrupting one another, often interrupted by their mother, managed to tell this strange story, which I had better relate connectedly and in my own language.

The Widow Ryan’s three children were playing, as I have said, upon the narrow old road in front of her door. Little Bill or Leum, about five years old, with golden hair and large blue eyes, was a very pretty boy, with all the clear tints of healthy childhood, and that gaze of earnest simplicity which belongs not to town children of the same age. His little sister Peg, about a year elder, and his brother Con, a little more than a year elder than she, made up the little group.

Under the great old ash-trees, whose last leaves were falling at their feet, in the light of an October sunset, they were playing with the hilarity and eagerness of rustic children, clamouring together, and their faces were turned toward the west and storied hill of Lisnavoura.

Suddenly a startling voice with a screech called to them from behind, ordering them to get out of the way, and turning, they saw a sight, such as they never beheld before. It was a carriage drawn by four horses that were pawing and snorting, in impatience, as if just pulled up. The children were almost under their feet, and scrambled to the side of the road next their own door.

This carriage and all its appointments were old-fashioned and gorgeous, and presented to the children, who had never seen anything finer than a turf car, and once, an old chaise that passed that way from Killaloe, a spectacle perfectly dazzling.

Here was antique splendour. The harness and trappings were scarlet, and blazing with gold. The horses were huge, and snow white, with great manes, that as they tossed and shook them in the air, seemed to stream and float sometimes longer and sometimes shorter, like so much smoke their tails were long, and tied up in bows of broad scarlet and gold ribbon. The coach itself was glowing with colours, gilded and emblazoned. There were footmen in gay liveries, and three-cocked hats, like the coachman’s; but he had a great wig, like a judge’s, and their hair was frizzed out and powdered, and a long thick “pigtail,” with a bow to it, hung down the back of each.

All these servants were diminutive, and ludicrously out of proportion with the enormous horses of the equipage, and had sharp, sallow features, and small, restless fiery eyes, and faces of cunning and malice that chilled the children. The little coachman was scowling and showing his white fangs under his cocked hat, and his little blazing beads of eyes were quivering with fury in their sockets as he whirled his whip round and round over their heads, till the lash of it looked like a streak of fire in the evening sun, and sounded like the cry of a legion of “fillapoueeks” in the air.

“Stop the princess on the highway!” cried the coachman, in a piercing treble.

“Stop the princess on the highway!” piped each footman in turn, scowling over his shoulder down on the children, and grinding his keen teeth.

The children were so frightened they could only gape and turn white in their panic. But a very sweet voice from the open window of the carriage reassured them, and arrested the attack of the lackeys.

A beautiful and “very grand-looking” lady was smiling from it on them, and they all felt pleased in the strange light of that smile.

“The boy with the golden hair, I think,” said the lady, bending her large and wonderfully clear eyes on little Leum.

The upper sides of the carriage were chiefly of glass, so that the children could see another woman inside, whom they did not like so well.

This was a black woman, with a wonderfully long neck, hung round with many strings of large variously-coloured beads, and on her head was a sort of turban of silk striped with all the colours of the rainbow, and fixed in it was a golden star.

This black woman had a face as thin almost as a death’s-head, with high cheekbones, and great goggle eyes, the whites of which, as well as her wide range of teeth, showed in brilliant contrast with her skin, as she looked over the beautiful lady’s shoulder, and whispered something in her ear.

“Yes; the boy with the golden hair, I think,” repeated the lady.

And her voice sounded sweet as a silver bell in the children’s ears, and her smile beguiled them like the light of an enchanted lamp, as she leaned from the window with a look of ineffable fondness on the golden-haired boy, with the large blue eyes; insomuch that little Billy, looking up, smiled in return with a wondering fondness, and when she stooped down, and stretched her jewelled arms towards him, he stretched his little hands up, and how they touched the other children did not know; but, saying, “Come and give me a kiss, my darling,” she raised him, and he seemed to ascend in her small fingers as lightly as a feather, and she held him in her lap and covered him with kisses.

Nothing daunted, the other children would have been only too happy to change places with their favoured little brother. There was only one thing that was unpleasant, and a little frightened them, and that was the black woman, who stood and stretched forward, in the carriage as before. She gathered a rich silk and gold handkerchief that was in her fingers up to her lips, and seemed to thrust ever so much of it, fold after fold, into her capacious mouth, as they thought to smother her laughter, with which she seemed convulsed, for she was shaking and quivering, as it seemed, with suppressed merriment; but her eyes, which remained uncovered, looked angrier than they had ever seen eyes look before.

But the lady was so beautiful they looked on her instead, and she continued to caress and kiss the little boy on her knee; and smiling at the other children she held up a large russet apple in her fingers, and the carriage began to move slowly on, and with a nod inviting them to take the fruit, she dropped it on the road from the window; it rolled some way beside the wheels, they following, and then she dropped another, and then another, and so on. And the same thing happened to all; for just as either of the children who ran beside had caught the rolling apple, somehow it slipt into a hole or ran into a ditch, and looking up they saw the lady drop another from the window, and so the chase was taken up and continued till they got, hardly knowing how far they had gone, to the old crossroad that leads to Owney. It seemed that there the horses’ hoofs and carriage wheels rolled up a wonderful dust, which being caught in one of those eddies that whirl the dust up into a column, on the calmest day, enveloped the children for a moment, and passed whirling on towards Lisnavoura, the carriage, as they fancied, driving in the centre of it; but suddenly it subsided, the straws and leaves floated to the ground, the dust dissipated itself, but the white horses and the lackeys, the gilded carriage, the lady and their little golden-haired brother were gone.

At the same moment suddenly the upper rim of the clear setting sun disappeared behind the hill of Knockdoulah, and it was twilight. Each child felt the transition like a shock – and the sight of the rounded summit of Lisnavoura, now closely overhanging them, struck them with a new fear.

They screamed their brother’s name after him, but their cries were lost in the vacant air. At the same time they thought they heard a hollow voice say, close to them, “Go home.”

Looking round and seeing no one, they were scared, and hand in hand – the little girl crying wildly, and the boy white as ashes, from fear, they trotted homeward, at their best speed, to tell, as we have seen, their strange story.

Molly Ryan never more saw her darling. But something of the lost little boy was seen by his former playmates.

Sometimes when their mother was away earning a trifle at hay-making, and Nelly washing the potatoes for their dinner, or “beatling” clothes in the little stream that flows in the hollow close by, they saw the pretty face of little Billy peeping in archly at the door, and smiling silently at them, and as they ran to embrace him, with cries of delight, he drew back, still smiling archly, and when they got out into the open day, he was gone, and they could see no trace of him anywhere.

This happened often, with slight variations in the circumstances of the visit. Sometimes he would peep for a longer time, sometimes for a shorter time, sometimes his little hand would come in, and, with bended finger, beckon them to follow; but always he was smiling with the same arch look and wary silence – and always he was gone when they reached the door. Gradually these visits grew less and less frequent, and in about eight months they ceased altogether, and little Billy, irretrievably lost, took rank in their memories with the dead.

One wintry morning, nearly a year and a half after his disappearance, their mother having set out for Limerick soon after cock-crow, to sell some fowls at the market, the little girl, lying by the side of her elder sister, who was fast asleep, just at the grey of the morning heard the latch lifted softly, and saw little Billy enter and close the door gently after him. There was light enough to see that he was barefoot and ragged, and looked pale and famished. He went straight to the fire, and cowered over the turf embers, and rubbed his hands slowly, and seemed to shiver as he gathered the smouldering turf together.

The little girl clutched her sister in terror and whispered, “Waken, Nelly, waken; here’s Billy come back!”

Nelly slept soundly on, but the little boy, whose hands were extended close over the coals, turned and looked toward the bed, it seemed to her, in fear, and she saw the glare of the embers reflected on his thin cheek as he turned toward her. He rose and went, on tiptoe, quickly to the door, in silence, and let himself out as softly as he had come in.

After that, the little boy was never seen any more by any one of his kindred.

“Fairy doctors,” as the dealers in the preternatural, who in such cases were called in, are termed, did all that in them lay – but in vain. Father Tom came down, and tried what holier rites could do, but equally without result. So little Billy was dead to mother, brother, and sisters; but no grave received him. Others whom affection cherished, lay in holy ground, in the old churchyard of Abington, with headstone to mark the spot over which the survivor might kneel and say a kind prayer for the peace of the departed soul. But there was no landmark to show where little Billy was hidden from their loving eyes, unless it was in the old hill of Lisnavoura, that cast its long shadow at sunset before the cabin door; or that, white and filmy in the moonlight, in later years, would occupy his brother’s gaze as he returned from fair or market, and draw from him a sigh and a prayer for the little brother he had lost so long ago, and was never to see again.

“All The Year Round” magazine, 05 Feb. 1870

Madam Crowl’s Ghost And Other Tales of Mystery (1923)

THE WHITE CAT OF DRUMGUNNIOL

(1870)

There is a famous story of a white cat, with which we all become acquainted in the nursery. I am going to tell a story of a white cat very different from the amiable and enchanted princess who took that disguise for a season. The white cat of which I speak was a more sinister animal.

The traveller from Limerick toward Dublin, after passing the hills of Killaloe upon the left, as Keeper Mountain rises high in view, finds himself gradually hemmed in, up the right, by a range of lower hills. An undulating plain that dips gradually to a lower level than that of the road interposes, and some scattered hedgerows relieve its somewhat wild and melancholy character.

One of the few human habitations that send up their films of turf-smoke from that lonely plain, is the loosely-thatched, earth-built dwelling of a “strong farmer,” as the more prosperous of the tenant-farming classes are termed in Munster. It stands in a clump of trees near the edge of a wandering stream, about halfway between the mountains and the Dublin road, and had been for generations tenanted by people named Donovan.

In a distant place, desirous of studying some Irish records which had fallen into my hands, and inquiring for a teacher capable of instructing me in the Irish language, a Mr. Donovan, dreamy, harmless, and learned, was recommended to me for the purpose.

I found that he had been educated as a Sizar in Trinity College, Dublin. He now supported himself by teaching, and the special direction of my studies, I suppose, flattered his national partialities, for he unbosomed himself of much of his long-reserved thoughts, and recollections about his country and his early days. It was he who told me this story, and I mean to repeat it, as nearly as I can, in his own words.

I have myself seen the old farmhouse, with its orchard of huge moss-grown apple trees. I have looked round on the peculiar landscape; the roofless, ivied tower, that two hundred years before had afforded a refuge from raid and rapparee, and which still occupies its old place in the angle of the haggard; the bush-grown “liss,” that scarcely a hundred and fifty steps away records the labours of a bygone race; the dark and towering outline of old Keeper in the background; and the lonely range of furze and heath-clad hills that form a nearer barrier, with many a line of grey rock and clump of dwarf oak or birch. The pervading sense of loneliness made it a scene not unsuited for a wild and unearthly story. And I could quite fancy how, seen in the grey of a wintry morning, shrouded far and wide in snow, or in the melancholy glory of an autumnal sunset, or in the chill splendour of a moonlight night, it might have helped to tone a dreamy mind like honest Dan Donovan’s to superstition and a proneness to the illusions of fancy. It is certain, however, that I never anywhere met with a more simple-minded creature, or one on whose good faith I could more entirely rely.

When I was a boy, said he, living at home at Drumgunniol, I used to take my Goldsmith’s Roman History in my hand and go down to my favourite seat, the flat stone, sheltered by a hawthorn tree beside the little lough, a large and deep pool, such as I have heard called a tarn in England. It lay in the gentle hollow of a field that is overhung toward the north by the old orchard, and being a deserted place was favourable to my studious quietude.

One day reading here, as usual, I wearied at last, and began to look about me, thinking of the heroic scenes I had just been reading of. I was as wide awake as I am at this moment, and I saw a woman appear at the corner of the orchard and walk down the slope. She wore a long, light grey dress, so long that it seemed to sweep the grass behind her, and so singular was her appearance in a part of the world where female attire is so inflexibly fixed by custom, that I could not take my eyes off her. Her course lay diagonally from corner to corner of the field, which was a large one, and she pursued it without swerving.

When she came near I could see that her feet were bare, and that she seemed to be looking steadfastly upon some remote object for guidance. Her route would have crossed me – had the tarn not interposed – about ten or twelve yards below the point at which I was sitting. But instead of arresting her course at the margin of the lough, as I had expected, she went on without seeming conscious of its existence, and I saw her, as plainly as I see you, sir, walk across the surface of the water, and pass, without seeming to see me, at about the distance I had calculated.

I was ready to faint from sheer terror. I was only thirteen years old then, and I remember every particular as if it had happened this hour.

The figure passed through the gap at the far corner of the field, and there I lost sight of it. I had hardly strength to walk home, and was so nervous, and ultimately so ill, that for three weeks I was confined to the house, and could not bear to be alone for a moment. I never entered that field again, such was the horror with which from that moment every object in it was clothed. Even at this distance of time I should not like to pass through it.

This apparition I connected with a mysterious event; and, also, with a singular liability, that has for nearly eight years distinguished, or rather afflicted, our family. It is no fancy. Everybody in that part of the country knows all about it. Everybody connected what I had seen with it.

I will tell it all to you as well as I can.

When I was about fourteen years old – that is about a year after the sight I had seen in the lough field – we were one night expecting my father home from the fair of Killaloe. My mother sat up to welcome him home, and I with her, for I liked nothing better than such a vigil. My brothers and sisters, and the farm servants, except the men who were driving home the cattle from the fair, were asleep in their beds. My mother and I were sitting in the chimney corner chatting together, and watching my father’s supper, which was kept hot over the fire. We knew that he would return before the men who were driving home the cattle, for he was riding, and told us that he would only wait to see them fairly on the road, and then push homeward.

At length we heard his voice and the knocking of his loaded whip at the door, and my mother let him in. I don’t think I ever saw my father drunk, which is more than most men of my age, from the same part of the country, could say of theirs. But he could drink his glass of whisky as well as another, and he usually came home from fair or market a little merry and mellow, and with a jolly flush in his cheeks.

Tonight he looked sunken, pale and sad. He entered with the saddle and bridle in his hand, and he dropped them against the wall, near the door, and put his arms round his wife’s neck, and kissed her kindly.

“Welcome home, Meehal,” said she, kissing him heartily.

“God bless you, mavourneen,” he answered.

And hugging her again, he turned to me, who was plucking him by the hand, jealous of his notice. I was little, and light of my age, and he lifted me up in his arms, and kissed me, and my arms being about his neck, he said to my mother:

“Draw the bolt, acushla.”

She did so, and setting me down very dejectedly, he walked to the fire and sat down on a stool, and stretched his feet toward the glowing turf, leaning with his hands on his knees.

“Rouse up, Mick, darlin’,” said my mother, who was growing anxious, “and tell me how did the cattle sell, and did everything go lucky at the fair, or is there anything wrong with the landlord, or what in the world is it that ails you, Mick, jewel?”

“Nothin’, Molly. The cows sould well, thank God, and there’s nothin’ fell out between me an’ the landlord, an’ everything’s the same way. There’s no fault to find anywhere.”

“Well, then, Mickey, since so it is, turn round to your hot supper, and ate it, and tell us is there anything new.”

“I got my supper, Molly, on the way, and I can’t ate a bit,” he answered.

“Got your supper on the way, an’ you knowin’ ’twas waiting for you at home, an’ your wife sittin’ up an’ all!” cried my mother, reproachfully.

“You’re takin’ a wrong meanin’ out of what I say,” said my father. “There’s something happened that leaves me that I can’t ate a mouthful, and I’ll not be dark with you, Molly, for, maybe, it ain’t very long I have to be here, an’ I’ll tell you what it was. It’s what I’ve seen, the white cat.”

“The Lord between us and harm!” exclaimed my mother, in a moment as pale and as chap-fallen as my father; and then, trying to rally, with a laugh, she said: “Ha! ’tis only funnin’ me you are. Sure a white rabbit was snared a Sunday last, in Grady’s wood; an’ Teigue seen a big white rat in the haggard yesterday.”

“’twas neither rat nor rabbit was in it. Don’t ye think but I’d know a rat or a rabbit from a big white cat, with green eyes as big as halfpennies, and its back riz up like a bridge, trottin’ on and across me, and ready, if I dar’ stop, to rub its sides against my shins, and maybe to make a jump and seize my throat, if that it’s a cat, at all, an’ not something worse?”

As he ended his description in a low tone, looking straight at the fire, my father drew his big hand across his forehead once or twice, his face being damp and shining with the moisture of fear, and he sighed, or rather groaned, heavily.

My mother had relapsed into panic, and was praying again in her fear. I, too, was terribly frightened, and on the point of crying, for I knew all about the white cat.

Clapping my father on the shoulder, by way of encouragement, my mother leaned over him, kissing him, and at last began to cry. He was wringing her hands in his, and seemed in great trouble.

“There was nothin’ came into the house with me?” he asked, in a very low tone, turning to me.

“There was nothin’, father,” I said, “but the saddle and bridle that was in your hand.”

“Nothin’ white kem in at the doore wid me,” he repeated.

“Nothin’ at all,” I answered.

“So best,” said my father, and making the sign of the cross, he began mumbling to himself, and I knew he was saying his prayers.

Waiting for a while, to give him time for this exercise, my mother asked him where he first saw it.

“When I was riding up the bohereen,” – the Irish term meaning a little road, such as leads up to a farmhouse – “I bethought myself that the men was on the road with the cattle, and no one to look to the horse barrin’ myself, so I thought I might as well leave him in the crooked field below, an’ I tuck him there, he bein’ cool, and not a hair turned, for I rode him aisy all the way. It was when I turned, after lettin’ him go – the saddle and bridle bein’ in my hand – that I saw it, pushin’ out o’ the long grass at the side o’ the path, an’ it walked across it, in front of me, an’ then back again, before me, the same way, an’ sometimes at one side, an’ then at the other, lookin’ at me wid them shinin’ eyes; and I consayted I heard it growlin’ as it kep’ beside me – as close as ever you see – till I kem up to the doore, here, an’ knocked an’ called, as ye heerd me.”

Now, what was it, in so simple an incident, that agitated my father, my mother, myself, and finally, every member of this rustic household, with a terrible foreboding? It was this that we, one and all, believed that my father had received, in thus encountering the white cat, a warning of his approaching death.

The omen had never failed hitherto. It did not fail now. In a week after my father took the fever that was going, and before a month he was dead.

My honest friend, Dan Donovan, paused here; I could perceive that he was praying, for his lips were busy, and I concluded that it was for the repose of that departed soul.

In a little while he resumed.

It is eighty years now since that omen first attached to my family. Eighty years? Aye, is it. Ninety is nearer the mark. And I have spoken to many old people, in those earlier times, who had a distinct recollection of everything connected with it.

It happened in this way.

My grand-uncle, Connor Donovan, had the old farm of Drumgunniol in his day. He was richer than ever my father was, or my father’s father either, for he took a short lease of Balraghan, and made money of it. But money won’t soften a hard heart, and I’m afraid my grand-uncle was a cruel man – a profligate man he was, surely, and that is mostly a cruel man at heart. He drank his share, too, and cursed and swore, when he was vexed, more than was good for his soul, I’m afraid.

At that time there was a beautiful girl of the Colemans, up in the mountains, not far from Capper Cullen. I’m told that there are no Colemans there now at all, and that family has passed away. The famine years made great changes.

Ellen Coleman was her name. The Colemans were not rich. But, being such a beauty, she might have made a good match. Worse than she did for herself, poor thing, she could not.

Con Donovan – my grand-uncle, God forgive him! – sometimes in his rambles saw her at fairs or patterns, and he fell in love with her, as who might not?

He used her ill. He promised her marriage, and persuaded her to come away with him; and, after all, he broke his word. It was just the old story. He tired of her, and he wanted to push himself in the world; and he married a girl of the Collopys, that had a great fortune – twenty-four cows, seventy sheep, and a hundred and twenty goats.

He married this Mary Collopy, and grew richer than before; and Ellen Coleman died broken-hearted. But that did not trouble the strong farmer much.

He would have liked to have children, but he had none, and this was the only cross he had to bear, for everything else went much as he wished.

One night he was returning from the fair of Nenagh. A shallow stream at that time crossed the road – they have thrown a bridge over it, I am told, some time since – and its channel was often dry in summer weather. When it was so, as it passes close by the old farmhouse of Drumgunniol, without a great deal of winding, it makes a sort of road, which people then used as a short cut to reach the house by. Into this dry channel, as there was plenty of light from the moon, my grand-uncle turned his horse, and when he had reached the two ash-trees at the meering of the farm he turned his horse short into the river-field, intending to ride through the gap at the other end, under the oak-tree, and so he would have been within a few hundred yards of his door.

As he approached the “gap” he saw, or thought he saw, with a slow motion, gliding along the ground toward the same point, and now and then with a soft bound, a white object, which he described as being no bigger than his hat, but what it was he could not see, as it moved along the hedge and disappeared at the point to which he was himself tending.

When he reached the gap the horse stopped short. He urged and coaxed it in vain. He got down to lead it through, but it recoiled, snorted, and fell into a wild trembling fit. He mounted it again. But its terror continued, and it obstinately resisted his caresses and his whip. It was bright moonlight, and my grand-uncle was chafed by the horse’s resistance, and, seeing nothing to account for it, and being so near home, what little patience he possessed forsook him, and, plying his whip and spur in earnest, he broke into oaths and curses.

All on a sudden the horse sprang through, and Con Donovan, as he passed under the broad branch of the oak, saw clearly a woman standing on the bank beside him, her arm extended, with the hand of which, as he flew by, she struck him a blow upon the shoulders. It threw him forward upon the neck of the horse, which, in wild terror, reached the door at a gallop, and stood there quivering and steaming all over.

Less alive than dead, my grand-uncle got in. He told his story, at least, so much as he chose. His wife did not quite know what to think. But that something very bad had happened she could not doubt. He was very faint and ill, and begged that the priest should be sent for forthwith. When they were getting him to his bed they saw distinctly the marks of five fingerpoints on the flesh of his shoulder, where the spectral blow had fallen. These singular marks – which they said resembled in tint the hue of a body struck by lightning – remained imprinted on his flesh, and were buried with him.

When he had recovered sufficiently to talk with the people about him – speaking, like a man at his last hour, from a burdened heart, and troubled conscience – he repeated his story, but said he did not see, or, at all events, know, the face of the figure that stood in the gap. No one believed him. He told more about it to the priest than to others. He certainly had a secret to tell. He might as well have divulged it frankly, for the neighbours all knew well enough that it was the face of dead Ellen Coleman that he had seen.

From that moment my grand-uncle never raised his head. He was a scared, silent, broken-spirited man. It was early summer then, and at the fall of the leaf in the same year he died.

Of course there was a wake, such as beseemed a strong farmer so rich as he. For some reason the arrangements of this ceremonial were a little different from the usual routine.

The usual practice is to place the body in the great room, or kitchen, as it is called, of the house. In this particular case there was, as I told you, for some reason, an unusual arrangement. The body was placed in a small room that opened upon the greater one. The door of this, during the wake, stood open. There were candles about the bed, and pipes and tobacco on the table, and stools for such guests as chose to enter, the door standing open for their reception.

The body, having been laid out, was left alone, in this smaller room, during the preparations for the wake. After nightfall one of the women, approaching the bed to get a chair which she had left near it, rushed from the room with a scream, and, having recovered her speech at the further end of the “kitchen,” and surrounded by a gaping audience, she said, at last:

“May I never sin, if his face bain’t riz up again the back o’ the bed, and he starin’ down to the doore, wid eyes as big as pewter plates, that id be shinin’ in the moon!”

“Arra, woman! Is it cracked you are?” said one of the farm boys as they are termed, being men of any age you please.

“Agh, Molly, don’t be talkin’, woman! ’tis what ye consayted it, goin’ into the dark room, out o’ the light. Why didn’t ye take a candle in your fingers, ye aumadhaun?” said one of her female companions.

“Candle, or no candle; I seen it,” insisted Molly. “An’ what’s more, I could a’most tak’ my oath I seen his arum, too, stretchin’ out o’ the bed along the flure, three times as long as it should be, to take hould o’ me be the fut.”

“Nansinse, ye fool, what id he want o’ yer fut?” exclaimed one scornfully.

“Gi’ me the candle, some o’ yez – in the name o’ God,” said old Sal Doolan, that was straight and lean, and a woman that could pray like a priest almost.

“Give her a candle,” agreed all.

But whatever they might say, there wasn’t one among them that did not look pale and stern enough as they followed Mrs. Doolan, who was praying as fast as her lips could patter, and leading the van with a tallow candle, held like a taper, in her fingers.

The door was half open, as the panic-stricken girl had left it; and holding the candle on high the better to examine the room, she made a step or so into it.

If my grand-uncle’s hand had been stretched along the floor, in the unnatural way described, he had drawn it back again under the sheet that covered him. And tall Mrs. Doolan was in no danger of tripping over his arm as she entered. But she had not gone more than a step or two with her candle aloft, when, with a drowning face, she suddenly stopped short, staring at the bed which was now fully in view.

“Lord, bless us, Mrs. Doolan, ma’am, come back,” said the woman next her, who had fast hold of her dress, or her ‘coat,’ as they call it, and drawing her backwards with a frightened pluck, while a general recoil among her followers betokened the alarm which her hesitation had inspired.

“Whisht, will yez?” said the leader, peremptorily, “I can’t hear my own ears wid the noise ye’re makin’, an’ which iv yez let the cat in here, an’ whose cat is it?” she asked, peering suspiciously at a white cat that was sitting on the breast of the corpse.

“Put it away, will yez?” she resumed, with horror at the profanation. “Many a corpse as I sthretched and crossed in the bed, the likes o’ that I never seen yet. The man o’ the house, wid a brute baste like that mounted on him, like a phooka, Lord forgi’ me for namin’ the like in this room. Dhrive it away, some o’ yez! out o’ that, this minute, I tell ye.”

Each repeated the order, but no one seemed inclined to execute it. They were crossing themselves, and whispering their conjectures and misgivings as to the nature of the beast, which was no cat of that house, nor one that they had ever seen before. On a sudden, the white cat placed itself on the pillow over the head of the body, and having from that place glared for a time at them over the features of the corpse, it crept softly along the body towards them, growling low and fiercely as it drew near.

Out of the room they bounced, in dreadful confusion, shutting the door fast after them, and not for a good while did the hardiest venture to peep in again.

The white cat was sitting in its old place, on the dead man’s breast, but this time it crept quietly down the side of the bed, and disappeared under it, the sheet which was spread like a coverlet, and hung down nearly to the floor, concealing it from view.

Praying, crossing themselves, and not forgetting a sprinkling of holy water, they peeped, and finally searched, poking spades, “wattles,” pitchforks and such implements under the bed. But the cat was not to be found, and they concluded that it had made its escape among their feet as they stood near the threshold. So they secured the door carefully, with hasp and padlock. But when the door was opened next morning they found the white cat sitting, as if it had never been disturbed, upon the breast of the dead man.

Again occurred very nearly the same scene with a like result, only that some said they saw the cat afterwards lurking under a big box in a corner of the outer-room, where my grand-uncle kept his leases and papers, and his prayer-book and beads.

Mrs. Doolan heard it growling at her heels wherever she went; and although she could not see it, she could hear it spring on the back of her chair when she sat down, and growl in her ear, so that she would bounce up with a scream and a prayer, fancying that it was on the point of taking her by the throat.

And the priest’s boy, looking round the corner, under the branches of the old orchard, saw a white cat sitting under the little window of the room where my grand-uncle was laid out and looking up at the four small panes of glass as a cat will watch a bird.

The end of it was that the cat was found on the corpse again, when the room was visited, and do what they might, whenever the body was left alone, the cat was found again in the same ill-omened contiguity with the dead man. And this continued, to the scandal and fear of the neighbourhood, until the door was opened finally for the wake.

My grand-uncle being dead, and, with all due solemnities, buried, I have done with him. But not quite yet with the white cat. No banshee ever yet was more inalienably attached to a family than this ominous apparition is to mine. But there is this difference. The banshee seems to be animated with an affectionate sympathy with the bereaved family to whom it is hereditarily attached, whereas this thing has about it a suspicion of malice. It is the messenger simply of death. And its taking the shape of a cat – the coldest, and they say, the most vindictive of brutes – is indicative of the spirit of its visit.

When my grandfather’s death was near, although he seemed quite well at the time, it appeared not exactly, but very nearly in the same way in which I told you it showed itself to my father.

The day before my Uncle Teigue was killed by the bursting of his gun, it appeared to him in the evening, at twilight, by the lough, in the field where I saw the woman who walked across the water, as I told you. My uncle was washing the barrel of his gun in the lough. The grass is short there, and there is no cover near it. He did not know how it approached; but the first he saw of it, the white cat was walking close round his feet, in the twilight, with an angry twist of its tail, and a green glare in its eyes, and do what he would, it continued walking round and round him, in larger or smaller circles, till he reached the orchard, and there he lost it.

My poor Aunt Peg – she married one of the O’Brians, near Oolah – came to Drumgunniol to go to the funeral of a cousin who died about a mile away. She died herself, poor woman, only a month after.

Coming from the wake, at two or three o’clock in the morning, as she got over the style into the farm of Drumgunniol, she saw the white cat at her side, and it kept close beside her, she ready to faint all the time, till she reached the door of the house, where it made a spring up into the white-thorn tree that grows close by, and so it parted from her. And my little brother Jim saw it also, just three weeks before he died. Every member of our family who dies, or takes his death-sickness, at Drumgunniol, is sure to see the white cat, and no one of us who sees it need hope for long life after.

“All The Year Round” magazine, 02 Apr. 1870

Madam Crowl’s Ghost And Other Tales of Mystery (1923)

STORIES OF LOUGH GUIR

(1870)

When the present writer was a boy of twelve or thirteen, he first made the acquaintance of Miss Anne Baily, of Lough Guir, in the county of Limerick. She and her sister were the last representatives at that place, of an extremely good old name in the county. They were both what is termed “old maids,” and at that time past sixty. But never were old ladies more hospitable, lively, and kind, especially to young people. They were both remarkably agreeable and clever. Like all old county ladies of their time, they were great genealogists, and could recount the origin, generations, and intermarriages, of every county family of note.

These ladies were visited at their house at Lough Guir by Mr. Crofton Croker; and are, I think, mentioned, by name, in the second series of his fairy legends; the series in which (probably communicated by Miss Anne Baily), he recounts some of the picturesque traditions of those beautiful lakes – lakes, I should no longer say, for the smaller and prettier has since been drained, and gave up from its depths some long lost and very interesting relics.

In their drawing-room stood a curious relic of another sort: old enough, too, though belonging to a much more modern period. It was the ancient stirrup cup of the hospitable house of Lough Guir. Crofton Croker has preserved a sketch of this curious glass. I have often had it in my hand. It had a short stem; and the cup part, having the bottom rounded, rose cylindrically, and, being of a capacity to contain a whole bottle of claret, and almost as narrow as an old-fashioned ale glass, was tall to a degree that filled me with wonder. As it obliged the rider to extend his arm as he raised the glass, it must have tried a tipsy man, sitting in the saddle, pretty severely. The wonder was that the marvellous tall glass had come down to our times without a crack.

There was another glass worthy of remark in the same drawing-room. It was gigantic, and shaped conically, like one of those old-fashioned jelly glasses which used to be seen upon the shelves of confectioners. It was engraved round the rim with the words, “The glorious, pious, and immortal memory”; and on grand occasions, was filled to the brim, and after the manner of a loving cup, made the circuit of the Whig guests, who owed all to the hero whose memory its legend invoked.

It was now but the transparent phantom of those solemn convivialities of a generation, who lived, as it were, within hearing of the cannon and shoutings of those stirring times. When I saw it, this glass had long retired from politics and carousals, and stood peacefully on a little table in the drawing-room, where ladies’ hands replenished it with fair water, and crowned it daily with flowers from the garden.

Miss Anne Baily’s conversation ran oftener than her sister’s upon the legendary and supernatural; she told her stories with the sympathy, the colour, and the mysterious air which contribute so powerfully to effect, and never wearied of answering questions about the old castle, and amusing her young audience with fascinating little glimpses of old adventure and bygone days. My memory retains the picture of my early friend very distinctly. A slim straight figure, above the middle height; a general likeness to the full-length portrait of that delightful Countess d’Aulnois, to whom we all owe our earliest and most brilliant glimpses of fairyland; something of her gravely-pleasant countenance, plain, but refined and ladylike, with that kindly mystery in her sidelong glance and uplifted finger, which indicated the approaching climax of a tale of wonder.

Lough Guir is a kind of centre of the operations of the Munster fairies. When a child is stolen by the “good people,” Lough Guir is conjectured to be the place of its unearthly transmutation from the human to the fairy state. And beneath its waters lie enchanted, the grand old castle of the Desmonds, the great earl himself, his beautiful young countess, and all the retinue that surrounded him in the years of his splendour, and at the moment of his catastrophe.

Here, too, are historic associations. The huge square tower that rises at one side of the stable-yard close to the old house, to a height that amazed my young eyes, though robbed of its battlements and one story, was a stronghold of the last rebellious Earl of Desmond, and is specially mentioned in that delightful old folio, the Hibernia Pacata, as having, with its Irish garrison on the battlements, defied the army of the lord deputy, then marching by upon the summits of the overhanging hills. The house, built under shelter of this stronghold of the once proud and turbulent Desmonds, is old, but snug, with a multitude of small low rooms, such as I have seen in houses of the same age in Shropshire and the neighbouring English counties.

The hills that overhang the lakes appeared to me, in my young days (and I have not seen them since), to be clothed with a short soft verdure, of a hue so dark and vivid as I had never seen before.

In one of the lakes is a small island, rocky and wooded, which is believed by the peasantry to represent the top of the highest tower of the castle which sank, under a spell, to the bottom. In certain states of the atmosphere, I have heard educated people say, when in a boat you have reached a certain distance, the island appears to rise some feet from the water, its rocks assume the appearance of masonry, and the whole circuit presents very much the effect of the battlements of a castle rising above the surface of the lake.

This was Miss Anne Baily’s story of the submersion of this lost castle:

THE MAGICIAN EARL

It is well known that the great Earl of Desmond, though history pretends to dispose of him differently, lives to this hour enchanted in his castle, with all his household, at the bottom of the lake.

There was not, in his day, in all the world, so accomplished a magician as he. His fairest castle stood upon an island in the lake, and to this he brought his young and beautiful bride, whom he loved but too well; for she prevailed upon his folly to risk all to gratify her imperious caprice.

They had not been long in this beautiful castle, when she one day presented herself in the chamber in which her husband studied his forbidden art, and there implored him to exhibit before her some of the wonders of his evil science. He resisted long; but her entreaties, tears, and wheedlings were at length too much for him and he consented.

But before beginning those astonishing transformations with which he was about to amaze her, he explained to her the awful conditions and dangers of the experiment.

Alone in this vast apartment, the walls of which were lapped, far below, by the lake whose dark waters lay waiting to swallow them, she must witness a certain series of frightful phenomena, which once commenced, he could neither abridge nor mitigate; and if throughout their ghastly succession she spoke one word, or uttered one exclamation, the castle and all that it contained would in one instant subside to the bottom of the lake, there to remain, under the servitude of a strong spell, for ages.

The dauntless curiosity of the lady having prevailed, and the oaken door of the study being locked and barred, the fatal experiments commenced.

Muttering a spell, as he stood before her, feathers sprouted thickly over him, his face became contracted and hooked, a cadaverous smell filled the air, and, with heavy winnowing wings, a gigantic vulture rose in his stead, and swept round and round the room, as if on the point of pouncing upon her.

The lady commanded herself through this trial, and instantly another began.

The bird alighted near the door, and in less than a minute changed, she saw not how, into a horribly deformed and dwarfish hag: who, with yellow skin hanging about her face and enormous eyes, swung herself on crutches toward the lady, her mouth foaming with fury, and her grimaces and contortions becoming more and more hideous every moment, till she rolled with a yell on the floor, in a horrible convulsion, at the lady’s feet, and then changed into a huge serpent, with crest erect, and quivering tongue. Suddenly, as it seemed on the point of darting at her, she saw her husband in its stead, standing pale before her, and, with his finger on his lip, enforcing the continued necessity of silence. He then placed himself at his length on the floor, and began to stretch himself out and out, longer and longer, until his head nearly reached to one end of the vast room, and his feet to the other.

This horror overcame her. The ill-starred lady uttered a wild scream, whereupon the castle and all that was within it, sank in a moment to the bottom of the lake.

But, once in every seven years, by night, the Earl of Desmond and his retinue emerge, and cross the lake, in shadowy cavalcade. His white horse is shod with silver. On that one night, the earl may ride till daybreak, and it behoves him to make good use of his time; for, until the silver shoes of his steed be worn through, the spell that holds him and his beneath the lake, will retain its power.

When I (Miss Anne Baily) was a child, there was still living a man named Teigue O’Neill, who had a strange story to tell.

He was a smith, and his forge stood on the brow of the hill, overlooking the lake, on a lonely part of the road to Cahir Conlish. One bright moonlight night, he was working very late, and quite alone. The clink of his hammer, and the wavering glow reflected through the open door on the bushes at the other side of the narrow road, were the only tokens that told of life and vigil for miles around.

In one of the pauses of his work, he heard the ring of many hoofs ascending the steep road that passed his forge, and, standing in his doorway, he was just in time to see a gentleman, on a white horse, who was dressed in a fashion the like of which the smith had never seen before. This man was accompanied and followed by a mounted retinue, as strangely dressed as he.

They seemed, by the clang and clatter that announced their approach, to be riding up the hill at a hard hurry-scurry gallop; but the pace abated as they drew near, and the rider of the white horse who, from his grave and lordly air, he assumed to be a man of rank, and accustomed to command, drew bridle and came to a halt before the smith’s door.

He did not speak, and all his train were silent, but he beckoned to the smith, and pointed down to one of his horse’s hoofs.

Teigue stooped and raised it, and held it just long enough to see that it was shod with a silver shoe; which, in one place, he said, was worn as thin as a shilling. Instantaneously, his situation was made apparent to him by this sign, and he recoiled with a terrified prayer. The lordly rider, with a look of pain and fury, struck at him suddenly, with something that whistled in the air like a whip; and an icy streak seemed to traverse his body as if he had been cut through with a leaf of steel. But he was without scathe or scar, as he afterwards found. At the same moment he saw the whole cavalcade break into a gallop and disappear down the hill, with a momentary hurtling in the air, like the flight of a volley of cannon shot.

Here had been the earl himself. He had tried one of his accustomed stratagems to lead the smith to speak to him. For it is well known that either for the purpose of abridging or of mitigating his period of enchantment, he seeks to lead people to accost him. But what, in the event of his succeeding, would befall the person whom he had thus ensnared, no one knows.

MOLL RIAL’S ADVENTURE

When Miss Anne Baily was a child, Moll Rial was an old woman. She had lived all her days with the Bailys of Lough Guir; in and about whose house, as was the Irish custom of those days, were a troop of barefooted country girls, scullery maids, or laundresses, or employed about the poultry yard, or running of errands.

Among these was Moll Rial, then a stout good-humoured lass, with little to think of, and nothing to fret about. She was once washing clothes by the process known universally in Munster as beetling. The washer stands up to her ankles in water, in which she has immersed the clothes, which she lays in that state on a great flat stone, and smacks with lusty strokes of an instrument which bears a rude resemblance to a cricket bat, only shorter, broader, and light enough to be wielded freely with one hand. Thus, they smack the dripping clothes, turning them over and over, sousing them in the water, and replacing them on the same stone, to undergo a repetition of the process, until they are thoroughly washed.

Moll Rial was plying her “beetle” at the margin of the lake, close under the old house and castle. It was between eight and nine o’clock on a fine summer morning, everything looked bright and beautiful. Though quite alone, and though she could not see even the windows of the house (hidden from her view by the irregular ascent and some interposing bushes), her loneliness was not depressing.

Standing up from her work, she saw a gentleman walking slowly down the slope toward her. He was a “grand-looking” gentleman, arrayed in a flowered silk dressing-gown, with a cap of velvet on his head; and as he stepped toward her, in his slippered feet, he showed a very handsome leg. He was smiling graciously as he approached, and drawing a ring from his finger with an air of gracious meaning, which seemed to imply that he wished to make her a present, he raised it in his fingers with a pleased look, and placed it on the flat stones beside the clothes she had been beetling so industriously.

He drew back a little, and continued to look at her with an encouraging smile, which seemed to say: “You have earned your reward; you must not be afraid to take it.”

The girl fancied that this was some gentleman who had arrived, as often happened in those hospitable and haphazard times, late and unexpectedly the night before, and who was now taking a little indolent ramble before breakfast.

Moll Rial was a little shy, and more so at having been discovered by so grand a gentleman with her petticoats gathered a little high about her bare shins. She looked down, therefore, upon the water at her feet, and then she saw a ripple of blood, and then another, ring after ring, coming and going to and from her feet. She cried out the sacred name in horror, and, lifting her eyes, the courtly gentleman was gone, but the blood-rings about her feet spread with the speed of light over the surface of the lake, which for a moment glowed like one vast estuary of blood.

Here was the earl once again, and Moll Rial declared that if it had not been for that frightful transformation of the water she would have spoken to him next minute, and would thus have passed under a spell, perhaps as direful as his own.

THE BANSHEE

So old a Munster family as the Bailys, of Lough Guir, could not fail to have their attendant banshee. Everyone attached to the family knew this well, and could cite evidences of that unearthly distinction. I heard Miss Baily relate the only experience she had personally had of that wild spiritual sympathy.

She said that, being then young, she and Miss Susan undertook a long attendance upon the sick bed of their sister, Miss Kitty, whom I have heard remembered among her contemporaries as the merriest and most entertaining of human beings. This light-hearted young lady was dying of consumption. The sad duties of such attendance being divided among many sisters, as there then were, the night watches devolved upon the two ladies I have named: I think, as being the eldest.

It is not improbable that these long and melancholy vigils, lowering the spirits and exciting the nervous system, prepared them for illusions. At all events, one night at dead of night, Miss Baily and her sister, sitting in the dying lady’s room, heard such sweet and melancholy music as they had never heard before. It seemed to them like distant cathedral music. The room of the dying girl had its windows toward the yard, and the old castle stood near, and full in sight. The music was not in the house, but seemed to come from the yard, or beyond it. Miss Anne Baily took a candle, and went down the back stairs. She opened the back door, and, standing there, heard the same faint but solemn harmony, and could not tell whether it most resembled the distant music of instruments, or a choir of voices. It seemed to come through the windows of the old castle, high in the air. But when she approached the tower, the music, she thought, came from above the house, at the other side of the yard; and thus perplexed, and at last frightened, she returned.

This aerial music both she and her sister, Miss Susan Baily, avowed that they distinctly heard, and for a long time. Of the fact she was clear, and she spoke of it with great awe.

THE GOVERNESS’S DREAM

This lady, one morning, with a grave countenance that indicated something weighty upon her mind, told her pupils that she had, on the night before, had a very remarkable dream.

The first room you enter in the old castle, having reached the foot of the spiral stone stair, is a large hall, dim and lofty, having only a small window or two, set high in deep recesses in the wall. When I saw the castle many years ago, a portion of this capacious chamber was used as a store for the turf laid in to last the year.

Her dream placed her, alone, in this room, and there entered a grave-looking man, having something very remarkable in his countenance: which impressed her, as a fine portrait sometimes will, with a haunting sense of character and individuality.

In his hand this man carried a wand, about the length of an ordinary walking cane. He told her to observe and remember its length, and to mark well the measurements he was about to make, the result of which she was to communicate to Mr. Baily of Lough Guir.

From a certain point in the wall, with this wand, he measured along the floor, at right angles with the wall, a certain number of its lengths, which he counted aloud; and then, in the same way, from the adjoining wall he measured a certain number of its lengths, which he also counted distinctly. He then told her that at the point where these two lines met, at a depth of a certain number of feet which he also told her, treasure lay buried. And so the dream broke up, and her remarkable visitant vanished.

She took the girls with her to the old castle, where, having cut a switch to the length represented to her in her dream, she measured the distances, and ascertained, as she supposed, the point on the floor beneath which the treasure lay. The same day she related her dream to Mr. Baily. But he treated it laughingly, and took no step in consequence.

Some time after this, she again saw, in a dream, the same remarkable-looking man, who repeated his message, and appeared displeased. But the dream was treated by Mr. Baily as before.

The same dream occurred again, and the children became so clamorous to have the castle floor explored, with pick and shovel, at the point indicated by the thrice-seen messenger, that at length Mr. Baily consented, and the floor was opened, and a trench was sunk at the spot which the governess had pointed out.

Miss Anne Baily, and nearly all the members of the family, her father included, were present at this operation. As the workmen approached the depth described in the vision, the interest and suspense of all increased; and when the iron implements met the solid resistance of a broad flagstone, which returned a cavernous sound to the stroke, the excitement of all present rose to its acme.

With some difficulty the flag was raised, and a chamber of stone work, large enough to receive a moderately-sized crock or pit, was disclosed. Alas! it was empty. But in the earth at the bottom of it, Miss Baily said, she herself saw, as every other bystander plainly did, the circular impression of a vessel: which had stood there, as the mark seemed to indicate, for a very long time.

Both the Miss Bailys were strong in their belief hereafterwards, that the treasure which they were convinced had actually been deposited there, had been removed by some more trusting and active listener than their father had proved.

This same governess remained with them to the time of her death, which occurred some years later, under the following circumstances as extraordinary as her dream.

THE EARL’S HALL

The good governess had a particular liking for the old castle, and when lessons were over, would take her book or her work into a large room in the ancient building, called the Earl’s Hall. Here she caused a table and chair to be placed for her use, and in the chiaroscuro would so sit at her favourite occupations, with just a little ray of subdued light, admitted through one of the glassless windows above her, and falling upon her table.

The Earl’s Hall is entered by a narrow-arched door, opening close to the winding stair. It is a very large and gloomy room, pretty nearly square, with a lofty vaulted ceiling, and a stone floor. Being situated high in the castle, the walls of which are immensely thick, and the windows very small and few, the silence that reigns here is like that of a subterranean cavern. You hear nothing in this solitude, except perhaps twice in a day, the twitter of a swallow in one of the small windows high in the wall.

This good lady having one day retired to her accustomed solitude, was missed from the house at her wonted hour of return. This in a country house, such as Irish houses Were in those days, excited little surprise, and no harm. But when the dinner hour came, which was then, in country houses, five o’clock, and the governess had not appeared, some of her young friends, it being not yet winter, and sufficient light remaining to guide them through the gloom of the dim ascent and passages, mounted the old stone stair to the level of the Earl’s Hall, gaily calling to her as they approached.

There was no answer. On the stone floor, outside the door of the Earl’s Hall, to their horror, they found her lying insensible. By the usual means she was restored to consciousness; but she continued very ill, and was conveyed to the house, where she took to her bed.

It was there and then that she related what had occurred to her. She had placed herself, as usual, at her little work table, and had been either working or reading – I forget which – for some time, and felt in her usual health and serene spirits. Raising her eyes, and looking towards the door, she saw a horrible-looking little man enter. He was dressed in red, was very short, had a singularly dark face, and a most atrocious countenance. Having walked some steps into the room, with his eyes fixed on her, he stopped, and beckoning to her to follow, moved back toward the door. About half way, again he stopped once more and turned. She was so terrified that she sat staring at the apparition without moving or speaking. Seeing that she had not obeyed him, his face became more frightful and menacing, and as it underwent this change, he raised his hand and stamped on the floor. Gesture, look, and all, expressed diabolical fury. Through sheer extremity of terror she did rise, and, as he turned again, followed him a step or two in the direction of the door. He again stopped, and with the same mute menace, compelled her again to follow him.

She reached the narrow stone doorway of the Earl’s Hall, through which he had passed; from the threshold she saw him standing a little way off, with his eyes still fixed on her. Again he signed to her, and began to move along the short passage that leads to the winding stair. But instead of following him further, she fell on the floor in a fit.

The poor lady was thoroughly persuaded that she was not long to survive this vision, and her foreboding proved true. From her bed she never rose. Fever and delirium supervened in a few days and she died. Of course it is possible that fever, already approaching, had touched her brain when she was visited by the phantom, and that it had no external existence.

“All The Year Round” magazine, 23 Apr. 1870

Madam Crowl’s Ghost And Other Tales of Mystery (1923)

THE VISION OF TOM CHUFF

(1870)

At the edge of melancholy Catstean Moor, in the north of England, with half-a-dozen ancient poplar-trees with rugged and hoary stems around, one smashed across the middle by a flash of lightning thirty summers before, and all by their great height dwarfing the abode near which they stand, there squats a rude stone house, with a thick chimney, a kitchen and bedroom on the ground-floor, and a loft, accessible by a ladder, under the shingle roof, divided into two rooms.

Its owner was a man of ill repute. Tom Chuff was his name. A shock-headed, broad-shouldered, powerful man, though somewhat short, with lowering brows and a sullen eye. He was a poacher, and hardly made an ostensible pretence of earning his bread by any honest industry. He was a drunkard. He beat his wife, and led his children a life of terror and lamentation, when he was at home. It was a blessing to his frightened little family when he absented himself, as he sometimes did, for a week or more together.

On the night I speak of he knocked at the door with his cudgel at about eight o’clock. It was winter, and the night was very dark. Had the summons been that of a bogie from the moor, the inmates of this small house could hardly have heard it with greater terror.

His wife unbarred the door in fear and haste. Her hunchbacked sister stood by the hearth, staring toward the threshold. The children cowered behind.

Tom Chuff entered with his cudgel in his hand, without speaking, and threw himself into a chair opposite the fire. He had been away two or three days. He looked haggard, and his eyes were bloodshot. They knew he had been drinking.

Tom raked and knocked the peat fire with his stick, and thrust his feet close to it. He signed towards the little dresser, and nodded to his wife, and she knew he wanted a cup, which in silence she gave him. He pulled a bottle of gin from his coat-pocket, and nearly filling the teacup, drank off the dram at a few gulps.

He usually refreshed himself with two or three drams of this kind before beating the inmates of his house. His three little children, cowering in a corner, eyed him from under a table, as Jack did the ogre in the nursery tale. His wife, Nell, standing behind a chair, which she was ready to snatch up to meet the blow of the cudgel, which might be levelled at her at any moment, never took her eyes off him; and hunchbacked Mary showed the whites of a large pair of eyes, similarly employed, as she stood against the oaken press, her dark face hardly distinguishable in the distance from the brown panel behind it.

Tom Chuff was at his third dram, and had not yet spoken a word since his entrance, and the suspense was growing dreadful, when, on a sudden, he leaned back in his rude seat, the cudgel slipped from his hand, a change and a deathlike pallor came over his face.

For a while they all stared on; such was their fear of him, they dared not speak or move, lest it should prove to have been but a doze, and Tom should wake up and proceed forthwith to gratify his temper and exercise his cudgel.

In a very little time, however, things began to look so odd, that they ventured, his wife and Mary, to exchange glances full of doubt and wonder. He hung so much over the side of the chair, that if it had not been one of cyclopean clumsiness and weight, he would have borne it to the floor. A leaden tint was darkening the pallor of his face. They were becoming alarmed, and finally braving everything his wife timidly said, “Tom!” and then more sharply repeated it, and finally cried the appellative loudly, and again and again, with the terrified accompaniment, “He’s dying – he’s dying!” her voice rising to a scream, as she found that neither it nor her plucks and shakings of him by the shoulder had the slightest effect in recalling him from his torpor.

And now from sheer terror of a new kind the children added their shrilly piping to the talk and cries of their seniors; and if anything could have called Tom up from his lethargy, it might have been the piercing chorus that made the rude chamber of the poacher’s habitation ring again. But Tom continued unmoved, deaf, and stirless.

His wife sent Mary down to the village, hardly a quarter of a mile away, to implore of the doctor, for whose family she did duty as laundress, to come down and look at her husband, who seemed to be dying.

The doctor, who was a good-natured fellow, arrived. With his hat still on, he looked at Tom, examined him, and when he found that the emetic he had brought with him, on conjecture from Mary’s description, did not act, and that his lancet brought no blood, and that he felt a pulseless wrist, he shook his head, and inwardly thought:

“What the plague is the woman crying for? Could she have desired a greater blessing for her children and herself than the very thing that has happened?”

Tom, in fact, seemed quite gone. At his lips no breath was perceptible. The doctor could discover no pulse. His hands and feet were cold, and the chill was stealing up into his body.

The doctor, after a stay of twenty minutes, had buttoned up his greatcoat again and pulled down his hat, and told Mrs. Chuff that there was no use in his remaining any longer, when, all of a sudden, a little rill of blood began to trickle from the lancet-cut in Tom Chuff’s temple.

“That’s very odd,” said the doctor. “Let us wait a little.”

I must describe now the sensations which Tom Chuff had experienced.

With his elbows on his knees, and his chin upon his hands, he was staring into the embers, with his gin beside him, when suddenly a swimming came in his head, he lost sight of the fire, and a sound like one stroke of a loud church bell smote his brain.

Then he heard a confused humming, and the leaden weight of his head held him backward as he sank in his chair, and consciousness quite forsook him.

When he came to himself he felt chilled, and was leaning against a huge leafless tree. The night was moonless, and when he looked up he thought he had never seen stars so large and bright, or sky so black. The stars, too, seemed to blink down with longer intervals of darkness, and fiercer and more dazzling emergence, and something, he vaguely thought, of the character of silent menace and fury.

He had a confused recollection of having come there, or rather of having been carried along, as if on men’s shoulders, with a sort of rushing motion. But it was utterly indistinct; the imperfect recollection simply of a sensation. He had seen or heard nothing on his way.

He looked round. There was not a sign of a living creature near. And he began with a sense of awe to recognise the place.

The tree against which he had been leaning was one of the noble old beeches that surround at irregular intervals the churchyard of Shackleton, which spreads its green and wavy lap on the edge of the Moor of Catstean, at the opposite side of which stands the rude cottage in which he had just lost consciousness. It was six miles or more across the moor to his habitation, and the black expanse lay before him, disappearing dismally in the darkness. So that, looking straight before him, sky and land blended together in an undistinguishable and awful blank.

There was a silence quite unnatural over the place. The distant murmur of the brook, which he knew so well, was dead; not a whisper in the leaves above him; the air, earth, everything about and above was indescribably still; and he experienced that quaking of the heart that seems to portend the approach of something awful. He would have set out upon his return across the moor, had he not an undefined presentiment that he was waylaid by something he dared not pass.

The old grey church and tower of Shackleton stood like a shadow in the rear. His eye had grown accustomed to the obscurity, and he could just trace its outline. There were no comforting associations in his mind connected with it; nothing but menace and misgiving. His early training in his lawless calling was connected with this very spot. Here his father used to meet two other poachers, and bring his son, then but a boy, with him.

Under the church porch, towards morning, they used to divide the game they had taken, and take account of the sales they had made on the previous day, and make partition of the money, and drink their gin. It was here he had taken his early lessons in drinking, cursing and lawlessness. His father’s grave was hardly eight steps from the spot where he stood. In his present state of awful dejection, no scene on earth could have so helped to heighten his fear.

There was one object close by which added to his gloom. About a yard away, in rear of the tree, behind himself, and extending to his left, was an open grave, the mould and rubbish piled on the other side. At the head of this grave stood the beech-tree; its columnar stem rose like a huge monumental pillar. He knew every line and crease on its smooth surface. The initial letters of his own name, cut in its bark long ago, had spread out and wrinkled like the grotesque capitals of a fanciful engraver, and now with a sinister significance overlooked the open grave, as if answering his mental question, “Who for is t’ grave cut?”

He felt still a little stunned, and there was a faint tremor in his joints that disinclined him to exert himself; and, further, he had a vague apprehension that take what direction he might, there was danger around him worse than that of staying where he was.

On a sudden the stars began to blink more fiercely, a faint wild light overspread for a minute the bleak landscape, and he saw approaching from the moor a figure at a kind of swinging trot, with now and then a zigzag hop or two, such as men accustomed to cross such places make, to avoid the patches of slob or quag that meet them here and there. This figure resembled his father’s, and like him, whistled through his finger by way of signal as he approached; but the whistle sounded not now shrilly and sharp, as in old times, but immensely far away, and seemed to sing strangely through Tom’s head. From habit or from fear, in answer to the signal, Tom whistled as he used to do five-and-twenty years ago and more, although he was already chilled with an unearthly fear.

Like his father, too, the figure held up the bag that was in his left hand as he drew near, when it was his custom to call out to him what was in it. It did not reassure the watcher, you may be certain, when a shout unnaturally faint reached him, as the phantom dangled the bag in the air, and he heard with a faint distinctness the words, “Tom Chuff’s soul!”

Scarcely fifty yards away from the low churchyard fence at which Tom was standing, there was a wider chasm in the peat, which there threw up a growth of reeds and bulrushes, among which, as the old poacher used to do on a sudden alarm, the approaching figure suddenly cast itself down.

From the same patch of tall reeds and rushes emerged instantaneously what he at first mistook for the same figure creeping on all-fours, but what he soon perceived to be an enormous black dog with a rough coat like a bear’s, which at first sniffed about, and then started towards him in what seemed to be a sportive amble, bouncing this way and that, but as it drew near it displayed a pair of fearful eyes that glowed like live coals, and emitted from the monstrous expanse of its jaws a terrifying growl.

This beast seemed on the point of seizing him, and Tom recoiled in panic and fell into the open grave behind him. The edge which he caught as he tumbled gave way, and down he went, expecting almost at the same instant to reach the bottom. But never was such a fall! Bottomless seemed the abyss! Down, down, down, with immeasurable and still increasing speed, through utter darkness, with hair streaming straight upward, breathless, he shot with a rush of air against him, the force of which whirled up his very arms, second after second, minute after minute, through the chasm downward he flew, the icy perspiration of horror covering his body, and suddenly, as he expected to be dashed into annihilation, his descent was in an instant arrested with a tremendous shock, which, however, did not deprive him of consciousness even for a moment.

He looked about him. The place resembled a smoke-stained cavern or catacomb, the roof of which, except for a ribbed arch here and there faintly visible, was lost in darkness. From several rude passages, like the galleries of a gigantic mine, which opened from this centre chamber, was very dimly emitted a dull glow as of charcoal, which was the only light by which he could imperfectly discern the objects immediately about him.

What seemed like a projecting piece of the rock, at the corner of one of these murky entrances, moved on a sudden, and proved to be a human figure, that beckoned to him. He approached, and saw his father. He could barely recognise him, he was so monstrously altered.

“I’ve been looking for you, Tom. Welcome home, lad; come along to your place.”

Tom’s heart sank as he heard these words, which were spoken in a hollow and, he thought, derisive voice that made him tremble. But he could not help accompanying the wicked spirit, who led him into a place, in passing which he heard, as it were from within the rock, dreadful cries and appeals for mercy.

“What is this?” said he.

“Never mind.”

“Who are they?”

“Newcomers, like yourself, lad,” answered his father apathetically. “They give over that work in time, finding it is no use.”

“What shall I do?” said Tom, in an agony.

“It’s all one.”

“But what shall I do?” reiterated Tom, quivering in every joint and nerve.

“Grin and bear it, I suppose.”

“For God’s sake, if ever you cared for me, as I am your own child, let me out of this!”

“There’s no way out.”

“If there’s a way in there’s a way out, and for Heaven’s sake let me out of this.”

But the dreadful figure made no further answer, and glided backwards by his shoulder to the rear; and others appeared in view, each with a faint red halo round it, staring on him with frightful eyes, images, all in hideous variety, of eternal fury or derision. He was growing mad, it seemed, under the stare of so many eyes, increasing in number and drawing closer every moment, and at the same time myriads and myriads of voices were calling him by his name, some far away, some near, some from one point, some from another, some from behind, close to his ears. These cries were increased in rapidity and multitude, and mingled with laughter, with flitting blasphemies, with broken insults and mockeries, succeeded and obliterated by others, before he could half catch their meaning.

All this time, in proportion to the rapidity and urgency of these dreadful sights and sounds, the epilepsy of terror was creeping up to his brain, and with a long and dreadful scream he lost consciousness.

When he recovered his senses, he found himself in a small stone chamber, vaulted above, and with a ponderous door. A single point of light in the wall, with a strange brilliancy illuminated this cell.

Seated opposite to him was a venerable man with a snowy beard of immense length; an image of awful purity and severity. He was dressed in a coarse robe, with three large keys suspended from his girdle. He might have filled one’s idea of an ancient porter of a city gate; such spiritual cities, I should say, as John Bunyan loved to describe.

This old man’s eyes were brilliant and awful, and fixed on him as they were, Tom Chuff felt himself helplessly in his power. At length he spoke:

“The command is given to let you forth for one trial more. But if you are found again drinking with the drunken, and beating your fellow-servants, you shall return through the door by which you came, and go out no more.”

With these words the old man took him by the wrist and led him through the first door, and then unlocking one that stood in the cavern outside, he struck Tom Chuff sharply on the shoulder, and the door shut behind him with a sound that boomed peal after peal of thunder near and far away, and all round and above, till it rolled off gradually into silence. It was totally dark, but there was a fanning of fresh cool air that overpowered him. He felt that he was in the upper world again.

In a few minutes he began to hear voices which he knew, and first a faint point of light appeared before his eyes, and gradually he saw the flame of the candle, and, after that, the familiar faces of his wife and children, and he heard them faintly when they spoke to him, although he was as yet unable to answer.

He also saw the doctor, like an isolated figure in the dark, and heard him say:

“There, now, you have him back. He’ll do, I think.”

His first words, when he could speak and saw clearly all about him, and felt the blood on his neck and shirt, were:

“Wife, forgi’ me. I’m a changed man. Send for t’ sir.”

Which last phrase means, “Send for the clergyman.”

When the vicar came and entered the little bedroom where the scared poacher, whose soul had died within him, was lying, still sick and weak, in his bed, and with a spirit that was prostrate with terror, Tom Chuff feebly beckoned the rest from the room, and, the door being closed, the good parson heard the strange confession, and with equal amazement the man’s earnest and agitated vows of amendment, and his helpless appeals to him for support and counsel.

These, of course, were kindly met; and the visits of the rector, for some time, were frequent.

One day, when he took Tom Chuff’s hand on bidding him good-bye, the sick man held it still, and said:

“Ye’r vicar o’ Shackleton, sir, and if I shud dee, ye’ll promise me ane thing, as I a promised ye a many. I a said I’ll never gie wife, nor bairn, nor folk o’ no sort, skelp nor sizzup more, and ye’ll know o’ me no more among the sipers. Nor never will Tom draw trigger, nor set a snare again, but in an honest way, and after that ye’ll no make it a bootless bene for me, but bein’, as I say, vicar o’ Shackleton, and able to do as ye list, ye’ll no let them bury me within twenty good yerd-wands measure o’ the a’d beech trees that’s round the churchyard of Shackleton.”

“I see; you would have your grave, when your time really comes, a good way from the place where lay the grave you dreamed of.”

“That’s jest it. I’d lie at the bottom o’ a marl-pit liefer! And I’d be laid in anither churchyard just to be shut o’ my fear o’ that, but that a’ my kinsfolk is buried beyond in Shackleton, and ye’ll gie me yer promise, and no break yer word.”

“I do promise, certainly. I’m not likely to outlive you; but, if I should, and still be vicar of Shackleton, you shall be buried somewhere as near the middle of the churchyard as we can find space.”

“That’ll do.”

And so content they parted.

The effect of the vision upon Tom Chuff was powerful, and promised to be lasting. With a sore effort he exchanged his life of desultory adventure and comparative idleness for one of regular industry. He gave up drinking; he was as kind as an originally surly nature would allow to his wife and family; he went to church; in fine weather they crossed the moor to Shackleton Church; the vicar said he came there to look at the scenery of his vision, and to fortify his good resolutions by the reminder.

Impressions upon the imagination, however, are but transitory, and a bad man acting under fear is not a free agent; his real character does not appear. But as the images of the imagination fade, and the action of fear abates, the essential qualities of the man reassert themselves.

So, after a time, Tom Chuff began to grow weary of his new life; he grew lazy, and people began to say that he was catching hares, and pursuing his old contraband way of life, under the rose.

He came home one hard night, with signs of the bottle in his thick speech and violent temper. Next day he was sorry, or frightened, at all events repentant, and for a week or more something of the old horror returned, and he was once more on his good behaviour. But in a little time came a relapse, and another repentance, and then a relapse again, and gradually the return of old habits and the flooding in of all his old way of life, with more violence and gloom, in proportion as the man was alarmed and exasperated by the remembrance of his despised, but terrible, warning.

With the old life returned the misery of the cottage. The smiles, which had begun to appear with the unwonted sunshine, were seen no more. Instead, returned to his poor wife’s face the old pale and heartbroken look. The cottage lost its neat and cheerful air, and the melancholy of neglect was visible. Sometimes at night were overheard, by a chance passer-by, cries and sobs from that ill-omened dwelling. Tom Chuff was now often drunk, and not very often at home, except when he came in to sweep away his poor wife’s earnings.

Tom had long lost sight of the honest old parson. There was shame mixed with his degradation. He had grace enough left when he saw the thin figure of “t’ sir” walking along the road to turn out of his way and avoid meeting him. The clergyman shook his head, and sometimes groaned, when his name was mentioned. His horror and regret were more for the poor wife than for the relapsed sinner, for her case was pitiable indeed.

Her brother, Jack Everton, coming over from Hexley, having heard stories of all this, determined to beat Tom, for his ill-treatment of his sister, within an inch of his life. Luckily, perhaps, for all concerned, Tom happened to be away upon one of his long excursions, and poor Nell besought her brother, in extremity of terror, not to interpose between them. So he took his leave and went home muttering and sulky.

Now it happened a few months later that Nelly Chuff fell sick. She had been ailing, as heartbroken people do, for a good while. But now the end had come.

There was a coroner’s inquest when she died, for the doctor had doubts as to whether a blow had not, at least, hastened her death. Nothing certain, however, came of the inquiry. Tom Chuff had left his home more than two days before his wife’s death. He was absent upon his lawless business still when the coroner had held his quest.

Jack Everton came over from Hexley to attend the dismal obsequies of his sister. He was more incensed than ever with the wicked husband, who, one way or other, had hastened Nelly’s death. The inquest had closed early in the day. The husband had not appeared.

An occasional companion – perhaps I ought to say accomplice – of Chuff’s happened to turn up. He had left him on the borders of Westmoreland, and said he would probably be home next day. But Everton affected not to believe it. Perhaps it was to Tom Chuff, he suggested, a secret satisfaction to crown the history of his bad married life with the scandal of his absence from the funeral of his neglected and abused wife.

Everton had taken on himself the direction of the melancholy preparations. He had ordered a grave to be opened for his sister beside her mother’s, in Shackleton churchyard, at the other side of the moor. For the purpose, as I have said, of marking the callous neglect of her husband, he determined that the funeral should take place that night. His brother Dick had accompanied him, and they and his sister, with Mary and the children, and a couple of the neighbours, formed the humble cortège.

Jack Everton said he would wait behind, on the chance of Tom Chuff coming in time, that he might tell him what had happened, and make him cross the moor with him to meet the funeral. His real object, I think, was to inflict upon the villain the drubbing he had so long wished to give him. Anyhow, he was resolved, by crossing the moor, to reach the churchyard in time to anticipate the arrival of the funeral, and to have a few words with the vicar, clerk, and sexton, all old friends of his, for the parish of Shackleton was the place of his birth and early recollections.

But Tom Chuff did not appear at his house that night. In surly mood, and without a shilling in his pocket, he was making his way homeward. His bottle of gin, his last investment, half emptied, with its neck protruding, as usual on such returns, was in his coat-pocket.

His way home lay across the moor of Catstean, and the point at which he best knew the passage was from the churchyard of Shackleton. He vaulted the low wall that forms its boundary, and strode across the graves, and over many a flat, half-buried tombstone, toward the side of the churchyard next Catstean Moor.

The old church of Shackleton and its tower rose, close at his right, like a black shadow against the sky. It was a moonless night, but clear. By this time he had reached the low boundary wall, at the other side, that overlooks the wide expanse of Catstean Moor. He stood by one of the huge old beech trees, and leaned his back to its smooth trunk. Had he ever seen the sky look so black, and the stars shine out and blink so vividly? There was a deathlike silence over the scene, like the hush that precedes thunder in sultry weather. The expanse before him was lost in utter blackness. A strange quaking unnerved his heart. It was the sky and scenery of his vision! The same horror and misgiving. The same invincible fear of venturing from the spot where he stood. He would have prayed if he dared. His sinking heart demanded a restorative of some sort, and he grasped the bottle in his coat-pocket. Turning to his left, as he did so, he saw the piled-up mould of an open grave that gaped with its head close to the base of the great tree against which he was leaning.

He stood aghast. His dream was returning and slowly enveloping him. Everything he saw was weaving itself into the texture of his vision. The chill of horror stole over him.

A faint whistle came shrill and clear over the moor, and he saw a figure approaching at a swinging trot, with a zigzag course, hopping now here and now there, as men do over a surface where one has need to choose their steps. Through the jungle of reeds and bulrushes in the foreground this figure advanced; and with the same unaccountable impulse that had coerced him in his dream, he answered the whistle of the advancing figure.

On that signal it directed its course straight toward him. It mounted the low wall, and, standing there, looked into the graveyard.

“Who med answer?” challenged the newcomer from his post of observation.

“Me,” answered Tom.

“Who are you?” repeated the man upon the wall.

“Tom Chuff; and who’s this grave cut for?” He answered in a savage tone, to cover the secret shudder of his panic.

“I’ll tell you that, ye villain!” answered the stranger, descending from the wall, “I a’ looked for you far and near, and waited long, and now you’re found at last.”

Not knowing what to make of the figure that advanced upon him, Tom Chuff recoiled, stumbled, and fell backward into the open grave. He caught at the sides as he fell, but without retarding his fall.

An hour after, when lights came with the coffin, the corpse of Tom Chuff was found at the bottom of the grave. He had fallen direct upon his head, and his neck was broken. His death must have been simultaneous with his fall. Thus far his dream was accomplished.

It was his brother-in-law who had crossed the moor and approached the churchyard of Shackleton, exactly in the line which the image of his father had seemed to take in his strange vision. Fortunately for Jack Everton, the sexton and clerk of Shackleton church were, unseen by him, crossing the churchyard toward the grave of Nelly Chuff, just as Tom the poacher stumbled and fell. Suspicion of direct violence would otherwise have inevitably attached to the exasperated brother. As it was, the catastrophe was followed by no legal consequences.

The good vicar kept his word, and the grave of Tom Chuff is still pointed out by the old inhabitants of Shackleton pretty nearly in the centre of the churchyard. This conscientious compliance with the entreaty of the panic-stricken man as to the place of his sepulture gave a horrible and mocking emphasis to the strange combination by which fate had defeated his precaution, and fixed the place of his death.

The story was for many a year, and we believe still is, told round many a cottage hearth, and though it appeals to what many would term superstition, it yet sounded, in the ears of a rude and simple audience, a thrilling, and, let us hope, not altogether fruitless homily.

“All The Year Round” magazine, 08 Oct. 1870

Madam Crowl’s Ghost And Other Tales of Mystery (1923)

MADAM CROWL’S GHOST

(1870)

I’m an old woman now; and I was but thirteen my last birthday, the night I came to Applewale House. My aunt was the housekeeper there, and a sort o’ one-horse carriage was down at Lexhoe to take me and my box up to Applewale.

I was a bit frightened by the time I got to Lexhoe, and when I saw the carriage and horse, I wished myself back again with my mother at Hazelden. I was crying when I got into the “shay” – that’s what we used to call it – and old John Mulbery that drove it, and was a good-natured fellow, bought me a handful of apples at the Golden Lion, to cheer me up a bit; and he told me that there was a currant-cake, and tea, and pork-chops, waiting for me, all hot, in my aunt’s room at the great house. It was a fine moonlight night and I eat the apples, lookin’ out o’ the shay winda.

It is a shame for gentlemen to frighten a poor foolish child like I was. I sometimes think it might be tricks. There was two on ’em on the tap o’ the coach beside me. And they began to question me after nightfall, when the moon rose, where I was going to. Well, I told them it was to wait on Dame Arabella Crowl, of Applewale House, near by Lexhoe.

“Ho, then,” says one of them, “you’ll not be long there!”

And I looked at him as much as to say, “Why not?” for I had spoke out when I told them where I was goin’, as if ’twas something clever I had to say.

“Because,” says he – “and don’t you for your life tell no one, only watch her and see – she’s possessed by the devil, and more an half a ghost. Have you got a Bible?”

“Yes, sir,” says I. For my mother put my little Bible in my box, and I knew it was there: and by the same token, though the print’s too small for my ald eyes, I have it in my press to this hour.

As I looked up at him, saying “Yes, sir,” I thought I saw him winkin’ at his friend; but I could not be sure.

“Well,” says he, “be sure you put it under your bolster every night, it will keep the ald girl’s claws aff ye.”

And I got such a fright when he said that, you wouldn’t fancy! And I’d a liked to ask him a lot about the ald lady, but I was too shy, and he and his friend began talkin’ together about their own consarns, and dowly enough I got down, as I told ye, at Lexhoe. My heart sank as I drove into the dark avenue. The trees stands very thick and big, as ald as the ald house almost, and four people, with their arms out and fingertips touchin’, barely girds round some of them.

Well, my neck was stretched out o’ the winda, looking for the first view o’ the great house; and, all at once we pulled up in front of it.

A great white-and-black house it is, wi’ great black beams across and right up it, and gables lookin’ out, as white as a sheet, to the moon, and the shadows o’ the trees, two or three up and down upon the front, you could count the leaves on them, and all the little diamond-shaped winda-panes, glimmering on the great hall winda, and great shutters, in the old fashion, hinged on the wall outside, boulted across all the rest o’ the windas in front, for there was but three or four servants, and the old lady in the house, and most o’ t’rooms was locked up.

My heart was in my mouth when I sid the journey was over, and this, the great house afore me, and I sa near my aunt that I never sid till noo, and Dame Crowl, that I was come to wait upon, and was afeard on already.

My aunt kissed me in the hall, and brought me to her room. She was tall and thin, wi’ a pale face and black eyes, and long thin hands wi’ black mittins on. She was past fifty, and her word was short; but her word was law. I hev no complaints to make of her; but she was a hard woman, and I think she would hev bin kinder to me if I had bin her sister’s child in place of her brother’s. But all that’s o’ no consequence noo.

The squire – his name was Mr. Chevenix Crowl, he was Dame Crowl’s grandson – came down there, by way of seeing that the old lady was well treated, about twice or thrice in the year. I sid him but twice all the time I was at Applewale House.

I can’t say but she was well taken care of, notwithstanding, but that was because my aunt and Meg Wyvern, that was her maid, had a conscience, and did their duty by her.

Mrs. Wyvern – Meg Wyvern my aunt called her to herself, and Mrs. Wyvern to me – was a fat, jolly lass of fifty, a good height and a good breadth, always good-humoured, and walked slow. She had fine wages, but she was a bit stingy, and kept all her fine clothes under lock and key, and wore, mostly, a twilled chocolate cotton, wi’ red, and yellow, and green sprigs and balls on it, and it lasted wonderful.

She never gave me nout, not the vally o’ a brass thimble, all the time I was there; but she was good-humoured, and always laughin’, and she talked no end o’ proas over her tea; and, seeing me sa sackless and dowly, she roused me up wi’ her laughin’ and stories; and I think I liked her better than my aunt – children is so taken wi’ a bit o’ fun or a story – though my aunt was very good to me, but a hard woman about some things, and silent always.

My aunt took me into her bed-chamber, that I might rest myself a bit while she was settin’ the tea in her room. But first she patted me on the shouther, and said I was a tall lass o’ my years, and had spired up well, and asked me if I could do plain work and stitchin’; and she looked in my face, and said I was like my father, her brother, that was dead and gone, and she hoped I was a better Christian, and wad na du a’ that lids.

It was a hard sayin’ the first time I set my foot in her room, I thought.

When I went into the next room, the housekeeper’s room – very comfortable, yak (oak) all round – there was a fine fire blazin’ away, wi’ coal, and peat, and wood, all in a low together, and tea on the table, and hot cake, and smokin’ meat; and there was Mrs. Wyvern, fat, jolly, and talkin’ away, more in an hour than my aunt would in a year.

While I was still at my tea my aunt went upstairs to see Madam Crowl.

“She’s agone up to see that old Judith Squailes is awake,” says Mrs. Wyvern. “Judith sits with Madam Crowl when me and Mrs. Shutters” – that was my aunt’s name – “is away. She’s a troublesome old lady. Ye’ll hev to be sharp wi’ her, or she’ll be into the fire, or out o’ t’ winda. She goes on wires, she does, old though she be.”

“How old, ma’am ?” says I.

“Ninety-three her last birthday, and that’s eight months gone,” says she; and she laughed. “And don’t be askin’ questions about her before your aunt – mind, I tell ye; just take her as you find her, and that’s all.”

“And what’s to be my business about her, please ma’am ?” says I.

“About the old lady? Well,” says she, “your aunt, Mrs. Shutters, will tell you that; but I suppose you’ll hev to sit in the room with your work, and see she’s at no mischief, and let her amuse herself with her things on the table, and get her her food or drink as she calls for it, and keep her out o’ mischief, and ring the bell hard if she’s troublesome.”

“Is she deaf, ma’am?”

“No, nor blind,” says she; “as sharp as a needle, but she’s gone quite aupy, and can’t remember nout rightly; and Jack the Giant Killer, or Goody Twoshoes will please her as well as the King’s court, or the affairs of the nation.”

“And what did the little girl go away for, ma’am, that went on Friday last? My aunt wrote to my mother she was to go.”

“Yes; she’s gone.”

“What for?” says I again.

“She didn’t answer Mrs. Shutters, I do suppose,” says she. “I don’t know. Don’t be talkin’; your aunt can’t abide a talkin’ child.”

“And please, ma’am, is the old lady well in health?” says I.

“It ain’t no harm to ask that,” says she. “She’s torflin’ a bit lately, but better this week past, and I dare say she’ll last out her hundred years yet. Hish! Here’s your aunt coming down the passage.”

In comes my aunt, and begins talkin’ to Mrs. Wyvern, and I, beginnin’ to feel more comfortable and at home like, was walkin’ about the room lookin’ at this thing and at that. There was pretty old china things on the cupboard, and pictures again the wall; and there was a door open in the wainscot, and I sees a queer old leathern jacket, wi’ straps and buckles to it, and sleeves as long as the bedpost, hangin’ up inside.

“What’s that you’re at, child?” says my aunt, sharp enough, turning about when I thought she least minded. “What’s that in your hand?”

“This, ma’am?” says I, turning about with the leathern jacket. “I don’t know what it is, ma’am.”

Pale as she was, the red came up in her cheeks, and her eyes flashed wi’ anger, and I think only she had half a dozen steps to take, between her and me, she’d a gov me a sizzup. But she did give me a shake by the shouther, and she plucked the thing out o’ my hand, and says she, “While ever you stay here, don’t ye meddle wi’ nout that don’t belong to ye,” and she hung it up on the pin that was there, and shut the door wi’ a bang and locked it fast.

Mrs. Wyvern was liftin’ up her hands and laughin’ all this time, quietly in her chair, rolling herself a bit in it, as she used when she was kinkin’.

The tears was in my eyes, and she winked at my aunt, and says she, dryin’ her own eyes that was wet wi’ the laughin’, “Tut, the child meant no harm – come here to me, child. It’s only a pair o’ crutches for lame ducks, and ask us no questions mind, and we’ll tell ye no lies; and come here and sit down, and drink a mug o’ beer before ye go to your bed.”

My room, mind ye, was upstairs, next to the old lady’s, and Mrs. Wyvern’s bed was near hers in her room and I was to be ready at call, if need should be.

The old lady was in one of her tantrums that night and part of the day before. She used to take fits o’ the sulks. Sometimes she would not let them dress her, and other times she would not let them take her clothes off. She was a great beauty, they said, in her day. But there was no one about Applewale that remembered her in her prime. And she was dreadful fond o’ dress, and had thick silks, and stiff satins, and velvets, and laces, and all sorts, enough to set up seven shops at the least. All her dresses was old-fashioned and queer, but worth a fortune.

Well, I went to my bed. I lay for a while awake; for a’ things was new to me; and I think the tea was in my nerves, too, for I wasn’t used to it, except now and then on a holiday, or the like. And I heard Mrs. Wyvern talkin’, and I listened with my hand to my ear; but I could not hear Mrs. Crowl, and I don’t think she said a word.

There was great care took of her. The people at Applewale knew that when she died they would every one get the sack; and their situations was well paid and easy.

The doctor come twice a week to see the old lady, and you may be sure they all did as he bid them. One thing was the same every time; they were never to cross or frump her, any way, but to humour and please her in everything.

So she lay in her clothes all that night, and next day, not a word she said, and I was at my needlework all that day, in my own room, except when I went down to my dinner.

I would a liked to see the ald lady, and even to hear her speak. But she might as well a’bin in Lunnon a’ the time for me.

When I had my dinner my aunt sent me out for a walk for an hour. I was glad when I came back, the trees was so big, and the place so dark and lonesome, and ’twas a cloudy day, and I cried a deal, thinkin’ of home, while I was walkin’ alone there. That evening, the candles bein’ alight, I was sittin’ in my room, and the door was open into Madam Crowl’s chamber, where my aunt was. It was, then, for the first time I heard what I suppose was the ald lady talking.

It was a queer noise like, I couldn’t well say which, a bird, or a beast, only it had a bleatin’ sound in it, and was very small.

I pricked my ears to hear all I could. But I could not make out one word she said. And my aunt answered:

“The evil one can’t hurt no one, ma’am, bout the Lord permits.”

Then the same queer voice from the bed says something more that I couldn’t make head nor tail on.

And my aunt med answer again: “Let them pull faces, ma’am, and say what they will; if the Lord be for us, who can be against us?”

I kept listenin’ with my ear turned to the door, holdin’ my breath, but not another word or sound came in from the room. In about twenty minutes, as I was sittin’ by the table, lookin’ at the pictures in the old Aesop’s Fables, I was aware o’ something moving at the door, and lookin’ up I sid my aunt’s face lookin’ in at the door, and her hand raised.

“Hish!” says she, very soft, and comes over to me on tiptoe, and she says in a whisper: “Thank God, she’s asleep at last, and don’t ye make no noise till I come back, for I’m goin’ down to take my cup o’ tea, and I’ll be back i’ noo – me and Mrs. Wyvern, and she’ll be sleepin’ in the room, and you can run down when we come up, and Judith will gie ye yaur supper in my room.”

And with that away she goes.

I kep’ looking at the picture-book, as before, listenin’ every noo and then, but there was no sound, not a breath, that I could hear; an’ I began whisperin’ to the pictures and talkin’ to myself to keep my heart up, for I was growin’ feared in that big room.

And at last up I got, and began walkin’ about the room, lookin’ at this and peepin’ at that, to amuse my mind, ye’ll understand. And at last what shud I do but peeps into Madame Crowl’s bed-chamber.

A grand chamber it was, wi’ a great four-poster, wi’ flowered silk curtains as tall as the ceilin’, and foldin’ down on the floor, and drawn close all round. There was a lookin’-glass, the biggest I ever sid before, and the room was a blaze o’ light. I counted twenty-two wax-candles, all alight. Such was her fancy, and no one dared say her nay.

I listened at the door, and gaped and wondered all round. When I heard there was not a breath, and did not see so much as a stir in the curtains, I took heart, and I walked into the room on tiptoe, and looked round again. Then I takes a keek at myself in the big glass; and at last it came in my head, “Why couldn’t I ha’ a keek at the ald lady herself in the bed?”

Ye’d think me a fule if ye knew half how I longed to see Dame Crowl, and I thought to myself if I didn’t peep now I might wait many a day before I got so gude a chance again.

Well, my dear, I came to the side o’ the bed, the curtains bein’ close, and my heart a’most failed me. But I took courage, and I slips my finger in between the thick curtains, and then my hand. So I waits a bit, but all was still as death. So, softly, softly I draws the curtain, and there, sure enough, I sid before me, stretched out like the painted lady on the tomb-stean in Lexhoe Church, the famous Dame Crowl, of Applewale House. There she was, dressed out. You never sid the like in they days. Satin and silk, and scarlet and green, and gold and pint lace; by Jen! ’twas a sight! A big powdered wig, half as high as herself, was a-top o’ her head, and, wow! – was ever such wrinkles? – and her old baggy throat all powdered white, and her cheeks rouged, and mouse-skin eyebrows, that Mrs. Wyvern used to stick on, and there she lay grand and stark, wi’ a pair o’ clocked silk hose on, and heels to her shoon as tall as ninepins. Lawk! But her nose was crooked and thin, and half the whites o’ her eyes was open. She used to stand, dressed as she was, gigglin’ and dribblin’ before the lookin’-glass, wi’ a fan in her hand, and a big nosegay in her bodice. Her wrinkled little hands was stretched down by her sides, and such long nails, all cut into points, I never sid in my days. Could it ever a bin the fashion for grit fowk to wear their finger-nails so?

Well, I think ye’d a bin frightened yourself if ye’d a sid such a sight. I couldn’t let go the curtain, nor move an inch, not take my eyes off her; my very heart stood still. And in an instant she opens her eyes, and up she sits, and spins herself round, and down wi’ her, wi’ a clack on her two tall heels on the floor, facin’ me, ogglin’ in my face wi’ her two great glassy eyes, and a wicked simper wi’ her old wrinkled lips, and lang fause teeth.

Well, a corpse is a natural thing; but this was the dreadfullest sight I ever sid. She had her fingers straight out pointin’ at me, and her back was crooked, round again wi’ age. Says she:

“Ye little limb! what for did ye say I killed the boy? I’ll tickle ye till ye’re stiff!”

If I’d a thought an instant, I’d a turned about and run. But I couldn’t take my eyes off her, and I backed from her as soon as I could; and she came clatterin’ after, like a thing on wires, with her fingers pointing to my throat, and she makin’ all the time a sound with her tongue like zizz-zizz-zizz.

I kept backin’ and backin’ as quick as I could, and her fingers was only a few inches away from my throat, and I felt I’d lose my wits if she touched me.

I went back this way, right into the corner, and I gev a yellock, ye’d think saul and body was partin’, and that minute my aunt, from the door, calls out wi’ a blare, and the ald lady turns round on her, and I turns about, and ran through my room, and down the back stairs, as hard as my legs could carry me.

I cried hearty, I can tell you, when I got down to the housekeeper’s room. Mrs. Wyvern laughed a deal when I told her what happened. But she changed her key when she heard the ald lady’s words.

“Say them again,” says she.

So I told her.

“Ye little limb! What for did ye say I killed the boy? I’ll tickle ye till ye’re stiff.”

“And did ye say she killed a boy?” says she.

“Not I, ma’am,” says I.

Judith was always up with me, after that, when the two elder women was away from her. I would a jumped out at winda, rather than stay alone in the same room wi’ her.

It was about a week after, as well as I can remember, Mrs. Wyvern, one day when me and her was alone, told me a thing about Madam Crowl that I did not know before.

She being young, and a great beauty, full seventy years before, had married Squire Crowl of Applewale. But he was a widower, and had a son about nine year old.

There never was tale or tidings of this boy after one mornin’. No one could say where he went to. He was allowed too much liberty, and used to be off in the morning, one day, to the keeper’s cottage, and breakfast wi’ him, and away to the warren, and not home, mayhap, till evening, and another time down to the lake, and bathe there, and spend the day fishin’ there, or paddlin’ about in the boat. Well, no one could say what was gone wi’ him; only this, that his hat was found by the lake, under a haathorn that grows thar to this day, and ’twas thought he was drowned bathin’. And the squire’s son, by his second marriage, by this Madam Crowl that lived sa dreadful lang, came in for the estates. It was his son, the ald lady’s grandson, Squire Chevenix Crowl, that owned the estates at the time I came to Applewale.

There was a deal o’ talk lang before my aunt’s time about it; and ’twas said the stepmother knew more than she was like to let out. And she managed her husband, the ald squire, wi’ her whiteheft and flatteries. And as the boy was never seen more, in course of time the thing died out of fowks’ minds.

I’m goin’ to tell ye noo about what I sid wi’ my own een.

I was not there six months, and it was winter time, when the ald lady took her last sickness.

The doctor was afeard she might a took a fit o’ madness, as she did, fifteen years befoore, and was buckled up, many a time, in a strait-waistcoat, which was the very leathern jerkin’ I sid in the closet, off my aunt’s room.

Well, she didn’t. She pined, and windered, and went off, torflin’, torflin’, quiet enough, till a day or two before her flittin’, and then she took to rabblin’, and sometimes skirlin’ in the bed, ye’d think a robber had a knife to her throat, and she used to work out o’ the bed, and not being strong enough, then, to walk or stand, she’d fall on the flure, wi’ her ald wizened hands stretched before her face, and skirlin’ still for mercy.

Ye may guess I didn’t go into the room, and I used to be shiverin’ in my bed wi’ fear, at her skirlin’ and scrafflin’ on the flure, and blarin’ out words that id make your skin turn blue.

My aunt, and Mrs. Wyvern, and Judith Squailes, and a woman from Lexhoe, was always about her. At last she took fits, and they wore her out.

T’ sir (parson) was there, and prayed for her; but she was past praying with. I suppose it was right, but none could think there was much good in it, and sa at lang last she made her flittin’, and a’ was over, and old Dame Crowl was shrouded and coffined and Squire Chevenix was wrote for. But he was away in France, and the delay was sa lang, that t’ sir and doctor both agreed it would not du to keep her langer out o’ her place, and no one cared but just them two, and my aunt and the rest o’ us, from Applewale, to go to the buryin’. So the old lady of Applewale was laid in the vault under Lexhoe Church; and we lived up at the great house till such time as the squire should come to tell his will about us, and pay off such as he chose to discharge.

I was put into another room, two doors away from what was Dame Crowl’s chamber, after her death, and this thing happened the night before Squire Chevenix came to Applewale.

The room I was in now was a large square chamber, covered wi’ yak pannels, but unfurnished except for my bed, which had no curtains to it, and a chair and a table, or so, that looked nothing at all in such a big room. And the big looking-glass, that the old lady used to keek into and admire herself from head to heel, now that there was na mair o’ that wark, was put out of the way, and stood against the wall in my room, for there was shiftin’ o’ many things in her chambers ye may suppose, when she came to be coffined.

The news had come that day that the squire was to be down next morning at Applewale; and not sorry was I, for I thought I was sure to be sent home again to my mother. And right glad was I, and I was thinkin’ of a’ at hame, and my sister, Janet, and the kitten and the pymag, and Trimmer the tike, and all the rest, and I got sa fidgety, I couldn’t sleep, and the clock struck twelve, and me wide awake, and the room as dark as pick. My back was turned to the door, and my eyes toward the wall opposite.

Well, it could na be a full quarter past twelve, when I sees a lightin’ on the wall befoore me, as if something took fire behind, and the shadas o’ the bed, and the chair, and my gown, that was hangin’ from the wall, was dancin’ up and down, on the ceilin’ beams and the yak pannels; and I turns my head ower my shouther quick, thinkin’ something must a gone a’ fire.

And what shud I see, by Jen! but the likeness o’ the ald beldame, bedizened out in her satins and velvets, on her dead body, simperin’, wi’ her eyes as wide as saucers, and her face like the fiend himself. ’Twas a red light that rose about her in a fuffin low, as if her dress round her feet was blazin’. She was drivin’ on right for me, wi’ her ald shrivelled hands crooked as if she was goin’ to claw me. I could not stir, but she passed me straight by, wi’ a blast o’ cald air, and I sid her, at the wall, in the alcove as my aunt used to call it, which was a recess where the state bed used to stand in ald times, wi’ a door open wide, and her hands gropin’ in at somethin’ was there. I never sid that door befoore. And she turned round to me, like a thing on a pivot, flyrin’ (grinning), and all at once the room was dark, and I standin’ at the far side o’ the bed; I don’t know how I got there, and I found my tongue at last, and if I did na blare a yellock, rennin’ down the gallery and almost pulled Mrs. Wyvern’s door, off t’hooks, and frightened her half out o’ her wits.

Ye may guess I did na sleep that night; and wi’ the first light, down wi’ me to my aunt, as fast as my two legs cud carry me.

Well, my aunt did na frump or flite me, as I thought she would, but she held me by the hand, and looked hard in my face all the time. And she telt me not to be feared; and says she:

“Hed the appearance a key in its hand?”

“Yes,” says I, bringin’ it to mind, “a big key in a queer brass handle.”

“Stop a bit,” says she, lettin’ go ma hand, and openin’ the cupboard-door. “Was it like this?” says she, takin’ one out in her fingers and showing it to me, with a dark look in my face.

“That was it,” says I, quick enough.

“Are ye sure?” she says, turnin’ it round.

“Sart,” says I, and I felt like I was gain’ to faint when I sid it.

“Well, that will do, child,” says she, saftly thinkin’, and she locked it up again.

“The squire himself will be here today, before twelve o’clock, and ye must tell him all about it,” says she, thinkin’, “and I suppose I’ll be leavin’ soon, and so the best thing for the present is, that ye should go home this afternoon, and I’ll look out another place for you when I can.”

Fain was I, ye may guess, at that word.

My aunt packed up my things for me, and the three pounds that was due to me, to bring home, and Squire Crowl himself came down to Applewale that day, a handsome man, about thirty years ald. It was the second time I sid him. But this was the first time he spoke to me.

My aunt talked wi’ him in the housekeeper’s room, and I don’t know what they said. I was a bit feared on the squire, he bein’ a great gentleman down in Lexhoe, and I darn’t go near till I was called. And says he, smilin’:

“What’s a’ this ye a sen, child? it mun be a dream, for ye know there’s na sic a thing as a bo or a freet in a’ the world. But whatever it was, ma little maid, sit ye down and tell us all about it from first to last.”

Well, so soon as I med an end, he thought a bit, and says he to my aunt:

“I mind the place well. In old Sir Oliver’s time lame Wyndel told me there was a door in that recess, to the left, where the lassie dreamed she saw my grandmother open it. He was past eighty when he telt me that, and I but a boy. It’s twenty year sen. The plate and jewels used to be kept there, long ago, before the iron closet was made in the arras chamber, and he told me the key had a brass handle, and this ye say was found in the bottom o’ the kist where she kept her old fans. Now, would not it be a queer thing if we found some spoons or diamonds forgot there? Ye mun come up wi’ us, lassie, and point to the very spot.”

Loth was I, and my heart in my mouth, and fast I held by my aunt’s hand as I stept into that awsome room, and showed them both how she came and passed me by, and the spot where she stood, and where the door seemed to open.

There was an ald empty press against the wall then, and shoving it aside, sure enough there was the tracing of a door in the wainscot, and a keyhole stopped with wood, and planed across as smooth as the rest, and the joining of the door all stopped wi’ putty the colour o’ yak, and, but for the hinges that showed a bit when the press was shoved aside, ye would not consayt there was a door there at all.

“Ha!” says he, wi’ a queer smile, “this looks like it.”

It took some minutes wi’ a small chisel and hammer to pick the bit o’ wood out o’ the keyhole. The key fitted, sure enough, and, wi’ a strang twist and a lang skreeak, the boult went back and he pulled the door open.

There was another door inside, stranger than the first, but the lacks was gone, and it opened easy. Inside was a narrow floor and walls and vault o’ brick; we could not see what was in it, for ’twas dark as pick.

When my aunt had lighted the candle the squire held it up and stept in.

My aunt stood on tiptoe tryin’ to look over his shouther, and I did na see nout.

“Ha! ha!” says the squire, steppin’ backward. “What’s that? Gi’ma the poker – quick!” says he to my aunt. And as she went to the hearth I peeps beside his arm, and I sid squat down in the far corner a monkey or a flayin’ on the chest, or else the maist shrivelled up, wizzened ald wife that ever was sen on yearth.

“By Jen!” says my aunt, as, puttin’ the poker in his hand, she keeked by his shouther, and sid the ill-favoured thing, “hae a care sir, what ye’re doin’. Back wi’ ye, and shut to the door!”

But in place o’ that he steps in saftly, wi’ the poker pointed like a swoord, and he gies it a poke, and down it a’ tumbles together, head and a’, in a heap o’ bayans and dust, little meyar an’ a hatful.

’Twas the bayans o’ a child; a’ the rest went to dust at a touch. They said nout for a while, but he turns round the skull as it lay on the floor.

Young as I was I consayted I knew well enough what they was thinkin’ on.

“A dead cat!” says he, pushin’ back and blowin’ out the can’le, and shuttin’ to the door. “We’ll come back, you and me, Mrs. Shutters, and look on the shelves by-and-by. I’ve other matters first to speak to ye about; and this little girl’s goin’ hame, ye say. She has her wages, and I mun mak’ her a present,” says he, pattin’ my shoulder wi’ his hand.

And he did gimma a goud pound, and I went aff to Lexhoe about an hour after, and sa hame by the stagecoach, and fain was I to be at hame again; and I never saa ald Dame Crowl o’ Applewale, God be thanked, either in appearance or in dream, at-efter. But when I was grown to be a woman my aunt spent a day and night wi’ me at Littleham, and she telt me there was na doubt it was the poor little boy that was missing sa lang sen that was shut up to die thar in the dark by that wicked beldame, whar his skirls, or his prayers, or his thumpin’ cud na be heard, and his hat was left by the water’s edge, whoever did it, to mak’ belief he was drowned. The clothes, at the first touch, a’ ran into a snuff o’ dust in the cell whar the bayans was found. But there was a handful o’ jet buttons, and a knife with a green handle, together wi’ a couple o’ pennies the poor little fella had in his pocket, I suppose, when he was decoyed in thar, and sid his last o’ the light. And there was, amang the squire’s papers, a copy o’ the notice that was prented after he was lost, when the old squire thought he might ’a run away, or bin took by gipsies, and it said he had a green-hefted knife wi’ him, and that his buttons were o’ cut jet. Sa that is a’ I hev to say consarnin’ ald Dame Crowl, o’ Applewale House.

“All The Year Round” magazine, 31 Dec. 1870

Madam Crowl’s Ghost And Other Tales of Mystery (1923)

THE DEAD SEXTON

(1871)

The sunsets were red, the nights were long, and the weather pleasantly frosty; and Christmas, the glorious herald of the New Year, was at hand, when an event – still recounted by winter firesides, with a horror made delightful by the mellowing influence of years – occurred in the beautiful little town of Golden Friars, and signalized, as the scene of its catastrophe, the old inn known throughout a wide region of the Northumbrian counties as the George and Dragon.

Toby Crooke, the sexton, was lying dead in the old coachhouse in the inn yard. The body had been discovered, only half an hour before this story begins, under strange circumstances, and in a place where it might have lain the better part of a week undisturbed; and a dreadful suspicion astounded the village of Golden Friars.

A wintry sunset was glaring through a gorge of the western mountains, turning into fire the twigs of the leafless elms, and all the tiny blades of grass on the green by which the quaint little town is surrounded. It is built of light, grey stone, with steep gables and slender chimneys rising with airy lightness from the level sward by the margin of the beautiful lake, and backed by the grand amphitheatre of the fells at the other side, whose snowy peaks show faintly against the sky, tinged with the vaporous red of the western light. As you descend towards the margin of the lake, and see Golden Friars, its taper chimneys and slender gables, its curious old inn and gorgeous sign, and over all the graceful tower and spire of the ancient church, at this hour or by moonlight, in the solemn grandeur and stillness of the natural scenery that surrounds it, it stands before you like a fairy town.

Toby Crooke, the lank sexton, now fifty or upwards, had passed an hour or two with some village cronies, over a solemn pot of purl, in the kitchen of that cosy hostelry, the night before. He generally turned in there at about seven o’clock, and heard the news. This contented him: for he talked little, and looked always surly.

Many things are now raked up and talked over about him.

In early youth, he had been a bit of a scamp. He broke his indentures, and ran away from his master, the tanner of Bryemere; he had got into fifty bad scrapes and out again; and, just as the little world of Golden Friars had come to the conclusion that it would be well for all parties – except, perhaps, himself – and a happy riddance for his afflicted mother, if he were sunk, with a gross of quart pots about his neck, in the bottom of the lake in which the grey gables, the elms, and the towering fells of Golden Friars are mirrored, he suddenly returned, a reformed man at the ripe age of forty.

For twelve years he had disappeared, and no one knew what had become of him. Then, suddenly, as I say, he reappeared at Golden Friars – a very black and silent man, sedate and orderly. His mother was dead and buried; but the “prodigal son” was received good-naturedly. The good vicar, Doctor Jenner, reported to his wife:

“His hard heart has been softened, dear Dolly. I saw him dry his eyes, poor fellow, at the sermon yesterday.”

“I don’t wonder, Hugh darling. I know the part – ‘There is joy in Heaven.’ I am sure it was – wasn’t it? It was quite beautiful. I almost cried myself.”

The Vicar laughed gently, and stooped over her chair and kissed her, and patted her cheek fondly.

“You think too well of your old man’s sermons,” he said. “I preach, you see, Dolly, very much to the poor. If they understand me, I am pretty sure everyone else must; and I think that my simple style goes more home to both feelings and conscience—”

“You ought to have told me of his crying before. You are so eloquent,” exclaimed Dolly Jenner. “No one preaches like my man. I have never heard such sermons.”

Not many, we may be sure; for the good lady had not heard more than six from any other divine for the last twenty years.

The personages of Golden Friars talked Toby Crooke over on his return. Doctor Lincote said:

“He must have led a hard life; he had dried in so, and got a good deal of hard muscle; and he rather fancied he had been soldiering – he stood like a soldier; and the mark over his right eye looked like a gunshot.”

People might wonder how he could have survived a gunshot over the eye; but was not Lincote a doctor – and an army doctor to boot – when he was young; and who, in Golden Friars, could dispute with him on points of surgery? And I believe the truth is, that this mark had been really made by a pistol bullet.

Mr. Jarlcot, the attorney, would “go bail” he had picked up some sense in his travels; and honest Turnbull, the host of the George and Dragon, said heartily:

“We must look out something for him to put his hand to. Now’s the time to make a man of him.”

The end of it was that he became, among other things, the sexton of Golden Friars.

He was a punctual sexton. He meddled with no other person’s business; but he was a silent man, and by no means popular. He was reserved in company; and he used to walk alone by the shore of the lake, while other fellows played at fives or skittles; and when he visited the kitchen of the George, he had his liquor to himself, and in the midst of the general talk was a saturnine listener. There was something sinister in this man’s face; and when things went wrong with him, he could look dangerous enough.

There were whispered stories in Golden Friars about Toby Crooke. Nobody could say how they got there. Nothing is more mysterious than the spread of rumour. It is like a vial poured on the air. It travels, like an epidemic, on the sightless currents of the atmosphere, or by the laws of a telluric influence equally intangible. These stories treated, though darkly, of the long period of his absence from his native village; but they took no well-defined shape, and no one could refer them to any authentic source.

The Vicar’s charity was of the kind that thinketh no evil; and in such cases he always insisted on proof. Crooke was, of course, undisturbed in his office.

On the evening before the tragedy came to light – trifles are always remembered after the catastrophe – a boy, returning along the margin of the mere, passed him by seated on a prostrate trunk of a tree, under the “bield” [shelter] of a rock, counting silver money. His lean body and limbs were bent together, his knees were up to his chin, and his long fingers were telling the coins over hurriedly in the hollow of his other hand. He glanced at the boy, as the old English saying is, like “the devil looking over Lincoln.” But a black and sour look from Mr. Crooke, who never had a smile for a child nor a greeting for a wayfarer, was nothing strange.

Toby Crooke lived in the grey stone house, cold and narrow, that stands near the church porch, with the window of its staircase looking out into the churchyard, where so much of his labour, for many a day, had been expended. The greater part of this house was untenanted.

The old woman who was in charge of it slept in a settle-bed, among broken stools, old sacks, rotten chests and other rattletraps, in the small room at the rear of the house, floored with tiles.

At what time of the night she could not tell, she awoke, and saw a man, with his hat on, in her room. He had a candle in his hand, which he shaded with his coat from her eye; his back was towards her, and he was rummaging in the drawer in which she usually kept her money.

Having got her quarter’s pension of two pounds that day, however, she had placed it, folded in a rag, in the corner of her tea caddy, and locked it up in the “eat-malison” or cupboard.

She was frightened when she saw the figure in her room, and she could not tell whether her visitor might not have made his entrance from the contiguous churchyard. So, sitting bolt upright in her bed, her grey hair almost lifting her kerchief off her head, and all over in “a fit o’ t’ creepins,” as she expressed it, she demanded:

“In God’s name, what want ye thar?”

“Whar’s the peppermint ye used to hev by ye, woman? I’m bad wi’ an inward pain.”

“It’s all gane a month sin’,” she answered; and offered to make him a “het” drink if he’d get to his room.

But he said:

“Never mind, I’ll try a mouthful o’ gin.”

And, turning on his heel, he left her.

In the morning the sexton was gone. Not only in his lodging was there no account of him, but, when inquiry began to be extended, nowhere in the village of Golden Friars could he be found.

Still he might have gone off, on business of his own, to some distant village, before the town was stirring; and the sexton had no near kindred to trouble their heads about him. People, therefore, were willing to wait, and take his return ultimately for granted.

At three o’clock the good Vicar, standing at his hall door, looking across the lake towards the noble fells that rise, steep and furrowed, from that beautiful mere, saw two men approaching across the green, in a straight line, from a boat that was moored at the water’s edge. They were carrying between them something which, though not very large, seemed ponderous.

“Ye’ll ken this, sir,” said one of the boatmen as they set down, almost at his feet, a small church bell, such as in old-fashioned chimes yields the treble notes.

“This won’t be less nor five stean. I ween it’s fra’ the church steeple yon.”

“What! one of our church bells?” ejaculated the Vicar – for a moment lost in horrible amazement. “Oh, no! – no, that can’t possibly be! Where did you find it?”

He had found the boat, in the morning, moored about fifty yards from her moorings where he had left it the night before, and could not think how that came to pass; and now, as he and his partner were about to take their oars, they discovered this bell in the bottom of the boat, under a bit of canvas, also the sexton’s pick and spade – “tom-spey’ad,” they termed that peculiar, broad-bladed implement.

“Very extraordinary! We must try whether there is a bell missing from the tower,” said the Vicar, getting into a fuss. “Has Crooke come back yet? Does anyone know where he is?”

The sexton had not yet turned up.

“That’s odd – that’s provoking,” said the Vicar. “However, my key will let us in. Place the bell in the hall while I get it; and then we can see what all this means.”

To the church, accordingly, they went, the Vicar leading the way, with his own key in his hand. He turned it in the lock, and stood in the shadow of the ground porch, and shut the door.

A sack, half full, lay on the ground, with open mouth, a piece of cord lying beside it. Something clanked within it as one of the men shoved it aside with his clumsy shoe.

The Vicar opened the church door and peeped in. The dusky glow from the western sky, entering through a narrow window, illuminated the shafts and arches, the old oak carvings, and the discoloured monuments, with the melancholy glare of a dying fire.

The Vicar withdrew his head and closed the door. The gloom of the porch was deeper than ever as, stooping, he entered the narrow door that opened at the foot of the winding stair that leads to the first loft; from which a rude ladder-stair of wood, some five and twenty feet in height, mounts through a trap to the ringers’ loft.

Up the narrow stairs the Vicar climbed, followed by his attendants, to the first loft. It was very dark: a narrow bow-slit in the thick wall admitted the only light they had to guide them. The ivy leaves, seen from the deep shadow, flashed and flickered redly, and the sparrows twittered among them.

“Will one of you be so good as to go up and count the bells, and see if they are all right?” said the Vicar. “There should be—”

“Agoy! what’s that?” exclaimed one of the men, recoiling from the foot of the ladder.

“By Jen!” ejaculated the other, in equal surprise.

“Good gracious!” gasped the Vicar, who, seeing indistinctly a dark mass lying on the floor, had stooped to examine it, and placed his hand upon a cold, dead face.

The men drew the body into the streak of light that traversed the floor.

It was the corpse of Toby Crooke! There was a frightful scar across his forehead.

The alarm was given. Doctor Lincote, and Mr. Jarlcot, and Turnbull, of the George and Dragon, were on the spot immediately; and many curious and horrified spectators of minor importance.

The first thing ascertained was that the man must have been many hours dead. The next was that his skull was fractured, across the forehead, by an awful blow. The next was that his neck was broken.

His hat was found on the floor, where he had probably laid it, with his handkerchief in it.

The mystery now began to clear a little; for a bell – one of the chime hung in the tower – was found where it had rolled to, against the wall, with blood and hair on the rim of it, which corresponded with the grisly fracture across the front of his head.

The sack that lay in the vestibule was examined, and found to contain all the church plate; a silver salver that had disappeared, about a month before, from Dr. Lincote’s store of valuables; the Vicar’s gold pencil-case, which he thought he had forgot in the vestry book; silver spoons, and various other contributions, levied from time to time off a dozen different households, the mysterious disappearance of which spoils had, of late years, begun to make the honest little community uncomfortable. Two bells had been taken down from the chime; and now the shrewd part of the assemblage, putting things together, began to comprehend the nefarious plans of the sexton, who lay mangled and dead on the floor of the tower, where only two days ago he had tolled the holy bell to call the good Christians of Golden Friars to worship.

The body was carried into the yard of the George and Dragon and laid in the old coachhouse; and the townsfolk came grouping in to have a peep at the corpse, and stood round, looking darkly, and talking as low as if they were in a church.

The Vicar, in gaiters and slightly shovel hat, stood erect, as one in a little circle of notables – the doctor, the attorney, Sir Geoffrey Mardykes, who happened to be in the town, and Turnbull, the host – in the centre of the paved yard, they having made an inspection of the body, at which troops of the village stragglers, to-ing and fro-ing, were gaping and frowning as they whispered their horrible conjectures.

“What d’ye think o’ that?” said Tom Scales, the old hostler of the George, looking pale, with a stern, faint smile on his lips, as he and Dick Linklin sauntered out of the coachhouse together.

“The deaul will hev his ain noo,” answered Dick, in his friend’s ear. “T’ sexton’s got a craigthraw like he gav’ the lass over the clints of Scarsdale; ye mind what the ald soger telt us when he hid his face in the kitchen of the George here? By Jen! I’ll ne’er forget that story.”

“I ween ’twas all true enough,” replied the hostler; “and the sizzup he gav’ the sleepin’ man wi’ t’ poker across the forehead. See whar the edge o’ t’ bell took him, and smashed his ain, the selfsame lids. By ma sang, I wonder the deaul did na carry awa’ his corpse i’ the night, as he did wi’ Tam Lunder’s at Mooltern Mill.”

“Hout, man, who ever sid t’ deaul inside o’ a church?”

“The corpse is ill-faur’d enew to scare Satan himsel’, for that matter; though it’s true what you say. Aye, ye’re reet tul a trippet, thar; for Beelzebub dar’n’t show his snout inside the church, not the length o’ the black o’ my nail.”

While this discussion was going on, the gentlefolk who were talking the matter over in the centre of the yard had dispatched a message for the coroner all the way to the town of Hextan.

The last tint of sunset was fading from the sky by this time; so, of course, there was no thought of an inquest earlier than next day.

In the meantime it was horribly clear that the sexton had intended to rob the church of its plate, and had lost his life in the attempt to carry the second bell, as we have seen, down the worn ladder of the tower. He had tumbled backwards and broken his neck upon the floor of the loft; and the heavy bell, in its fall, descended with its edge across his forehead.

Never was a man more completely killed by a double catastrophe, in a moment.

The bells and the contents of the sack, it was surmised, he meant to have conveyed across the lake that night, and with the help of his spade and pick to have buried them in Clousted Forest, and returned, after an absence of but a few hours – as he easily might – before morning, unmissed and unobserved. He would no doubt, having secured his booty, have made such arrangements as would have made it appear that the church had been broken into. He would, of course, have taken all measures to divert suspicion from himself, and have watched a suitable opportunity to repossess himself of the buried treasure and dispose of it in safety.

And now came out, into sharp relief, all the stories that had, one way or other, stolen after him into the town. Old Mrs. Pullen fainted when she saw him, and told Doctor Lincote, after, that she thought he was the highwayman who fired the shot that killed the coachman the night they were robbed on Hounslow Heath. There were the stories also told by the wayfaring old soldier with the wooden leg, and fifty others, up to this more than half disregarded, but which now seized on the popular belief with a startling grasp.

The fleeting light soon expired, and twilight was succeeded by the early night.

The inn yard gradually became quiet; and the dead sexton lay alone, in the dark, on his back, locked up in the old coachhouse, the key of which was safe in the pocket of Tom Scales, the trusty old hostler of the George.

It was about eight o’clock, and the hostler, standing alone on the road in the front of the open door of the George and Dragon, had just smoked his pipe out. A bright moon hung in the frosty sky. The fells rose from the opposite edge of the lake like phantom mountains. The air was stirless. Through the boughs and sprays of the leafless elms no sigh or motion, however hushed, was audible. Not a ripple glimmered on the lake, which at one point only reflected the brilliant moon from its dark blue expanse like burnished steel. The road that runs by the inn door, along the margin of the lake, shone dazzlingly white.

White as ghosts, among the dark holly and juniper, stood the tall piers of the Vicar’s gate, and their great stone balls, like heads, overlooking the same road, a few hundred yards up the lake, to the left. The early little town of Golden Friars was quiet by this time. Except for the townsfolk who were now collected in the kitchen of the inn itself, no inhabitant was now outside his own threshold.

Tom Scales was thinking of turning in. He was beginning to fell a little queer. He was thinking of the sexton, and could not get the fixed features of the dead man out of his head, when he heard the sharp though distant ring of a horse’s hoof upon the frozen road. Tom’s instinct apprised him of the approach of a guest to the George and Dragon. His experienced ear told him that the horseman was approaching by the Dardale road, which, after crossing that wide and dismal moss, passes the southern fells by Dunner Cleugh and finally enters the town of Golden Friars by joining the Mardykes road, at the edge of the lake, close to the gate of the Vicar’s house.

A clump of tall trees stood at this point; but the moon shone full upon the road and cast their shadow backward.

The hoofs were plainly coming at a gallop, with a hollow rattle. The horseman was a long time in appearing. Tom wondered how he had heard the sound – so sharply frosty as the air was – so very far away.

He was right in his guess. The visitor was coming over the mountainous road from Dardale Moss; and he now saw a horseman, who must have turned the corner of the Vicar’s house at the moment when his eye was wearied; for when he saw him for the first time he was advancing, in the hazy moonlight, like the shadow of a cavalier, at a gallop, upon the level strip of road that skirts the margin of the mere, between the George and the Vicar’s piers.

The hostler had not long to wonder why the rider pushed his beast at so furious a pace, and how he came to have heard him, as he now calculated, at least three miles away. A very few moments sufficed to bring horse and rider to the inn door.

It was a powerful black horse, something like the great Irish hunter that figured a hundred years ago, and would carry sixteen stone with ease across country. It would have made a grand charger. Not a hair turned. It snorted, it pawed, it arched its neck; then threw back its ears and down its head, and looked ready to lash, and then to rear; and seemed impatient to be off again, and incapable of standing quiet for a moment.

The rider got down

As light as shadow falls.

But he was a tall, sinewy figure. He wore a cape or short mantle, a cocked hat, and a pair of jack-boots, such as held their ground in some primitive corners of England almost to the close of the last century.

“Take him, lad,” said he to old Scales. “You need not walk or wisp him – he never sweats or tires. Give him his oats, and let him take his own time to eat them. House!” cried the stranger – in the old-fashioned form of summons which still lingered, at that time, in out-of-the-way places – in a deep and piercing voice.

As Tom Scales led the horse away to the stables it turned its head towards its master with a short, shrill neigh.

“About your business, old gentleman – we must not go too fast,” the stranger cried back again to his horse, with a laugh as harsh and piercing; and he strode into the house.

The hostler led this horse into the inn yard. In passing, it sidled up to the coachhouse gate, within which lay the dead sexton – snorted, pawed and lowered its head suddenly, with ear close to the plank, as if listening for a sound from within; then uttered again the same short, piercing neigh.

The hostler was chilled at this mysterious coquetry with the dead. He liked the brute less and less every minute.

In the meantime, its master had proceeded.

“I’ll go to the inn kitchen,” he said, in his startling bass, to the drawer who met him in the passage.

And on he went, as if he had known the place all his days: not seeming to hurry himself – stepping leisurely, the servant thought – but gliding on at such a rate, nevertheless, that he had passed his guide and was in the kitchen of the George before the drawer had got much more than halfway to it.

A roaring fire of dry wood, peat and coal lighted up this snug but spacious apartment – flashing on pots and pans, and dressers high-piled with pewter plates and dishes; and making the uncertain shadows of the long “hanks” of onions and many a flitch and ham, depending from the ceiling, dance on its glowing surface.

The doctor and the attorney, even Sir Geoffrey Mardykes, did not disdain on this occasion to take chairs and smoke their pipes by the kitchen fire, where they were in the thick of the gossip and discussion excited by the terrible event.

The tall stranger entered uninvited.

He looked like a gaunt, athletic Spaniard of forty, burned half black in the sun, with a bony, flattened nose. A pair of fierce black eyes were just visible under the edge of his hat; and his mouth seemed divided, beneath the moustache, by the deep scar of a hare-lip.

Sir Geoffrey Mardykes and the host of the George, aided by the doctor and the attorney, were discussing and arranging, for the third or fourth time, their theories about the death and the probable plans of Toby Crooke, when the stranger entered.

The newcomer lifted his hat, with a sort of smile, for a moment from his black head.

“What do you call this place, gentlemen?” asked the stranger.

“The town of Golden Friars, sir,” answered the doctor politely.

“The George and Dragon, sir: Anthony Turnbull, at your service,” answered mine host, with a solemn bow, at the same moment – so that the two voices went together, as if the doctor and the innkeeper were singing a catch.

“The George and the Dragon,” repeated the horseman, expanding his long hands over the fire which he had approached. “Saint George, King George, the Dragon, the Devil: it is a very grand idol, that outside your door, sir. You catch all sorts of worshippers – courtiers, fanatics, scamps: all’s fish, eh? Everybody welcome, provided he drinks like one. Suppose you brew a bowl or two of punch. I’ll stand it. How many are we? Here – count, and let us have enough. Gentlemen, I mean to spend the night here, and my horse is in the stable. What holiday, fun, or fair has got so many pleasant faces together? When I last called here – for, now I bethink me, I have seen the place before – you all looked sad. It was on a Sunday, that dismalest of holidays; and it would have been positively melancholy only that your sexton – that saint upon earth – Mr. Crooke, was here.” He was looking round, over his shoulder, and added: “Ha! don’t I see him there?”

Frightened a good deal were some of the company. All gaped in the direction in which, with a nod, he turned his eyes.

“He’s not thar – he can’t be thar – we see he’s not thar,” said Turnbull, as dogmatically as old Joe Willett might have delivered himself – for he did not care that the George should earn the reputation of a haunted house. “He’s met an accident, sir: he’s dead – he’s elsewhere – and therefore can’t be here.”

Upon this the company entertained the stranger with the narrative – which they made easy by a division of labour, two or three generally speaking at a time, and no one being permitted to finish a second sentence without finding himself corrected and supplanted.

“The man’s in Heaven, so sure as you’re not,” said the traveller so soon as the story was ended. “What! he was fiddling with the church bell, was he, and damned for that – eh? Landlord, get us some drink. A sexton damned for pulling down a church bell he has been pulling at for ten years!”

“You came, sir, by the Dardale-road, I believe?” said the doctor (village folk are curious). “A dismal moss is Dardale Moss, sir; and a bleak clim’ up the fells on t’ other side.”

“I say ‘Yes’ to all – from Dardale Moss, as black as pitch and as rotten as the grave, up that zigzag wall you call a road, that looks like chalk in the moonlight, through Dunner Cleugh, as dark as a coal-pit, and down here to the George and the Dragon, where you have a roaring fire, wise men, good punch – here it is – and a corpse in your coachhouse. Where the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together. Come, landlord, ladle out the nectar. Drink, gentlemen – drink, all. Brew another bowl at the bar. How divinely it stinks of alcohol! I hope you like it, gentlemen: it smells all over of spices, like a mummy. Drink, friends. Ladle, landlord. Drink, all. Serve it out.”

The guest fumbled in his pocket, and produced three guineas, which he slipped into Turnbull’s fat palm.

“Let punch flow till that’s out. I’m an old friend of the house. I call here, back and forward. I know you well, Turnbull, though you don’t recognize me.”

“You have the advantage of me, sir,” said Mr. Turnbull, looking hard on that dark and sinister countenance – which, or the like of which, he could have sworn he had never seen before in his life. But he liked the weight and colour of his guineas, as he dropped them into his pocket. “I hope you will find yourself comfortable while you stay.”

“You have given me a bedroom?”

“Yes, sir – the cedar chamber.”

“I know it – the very thing. No – no punch for me. By and by, perhaps.”

The talk went on, but the stranger had grown silent. He had seated himself on an oak bench by the fire, towards which he extended his feet and hands with seeming enjoyment; his cocked hat being, however, a little over his face.

Gradually the company began to thin. Sir Geoffrey Mardykes was the first to go; then some of the humbler townsfolk. The last bowl of punch was on its last legs. The stranger walked into the passage and said to the drawer:

“Fetch me a lantern. I must see my nag. Light it – hey! That will do. No – you need not come.”

The gaunt traveller took it from the man’s hand and strode along the passage to the door of the stable-yard, which he opened and passed out.

Tom Scales, standing on the pavement, was looking through the stable window at the horses when the stranger plucked his shirtsleeve. With an inward shock the hostler found himself alone in presence of the very person he had been thinking of.

“I say – they tell me you have something to look at in there” – he pointed with his thumb at the old coachhouse door. “Let us have a peep.”

Tom Scales happened to be at that moment in a state of mind highly favourable to anyone in search of a submissive instrument. He was in great perplexity, and even perturbation. He suffered the stranger to lead him to the coachhouse gate.

“You must come in and hold the lantern,” said he. “I’ll pay you handsomely.”

The old hostler applied his key and removed the padlock.

“What are you afraid of? Step in and throw the light on his face,” said the stranger grimly. “Throw open the lantern: stand there. Stoop over him a little – he won’t bite you. Steady, or you may pass the night with him!”

~   ~   ~   ~

In the meantime the company at the George had dispersed; and, shortly after, Anthony Turnbull – who, like a good landlord, was always last in bed, and first up, in his house – was taking, alone, his last look round the kitchen before making his final visit to the stable-yard, when Tom Scales tottered into the kitchen, looking like death, his hair standing upright; and he sat down on an oak chair, all in a tremble, wiped his forehead with his hand, and, instead of speaking, heaved a great sigh or two.

It was not till after he had swallowed a dram of brandy that he found his voice, and said:

“We’ve the deaul himsel’ in t’ house! By Jen! ye’d best send fo t’ sir” (the clergyman). “Happen he’ll tak him in hand wi’ holy writ, and send him elsewhidder deftly. Lord atween us and harm! I’m a sinfu’ man. I tell ye, Mr. Turnbull, I dar’n’t stop in t’ George tonight under the same roof wi’ him.”

“Ye mean the ra-beyoned, black-feyaced lad, wi’ the brocken neb? Why, that’s a gentleman wi’ a pocketful o’ guineas, man, and a horse worth fifty pounds!”

“That horse is no better nor his rider. The nags that were in the stable wi’ him, they all tuk the creepins, and sweated like rain down a thack. I tuk them all out o’ that, away from him, into the hack-stable, and I thocht I cud never get them past him. But that’s not all. When I was keekin inta t’ winda at the nags, he comes behint me and claps his claw on ma shouther, and he gars me gang wi’ him, and open the aad coachhouse door, and haad the cannle for him, till he pearked into the deed man’t feyace; and, as God’s my judge, I sid the corpse open its eyes and wark its mouth, like a man smoorin’ and strivin’ to talk. I cudna move or say a word, though I felt my hair rising on my heed; but at lang-last I gev a yelloch, and say I, ‘La! what is that?’ And he himsel’ looked round on me, like the devil he is; and, wi’ a skirl o’ a laugh, he strikes the lantern out o’ my hand. When I cum to myself we were outside the coachhouse door. The moon was shinin’ in, ad I cud see the corpse stretched on the table whar we left it; and he kicked the door to wi’ a purr o’ his foot. ‘Lock it,’ says he; and so I did. And here’s the key for ye – tak it yoursel’, sir. He offer’d me money: he said he’d mak me a rich man if I’d sell him the corpse, and help him awa’ wi’ it.”

“Hout, man! What cud he want o’ t’ corpse? He’s not doctor, to do a’ that lids. He was takin’ a rise out o’ ye, lad,” said Turnbull.

“Na, na – he wants the corpse. There’s summat you a’ me can’t tell he wants to do wi’ ’t; and he’d liefer get it wi’ sin and thievin’, and the damage of my soul. He’s one of them freytens a boo or a dobbies off Dardale Moss, that’s always astir wi’ the like after nightfall; unless – Lord save us! – he be the deaul himsel.’”

“Whar is he noo?” asked the landlord, who was growing uncomfortable.

“He spang’d up the back stair to his room. I wonder you didn’t hear him trampin’ like a wild horse; and he clapt his door that the house shook again – but Lord knows whar he is noo. Let us gang awa’s up to the Vicar’s, and gan him come down, and talk wi’ him.”

“Hoity toity, man – you’re too easy scared,” said the landlord, pale enough by this time. “’Twould be a fine thing, truly, to send abroad that the house was haunted by the deaul himsel’! Why, ’twould be the ruin o’ the George. You’re sure ye locked the door on the corpse?”

“Aye, sir – sartain.”

“Come wi’ me, Tom – we’ll gi’ a last look round the yard.”

So, side by side, with many a jealous look right and left, and over their shoulders, they went in silence. On entering the old-fashioned quadrangle, surrounded by stables and other offices – built in the antique cagework fashion – they stopped for a while under the shadow of the inn gable, and looked round the yard, and listened. All was silent – nothing stirring.

The stable lantern was lighted; and with it in his hand Tony Turnbull, holding Tom Scales by the shoulder, advanced. He hauled Tom after him for a step or two; then stood still and shoved him before him for a step or two more; and thus cautiously – as a pair of skirmishers under fire – they approached the coachhouse door.

“There, ye see – all safe,” whispered Tom, pointing to the lock, which hung – distinct in the moonlight – in its place. “Cum back, I say!”

“Cum on, say I!” retorted the landlord valorously. “It would never do to allow any tricks to be played with the chap in there” – he pointed to the coachhouse door.

“The coroner here in the morning, and never a corpse to sit on!” He unlocked the padlock with these words, having handed the lantern to Tom. “Here, keek in, Tom,” he continued; “ye hev the lantern – and see if all’s as ye left it.”

“Not me – na, not for the George and a’ that’s in it!” said Tom, with a shudder, sternly, as he took a step backward.

“What the – what are ye afraid on? Gi’ me the lantern – it is all one: I will.”

And cautiously, little by little, he opened the door; and, holding the lantern over his head in the narrow slit, he peeped in – frowning and pale – with one eye, as if he expected something to fly in his face. He closed the door without speaking, and locked it again.

“As safe as a thief in a mill,” he whispered with a nod to his companion. And at that moment a harsh laugh overhead broke the silence startlingly, and set all the poultry in the yard gabbling.

“Thar he be!” said Tom, clutching the landlord’s arm – “in the winda – see!”

The window of the cedar-room, up two pair of stairs, was open; and in the shadow a darker outline was visible of a man, with his elbows on the window-stone, looking down upon them.

“Look at his eyes – like two live coals!” gasped Tom.

The landlord could not see all this so sharply, being confused, and not so long-sighted as Tom.

“Time, sir,” called Tony Turnbull, turning cold as he thought he saw a pair of eyes shining down redly at him – “time for honest folk to be in their beds, and asleep!”

“As sound as your sexton!” said the jeering voice from above.

“Come out of this,” whispered the landlord fiercely to his hostler, plucking him hard by the sleeve.

They got into the house, and shut the door.

“I wish we were shot of him,” said the landlord, with something like a groan, as he leaned against the wall of the passage. “I’ll sit up, anyhow – and, Tom, you’ll sit wi’ me. Cum into the gun room. No one shall steal the dead man out of my yard while I can draw a trigger.”

The gun room in the George is about twelve feet square. It projects into the stable-yard and commands a full view of the old coachhouse; and, through a narrow side window, a flanking view of the back door of the inn, through which the yard is reached.

Tony Turnbull took down the blunderbuss – which was the great ordnance of the house – and loaded it with a stiff charge of pistol bullets.

He put on a greatcoat which hung there, and was his covering when he went out at night, to shoot wild ducks. Tom made himself comfortable likewise. They then sat down at the window, which was open, looking into the yard, the opposite side of which was white in the brilliant moonlight.

The landlord laid the blunderbuss across his knees, and stared into the yard. His comrade stared also. The door of the gun room was locked; so they felt tolerably secure.

An hour passed; nothing had occurred. Another. The clock struck one. The shadows had shifted a little; but still the moon shone full on the old coachhouse, and the stable where the guest’s horse stood.

Turnbull thought he heard a step on the back-stairs. Tom was watching the back door through the side window, with eyes glazing with the intensity of his stare. Anthony Turnbull, holding his breath, listened at the room door. It was a false alarm.

When he came back to the window looking into the yard:

“Hish! Look thar!” said he in a vehement whisper.

From the shadow at the left they saw the figure of the gaunt horseman, in short cloak and jack-boots, emerge. He pushed open the stable door, and led out his powerful black horse. He walked it across the front of the building till he reached the old coachhouse door; and there, with its bridle on its neck, he left it standing, while he stalked to the yard gate; and, dealing it a kick with his heel, it sprang back with the rebound, shaking from top to bottom, and stood open. The stranger returned to the side of his horse; and the door which secured the corpse of the dead sexton seemed to swing slowly open of itself as he entered, and returned with the corpse in his arms, and swung it across the shoulders of the horse, and instantly sprang into the saddle.

“Fire!” shouted Tom, and bang went the blunderbuss with a stunning crack. A thousand sparrows’ wings winnowed through the air from the thick ivy. The watchdog yelled a furious bark. There was a strange ring and whistle in the air. The blunderbuss had burst to shivers right down to the very breech. The recoil rolled the innkeeper upon his back on the floor, and Tom Scales was flung against the side of the recess of the window, which had saved him from a tumble as violent. In this position they heard the searing laugh of the departing horseman, and saw him ride out of the gate with his ghastly burden.

~   ~   ~   ~

Perhaps some of my readers, like myself, have heard this story told by Roger Turnbull, now host of the George and Dragon, the grandson of the very Tony who then swayed the spigot and keys of that inn, in the identical kitchen of which the fiend treated so many of the neighbours to punch.

What infernal object was subserved by the possession of the dead villain’s body, I have not learned. But a very curious story, in which a vampire resuscitation of Crooke the sexton figures, may throw a light upon this part of the tale.

The result of Turnbull’s shot at the disappearing fiend certainly justifies old Andrew Moreton’s dictum, which is thus expressed in his curious “History of Apparitions”: “I warn rash brands who, pretending not to fear the devil, are for using the ordinary violences with him, which affect one man from another – or with an apparition, in which they may be sure to receive some mischief. I knew one fired a gun at an apparition and the gun burst in a hundred pieces in his hand; another struck at an apparition with a sword, and broke his sword in pieces and wounded his hand grievously; and ’tis next to madness for anyone to go that way to work with any spirit, be it angel or be it devil.”

“Once a Week” magazine Christmas Annual, Dec. 1871

DICKON THE DEVIL

(1872)

About thirty years ago I was selected by two rich old maids to visit a property in that part of Lancashire which lies near the famous forest of Pendle, with which Mr. Ainsworth’s “Lancashire Witches” has made us so pleasantly familiar. My business was to make partition of a small property, including a house and demesne to which they had, a long time before, succeeded as co-heiresses.

The last forty miles of my journey I was obliged to post, chiefly by crossroads, little known, and less frequented, and presenting scenery often extremely interesting and pretty. The picturesqueness of the landscape was enhanced by the season, the beginning of September, at which I was travelling.

I had never been in this part of the world before; I am told it is now a great deal less wild, and, consequently, less beautiful.

At the inn where I had stopped for a relay of horses and some dinner – for it was then past five o’clock – I found the host, a hale old fellow of five-and-sixty, as he told me, a man of easy and garrulous benevolence, willing to accommodate his guests with any amount of talk, which the slightest tap sufficed to set flowing, on any subject you pleased.

I was curious to learn something about Barwyke, which was the name of the demesne and house I was going to. As there was no inn within some miles of it, I had written to the steward to put me up there, the best way he could, for a night.

The host of the “Three Nuns,” which was the sign under which he entertained wayfarers, had not a great deal to tell. It was twenty years, or more, since old Squire Bowes died, and no one had lived in the Hall ever since, except the gardener and his wife.

“Tom Wyndsour will be as old a man as myself; but he’s a bit taller, and not so much in flesh, quite,” said the fat innkeeper.

“But there were stories about the house,” I repeated, “that, they said, prevented tenants from coming into it?”

“Old wives’ tales; many years ago, that will be, sir; I forget ’em; I forget ’em all. Oh yes, there always will be, when a house is left so; foolish folk will always be talkin’; but I han’t heard a word about it this twenty year.”

It was vain trying to pump him; the old landlord of the “Three Nuns,” for some reason, did not choose to tell tales of Barwyke Hall, if he really did, as I suspected, remember them.

I paid my reckoning, and resumed my journey, well pleased with the good cheer of that old-world inn, but a little disappointed.

We had been driving for more than an hour, when we began to cross a wild common; and I knew that, this passed, a quarter of an hour would bring me to the door of Barwyke Hall.

The peat and furze were pretty soon left behind; we were again in the wooded scenery that I enjoyed so much, so entirely natural and pretty, and so little disturbed by traffic of any kind. I was looking from the chaise-window, and soon detected the object of which, for some time, my eye had been in search. Barwyke Hall was a large, quaint house, of that cage-work fashion known as “black-and-white,” in which the bars and angles of an oak framework contrast, black as ebony, with the white plaster that overspreads the masonry built into its interstices. This steep-roofed Elizabethan house stood in the midst of park-like grounds of no great extent, but rendered imposing by the noble stature of the old trees that now cast their lengthening shadows eastward over the sward, from the declining sun.

The park-wall was grey with age, and in many places laden with ivy. In deep grey shadow, that contrasted with the dim fires of evening reflected on the foliage above it, in a gentle hollow, stretched a lake that looked cold and black, and seemed, as it were, to skulk from observation with a guilty knowledge.

I had forgot that there was a lake at Barwyke; but the moment this caught my eye, like the cold polish of a snake in the shadow, my instinct seemed to recognize something dangerous, and I knew that the lake was connected, I could not remember how, with the story I had heard of this place in my boyhood.

I drove up a grass-grown avenue, under the boughs of these noble trees, whose foliage, dyed in autumnal red and yellow, returned the beams of the western sun gorgeously.

We drew up at the door. I got out, and had a good look at the front of the house; it was a large and melancholy mansion, with signs of long neglect upon it; great wooden shutters, in the old fashion, were barred, outside, across the windows; grass, and even nettles, were growing thick on the courtyard, and a thin moss streaked the timber beams; the plaster was discoloured by time and weather, and bore great russet and yellow stains. The gloom was increased by several grand old trees that crowded close about the house.

I mounted the steps, and looked round; the dark lake lay near me now, a little to the left. It was not large; it may have covered some ten or twelve acres; but it added to the melancholy of the scene. Near the centre of it was a small island, with two old ash-trees, leaning toward each other, their pensive images reflected in the stirless water. The only cheery influence of this scene of antiquity, solitude, and neglect was that the house and landscape were warmed with the ruddy western beams. I knocked, and my summons resounded hollow and ungenial in my ear; and the bell, from far away, returned a deep-mouthed and surly ring, as if it resented being roused from a score years’ slumber.

A light-limbed, jolly-looking old fellow, in a barracan jacket and gaiters, with a smirk of welcome, and a very sharp, red nose, that seemed to promise good cheer, opened the door with a promptitude that indicated a hospitable expectation of my arrival.

There was but little light in the hall, and that little lost itself in darkness in the background. It was very spacious and lofty, with a gallery running round it, which, when the door was open, was visible at two or three points. Almost in the dark my new acquaintance led me across this wide hall into the room destined for my reception. It was spacious, and wainscoted up to the ceiling. The furniture of this capacious chamber was old-fashioned and clumsy. There were curtains still to the windows, and a piece of Turkey carpet lay upon the floor; those windows were two in number, looking out, through the trunks of the trees close to the house, upon the lake. It needed all the fire, and all the pleasant associations of my entertainer’s red nose, to light up this melancholy chamber. A door at its farther end admitted to the room that was prepared for my sleeping apartment. It was wainscoted, like the other. It had a four-post bed, with heavy tapestry curtains, and in other respects was furnished in the same old-world and ponderous style as the other room. Its window, like those of that apartment, looked out upon the lake.

Sombre and sad as these rooms were, they were yet scrupulously clean. I had nothing to complain of; but the effect was rather dispiriting. Having given some directions about supper – a pleasant incident to look forward to – and made a rapid toilet, I called on my friend with the gaiters and red nose (Tom Wyndsour), whose occupation was that of a “bailiff,” or under-steward, of the property, to accompany me, as we had still an hour or so of sun and twilight, in a walk over the grounds.

It was a sweet autumn evening, and my guide, a hardy old fellow, strode at a pace that tasked me to keep up with.

Among clumps of trees at the northern boundary of the demesne we lighted upon the little antique parish church. I was looking down upon it, from an eminence, and the park-wall interposed; but a little way down was a stile affording access to the road, and by this we approached the iron gate of the churchyard. I saw the church door open; the sexton was replacing his pick, shovel, and spade, with which he had just been digging a grave in the churchyard, in their little repository under the stone stair of the tower. He was a polite, shrewd little hunchback, who was very happy to show me over the church. Among the monuments was one that interested me; it was erected to commemorate the very Squire Bowes from whom my two old maids had inherited the house and estate of Barwyke. It spoke of him in terms of grandiloquent eulogy, and informed the Christian reader that he had died, in the bosom of the Church of England, at the age of seventy-one.

I read this inscription by the parting beams of the setting sun, which disappeared behind the horizon just as we passed out from under the porch.

“Twenty years since the Squire died,” said I, reflecting, as I loitered still in the churchyard.

“Aye, sir; ’twill be twenty year the ninth o’ last month.”

“And a very good old gentleman?”

“Good-natured enough, and an easy gentleman he was, sir; I don’t think while he lived he ever hurt a fly,” acquiesced Tom Wyndsour. “It ain’t always easy sayin’ what’s in ’em, though, and what they may take or turn to afterward; and some o’ them sort, I think, goes mad.”

“You don’t think he was out of his mind?” I asked.

“He? La! no; not he, sir; a bit lazy, mayhap, like other old fellows; but a knew devilish well what he was about.”

Tom Wyndsour’s account was a little enigmatical; but, like old Squire Bowes, I was “a bit lazy” that evening, and asked no more questions about him.

We got over the stile upon the narrow road that skirts the churchyard. It is overhung by elms more than a hundred years old, and in the twilight, which now prevailed, was growing very dark. As side-by-side we walked along this road, hemmed in by two loose stone-like walls, something running toward us in a zigzag line passed us at a wild pace, with a sound like a frightened laugh or a shudder, and I saw, as it passed, that it was a human figure. I may confess, now, that I was a little startled. The dress of this figure was, in part, white: I know I mistook it at first for a white horse coming down the road at a gallop. Tom Wyndsour turned about and looked after the retreating figure.

“He’ll be on his travels tonight,” he said, in a low tone. “Easy served with a bed, that lad be; six foot o’ dry peat or heath, or a nook in a dry ditch. That lad hasn’t slept once in a house this twenty year, and never will while grass grows.”

“Is he mad?” I asked.

“Something that way, sir; he’s an idiot, an awpy; we call him ‘Dickon the devil,’ because the devil’s almost the only word that’s ever in his mouth.”

It struck me that this idiot was in some way connected with the story of old Squire Bowes.

“Queer things are told of him, I dare say?” I suggested.

“More or less, sir; more or less. Queer stories, some.”

“Twenty years since he slept in a house? That’s about the time the Squire died,” I continued.

“So it will be, sir; not very long after.”

“You must tell me all about that, Tom, tonight, when I can hear it comfortably, after supper.”

Tom did not seem to like my invitation; and looking straight before him as we trudged on, he said:

“You see, sir, the house has been quiet, and nout’s been troubling folk inside the walls or out, all round the woods of Barwyke, this ten year, or more; and my old woman, down there, is clear against talking about such matters, and thinks it best – and so do I – to let sleepin’ dogs be.”

He dropped his voice toward the close of the sentence, and nodded significantly.

We soon reached a point where he unlocked a wicket in the park wall, by which we entered the grounds of Barwyke once more.

The twilight deepening over the landscape, the huge and solemn trees, and the distant outline of the haunted house, exercised a sombre influence on me, which, together with the fatigue of a day of travel, and the brisk walk we had had, disinclined me to interrupt the silence in which my companion now indulged.

A certain air of comparative comfort, on our arrival, in great measure dissipated the gloom that was stealing over me. Although it was by no means a cold night, I was very glad to see some wood blazing in the grate; and a pair of candles aiding the light of the fire, made the room look cheerful. A small table, with a very white cloth, and preparations for supper, was also a very agreeable object.

I should have liked very well, under these influences, to have listened to Tom Wyndsour’s story; but after supper I grew too sleepy to attempt to lead him to the subject; and after yawning for a time, I found there was no use in contending against my drowsiness, so I betook myself to my bedroom, and by ten o’clock was fast asleep.

What interruption I experienced that night I shall tell you presently. It was not much, but it was very odd.

By next night I had completed my work at Barwyke. From early morning till then I was so incessantly occupied and hard-worked, that I had no time to think over the singular occurrence to which I have just referred. Behold me, however, at length once more seated at my little supper-table, having ended a comfortable meal. It had been a sultry day, and I had thrown one of the large windows up as high as it would go. I was sitting near it, with my brandy and water at my elbow, looking out into the dark. There was no moon, and the trees that are grouped about the house make the darkness round it supernaturally profound on such nights.

“Tom,” said I, so soon as the jug of hot punch I had supplied him with began to exercise its genial and communicative influence; “you must tell me who beside your wife and you and myself slept in the house last night.”

Tom, sitting near the door, set down his tumbler, and looked at me askance, while you might count seven, without speaking a word.

“Who else slept in the house?” he repeated, very deliberately. “Not a living soul, sir;” and he looked hard at me, still evidently expecting something more.

“That is very odd,” I said, returning his stare, and feeling really a little odd. “You are sure you were not in my room last night?”

“Not till I came to call you, sir, this morning; I can make oath of that.”

“Well,” said I, “there was someone there, I can make oath of that. I was so tired I could not make up my mind to get up; but I was waked by a sound that I thought was someone flinging down the two tin boxes in which my papers were locked up violently on the floor. I heard a slow step on the ground, and there was light in the room, although I remembered having put out my candle. I thought it must have been you, who had come in for my clothes, and upset the boxes by accident. Whoever it was, he went out, and the light with him. I was about to settle again, when, the curtain being a little open at the foot of the bed, I saw a light on the wall opposite; such as a candle from outside would cast if the door were very cautiously opening. I started up in the bed, drew the side curtain, and saw that the door was opening, and admitting light from outside. It is close, you know, to the head of the bed. A hand was holding on the edge of the door and pushing it open; not a bit like yours; a very singular hand. Let me look at yours.”

He extended it for my inspection.

“Oh no; there’s nothing wrong with your hand. This was differently shaped; fatter; and the middle finger was stunted, and shorter than the rest, looking as if it had once been broken, and the nail was crooked like a claw. I called out, ‘Who’s there?’ and the light and the hand were withdrawn, and I saw and heard no more of my visitor.”

“So sure as you’re a living man, that was him!” exclaimed Tom Wyndsour, his very nose growing pale, and his eyes almost starting out of his head.

“Who?” I asked.

“Old Squire Bowes; ’twas his hand you saw; the Lord a’ mercy on us!” answered Tom. “The broken finger, and the nail bent like a hoop. Well for you, sir, he didn’t come back when you called, that time. You came here about them Miss Dymock’s business, and he never meant they should have a foot o’ ground in Barwyke; and he was making a will to give it away quite different, when death took him short. He never was uncivil to no one; but he couldn’t abide them ladies. My mind misgave me when I heard ’twas about their business you were coming; and now you see how it is; he’ll be at his old tricks again!”

With some pressure, and a little more punch, I induced Tom Wyndsour to explain his mysterious allusions by recounting the occurrences which followed the old Squire’s death.

~   ~   ~   ~

Squire Bowes, of Barwyke, died without making a will, as you know (said Tom). And all the folk round were sorry; that is to say, sir, as sorry as folk will be for an old man that has seen a long tale of years, and has no right to grumble that death has knocked an hour too soon at his door. The Squire was well liked; he was never in a passion, or said a hard word; and he would not hurt a fly; and that made what happened after his decease the more surprising.

The first thing these ladies did, when they got the property, was to buy stock for the park.

It was not wise, in any case, to graze the land on their own account. But they little knew all they had to contend with.

Before long something went wrong with the cattle; first one, and then another, took sick and died, and so on, till the loss began to grow heavy. Then, queer stories, little by little, began to be told. It was said, first by one, then by another, that Squire Bowes was seen, about evening time, walking, just as he used to do when he was alive, among the old trees, leaning on his stick; and, sometimes, when he came up with the cattle, he would stop and lay his hand kindly like on the back of one of them; and that one was sure to fall sick next day, and die soon after.

No one ever met him in the park, or in the woods, or ever saw him, except a good distance off. But they knew his gait and his figure well, and the clothes he used to wear; and they could tell the beast he laid his hand on by its colour – white, dun, or black; and that beast was sure to sicken and die. The neighbours grew shy of taking the path over the park; and no one liked to walk in the woods, or come inside the bounds of Barwyke; and the cattle went on sickening and dying, as before.

At that time there was one Thomas Pyke; he had been a groom to the old Squire; and he was in care of the place, and was the only one that used to sleep in the house.

Tom was vexed, hearing these stories; which he did not believe the half on ’em; and more especial as he could not get man or boy to herd the cattle; all being afeared. So he wrote to Matlock, in Derbyshire, for his brother, Richard Pyke, a clever lad, and one that knew nout o’ the story of the old Squire walking.

Dick came; and the cattle was better; folk said they could still see the old Squire, sometimes, walking, as before, in openings of the wood, with his stick in his hand; but he was shy of coming nigh the cattle, whatever his reason might be, since Dickon Pyke came; and he used to stand a long bit off, looking at them, with no more stir in him than a trunk o’ one of the old trees, for an hour at a time, till the shape melted away, little by little, like the smoke of a fire that burns out.

Tom Pyke and his brother Dickon, being the only living souls in the house, lay in the big bed in the servants’ room, the house being fast barred and locked, one night in November.

Tom was lying next the wall, and, he told me, as wide awake as ever he was at noonday. His brother Dickon lay outside, and was sound asleep.

Well, as Tom lay thinking, with his eyes turned toward the door, it opens slowly, and who should come in but old Squire Bowes, his face lookin’ as dead as he was in his coffin.

Tom’s very breath left his body; he could not take his eyes off him; and he felt the hair rising up on his head.

The Squire came to the side of the bed, and put his arms under Dickon, and lifted the boy – in a dead sleep all the time – and carried him out so, at the door.

Such was the appearance, to Tom Pyke’s eyes, and he was ready to swear to it, anywhere.

When this happened, the light, wherever it came from, all on a sudden went out, and Tom could not see his own hand before him.

More dead than alive, he lay till daylight.

Sure enough his brother Dickon was gone. No sign of him could he discover about the house; and with some trouble he got a couple of the neighbours to help him to search the woods and grounds. Not a sign of him anywhere.

At last one of them thought of the island in the lake; the little boat was moored to the old post at the water’s edge. In they got, though with small hope of finding him there. Find him, nevertheless, they did, sitting under the big ash-tree, quite out of his wits; and to all their questions he answered nothing but one cry – “Bowes, the devil! See him; see him; Bowes, the devil!” An idiot they found him; and so he will be till God sets all things right. No one could ever get him to sleep under roof-tree more. He wanders from house to house while daylight lasts; and no one cares to lock the harmless creature in the workhouse. And folk would rather not meet him after nightfall, for they think where he is there may be worse things near.

~   ~   ~   ~

A silence followed Tom’s story. He and I were alone in that large room; I was sitting near the open window, looking into the dark night air. I fancied I saw something white move across it; and I heard a sound like low talking, that swelled into a discordant shriek – “Hoo-oo-oo! Bowes, the devil! Over your shoulder. Hoo-oo-oo! ha! ha! ha!” I started up, and saw, by the light of the candle with which Tom strode to the window, the wild eyes and blighted face of the idiot, as, with a sudden change of mood, he drew off, whispering and tittering to himself, and holding up his long fingers, and looking at them as if they were lighted at the tips like a “hand of glory.”

Tom pulled down the window. The story and its epilogue were over. I confessed I was rather glad when I heard the sound of the horses’ hoofs on the courtyard, a few minutes later; and still gladder when, having bidden Tom a kind farewell, I had left the neglected house of Barwyke a mile behind me.

“London Society” magazine, Dec. 1872

A Stable For Nightmares (1896)

Madam Crowl’s Ghost And Other Tales of Mystery (1923)

LAURA SILVER BELL

(1872)

In the five Northumbrian counties you will scarcely find so bleak, ugly, and yet, in a savage way, so picturesque a moor as Dardale Moss. The moor itself spreads north, south, east, and west, a great undulating sea of black peat and heath.

What we may term its shores are wooded wildly with birch, hazel, and dwarf-oak. No towering mountains surround it, but here and there you have a rocky knoll rising among the trees, and many a wooded promontory of the same pretty, because utterly wild, forest, running out into its dark level.

Habitations are thinly scattered in this barren territory, and a full mile away from the meanest was the stone cottage of Mother Carke.

Let not my southern reader who associates ideas of comfort with the term “cottage” mistake. This thing is built of shingle, with low walls. Its thatch is hollow; the peat-smoke curls stingily from its stunted chimney. It is worthy of its savage surroundings.

The primitive neighbours remark that no rowan-tree grows near, nor holly, nor bracken, and no horseshoe is nailed on the door.

Not far from the birches and hazels that straggle about the rude wall of the little enclosure, on the contrary, they say, you may discover the broom and the ragwort, in which witches mysteriously delight. But this is perhaps a scandal.

Mall Carke was for many a year the sage femme of this wild domain. She has renounced practice, however, for some years; and now, under the rose, she dabbles, it is thought, in the black art, in which she has always been secretly skilled, tells fortunes, practises charms, and in popular esteem is little better than a witch.

Mother Carke has been away to the town of Willarden, to sell knit stockings, and is returning to her rude dwelling by Dardale Moss. To her right, as far away as the eye can reach, the moor stretches. The narrow track she has followed here tops a gentle upland, and at her left a sort of jungle of dwarf-oak and brushwood approaches its edge. The sun is sinking blood-red in the west. His disk has touched the broad black level of the moor, and his parting beams glare athwart the gaunt figure of the old beldame, as she strides homeward stick in hand, and bring into relief the folds of her mantle, which gleam like the draperies of a bronze image in the light of a fire. For a few moments this light floods the air – tree, gorse, rock, and bracken glare; and then it is out, and grey twilight over everything.

All is still and sombre. At this hour the simple traffic of the thinly-peopled country is over, and nothing can be more solitary.

From this jungle, nevertheless, through which the mists of evening are already creeping, she sees a gigantic man approaching her.

In that poor and primitive country robbery is a crime unknown. She, therefore, has no fears for her pound of tea, and pint of gin, and sixteen shillings in silver which she is bringing home in her pocket. But there is something that would have frighted another woman about this man.

He is gaunt, sombre, bony, dirty, and dressed in a black suit which a beggar would hardly care to pick out of the dust.

This ill-looking man nodded to her as he stepped on the road.

“I don’t know you,” she said.

He nodded again.

“I never sid ye neyawheere,” she exclaimed sternly.

“Fine evening, Mother Carke,” he says, and holds his snuffbox toward her.

She widened the distance between them by a step or so, and said again sternly and pale,

“I hev nowt to say to thee, whoe’er thou beest.”

“You know Laura Silver Bell?”

“That’s a byneyam; the lass’s neyam is Laura Lew,” she answered, looking straight before her.

“One name’s as good as another for one that was never christened, mother.”

“How know ye that?” she asked grimly; for it is a received opinion in that part of the world that the fairies have power over those who have never been baptised.

The stranger turned on her a malignant smile.

“There is a young lord in love with her,” the stranger says, “and I’m that lord. Have her at your house tomorrow night at eight o’clock, and you must stick cross pins through the candle, as you have done for many a one before, to bring her lover thither by ten, and her fortune’s made. And take this for your trouble.”

He extended his long finger and thumb toward her, with a guinea temptingly displayed.

“I have nowt to do wi’ thee. I nivver sid thee afoore. Git thee awa’! I earned nae goold o’ thee, and I’ll tak’ nane. Awa’ wi’ thee, or I’ll find ane that will mak’ thee!”

The old woman had stopped, and was quivering in every limb as she thus spoke.

He looked very angry. Sulkily he turned away at her words, and strode slowly toward the wood from which he had come; and as he approached it, he seemed to her to grow taller and taller, and stalked into it as high as a tree.

“I conceited there would come something o’t”, she said to herself. “Farmer Lew must git it done nesht Sunda’. The a’ad awpy!”

Old Farmer Lew was one of that sect who insist that baptism shall be but once administered, and not until the Christian candidate had attained to adult years. The girl had indeed for some time been of an age not only, according to this theory, to be baptised, but if need be to be married.

Her story was a sad little romance. A lady some seventeen years before had come down and paid Farmer Lew for two rooms in his house. She told him that her husband would follow her in a fortnight, and that he was in the mean time delayed by business in Liverpool.

In ten days after her arrival her baby was born, Mall Carke acting as sage femme on the occasion; and on the evening of that day the poor young mother died. No husband came; no wedding-ring, they said, was on her finger. About fifty pounds was found in her desk, which Farmer Lew, who was a kind old fellow and had lost his two children, put in bank for the little girl, and resolved to keep her until a rightful owner should step forward to claim her.

They found half-a-dozen love-letters signed “Francis,” and calling the dead woman “Laura.”

So Farmer Lew called the little girl Laura; and her sobriquet of “Silver Bell” was derived from a tiny silver bell, once gilt, which was found among her poor mother’s little treasures after her death, and which the child wore on a ribbon round her neck.

Thus, being very pretty and merry, she grew up as a North-country farmer’s daughter; and the old man, as she needed more looking after, grew older and less able to take care of her; so she was, in fact, very nearly her own mistress, and did pretty much in all things as she liked.

Old Mall Carke, by some caprice for which no one could account, cherished an affection for the girl, who saw her often, and paid her many a small fee in exchange for the secret indications of the future.

It was too late when Mother Carke reached her home to look for a visit from Laura Silver Bell that day.

About three o’clock next afternoon, Mother Carke was sitting knitting, with her glasses on, outside her door on the stone bench, when she saw the pretty girl mount lightly to the top of the stile at her left under the birch, against the silver stem of which she leaned her slender hand, and called,

“Mall, Mall! Mother Carke, are ye alane all by yersel’?”

“Aye, Laura lass, we can be clooas enoo, if ye want a word wi’ me,” says the old woman, rising, with a mysterious nod, and beckoning her stiffly with her long fingers.

The girl was, assuredly, pretty enough for a “lord” to fall in love with. Only look at her. A profusion of brown rippling hair, parted low in the middle of her forehead, almost touched her eyebrows, and made the pretty oval of her face, by the breadth of that rich line, more marked. What a pretty little nose! what scarlet lips, and large, dark, long-fringed eyes!

Her face is transparently tinged with those clear Murillo tints which appear in deeper dyes on her wrists and the backs of her hands. These are the beautiful gipsy-tints with which the sun dyes young skins so richly.

The old woman eyes all this, and her pretty figure, so round and slender, and her shapely little feet, cased in the thick shoes that can’t hide their comely proportions, as she stands on the top of the stile. But it is with a dark and saturnine aspect.

“Come, lass, what stand ye for atoppa t’ wall, whar folk may chance to see thee? I hev a thing to tell thee, lass.”

She beckoned her again.

“An’ I hev a thing to tell thee, Mall.”

“Come hidder,” said the old woman peremptorily.

“But ye munna gie me the creepin’s” (make me tremble). “I winna look again into the glass o’ water, mind ye.”

The old woman smiled grimly, and changed her tone.

“Now, hunny, git tha down, and let ma see thy canny feyace,” and she beckoned her again.

Laura Silver Bell did get down, and stepped lightly toward the door of the old woman’s dwelling.

“Tak this,” said the girl, unfolding a piece of bacon from her apron, “and I hev a silver sixpence to gie thee, when I’m gaen away heyam.”

They entered the dark kitchen of the cottage, and the old woman stood by the door, lest their conference should be lighted on by surprise.

“Afoore ye begin,” said Mother Carke (I soften her patois), “I mun tell ye there’s ill folk watchin’ ye. What’s auld Farmer Lew about, he doesna get t’ sir” (the clergyman) “to baptise thee? If he lets Sunda’ next pass, I’m afeared ye’ll never be sprinkled nor signed wi’ cross, while there’s a sky aboon us.”

“Agoy!” exclaims the girl, “who’s lookin’ after me?”

“A big black fella, as high as the kipples, came out o’ the wood near Deadman’s Grike, just after the sun gaed down yester e’en; I knew weel what he was, for his feet ne’er touched the road while he made as if he walked beside me. And he wanted to gie me snuff first, and I wouldna hev that; and then he offered me a gowden guinea, but I was no sic awpy, and to bring you here tonight, and cross the candle wi’ pins, to call your lover in. And he said he’s a great lord, and in luve wi’ thee.”

“And you refused him?”

“Well for thee I did, lass,” says Mother Carke.

“Why, it’s every word true!” cries the girl vehemently, starting to her feet, for she had seated herself on the great oak chest.

“True, lass? Come, say what ye mean,” demanded Mall Carke, with a dark and searching gaze.

“Last night I was coming heyam from the wake, wi’ auld farmer Dykes and his wife and his daughter Nell, and when we came to the stile, I bid them goodnight, and we parted.”

“And ye came by the path alone in the night-time, did ye?” exclaimed old Mall Carke sternly.

“I wasna afeared, I don’t know why; the path heyam leads down by the wa’as o’ auld Hawarth Castle.”

“I knaa it weel, and a dowly path it is; ye’ll keep indoors o’ nights for a while, or ye’ll rue it. What saw ye?”

“No freetin, mother; nowt I was feared on.”

“Ye heard a voice callin’ yer neyam?”

“I heard nowt that was dow, but the hullyhoo in the auld castle wa’s,” answered the pretty girl. “I heard nor sid nowt that’s dow, but mickle that’s conny and gladsome. I heard singin’ and laughin’ a long way off, I consaited; and I stopped a bit to listen. Then I walked on a step or two, and there, sure enough in the Pie-Mag field, under the castle wa’s, not twenty steps away, I sid a grand company; silks and satins, and men wi’ velvet coats, wi’ gowd-lace striped over them, and ladies wi’ necklaces that would dazzle ye, and fans as big as griddles; and powdered footmen, like what the shirra hed behind his coach, only these was ten times as grand.”

“It was full moon last night,” said the old woman.

“Sa bright ’twould blind ye to look at it,” said the girl.

“Never an ill sight but the deaul [devil] finds a light,” quoth the old woman. “There’s a rinnin brook thar – you were at this side, and they at that; did they try to mak ye cross over?”

“Agoy! didn’t they? Nowt but civility and kindness, though. But ye mun let me tell it my own way. They was talkin’ and laughin’, and eatin’, and drinkin’ out o’ long glasses and goud cups, seated on the grass, and music was playin’; and I keekin’ behind a bush at all the grand doin’s; and up they gits to dance; and says a tall fella I didna see afoore, ‘Ye mun step across, and dance wi’ a young lord that’s faan in luv wi’ thee, and that’s mysel’,’ and sure enow I keeked at him under my lashes and a conny lad he is, to my teyaste, though he be dressed in black, wi’ sword and sash, velvet twice as fine as they sells in the shop at Gouden Friars; and keekin’ at me again fra the corners o’ his een. And the same fella telt me he was mad in luv wi’ me, and his fadder was there, and his sister, and they came all the way from Catstean Castle to see me that night; and that’s t’ other side o’ Gouden Friars.”

“Come, lass, yer no mafflin; tell me true. What was he like? Was his feyace grimed wi’ sutt? a tall fella wi’ wide shouthers, and lukt like an ill-thing, wi’ black clothes amaist in rags?”

“His feyace was long, but weel-faured, and darker nor a gipsy; and his clothes were black and grand, and made o’ velvet, and he said he was the young lord himsel’; and he lukt like it.”

“That will be the same fella I sid at Deadman’s Grike,” said Mall Carke, with an anxious frown.

“Hoot, mudder! how cud that be?” cried the lass, with a toss of her pretty head and a smile of scorn. But the fortuneteller made no answer, and the girl went on with her story.

“When they began to dance,” continued Laura Silver Bell, “he urged me again, but I wudna step o’er; ’twas partly pride, coz I wasna dressed fine enough, and partly contrairiness, or something, but gaa I wudna, not a fut. No but I more nor half wished it a’ the time.”

“Weel for thee thou dudstna cross the brook.”

“Hoitytoity, why not?”

“Keep at heyam after nightfall, and don’t ye be walking by yersel’ by daylight or any light lang lonesome ways, till after ye’re baptised,” said Mall Carke.

“I’m like to be married first.”

“Tak care that marriage won’t hang i’ the bell-ropes,” said Mother Carke.

“Leave me alane for that. The young lord said he was maist daft wi’ luv o’ me. He wanted to gie me a conny ring wi’ a beautiful stone in it. But, drat it, I was sic an awpy I wudna tak it, and he a young lord!”

“Lord, indeed! are ye daft or dreamin’? Those fine folk, what were they? I’ll tell ye. Dobies and fairies; and if ye don’t du as yer bid, they’ll tak ye, and ye’ll never git out o’ their hands again while grass grows,” said the old woman grimly.

“Od wit it!” replies the girl impatiently, “who’s daft or dreamin’ noo? I’d a bin dead wi’ fear, if ’twas any such thing. It cudna be; all was sa luvesome, and bonny, and shapely.”

“Weel, and what do ye want o’ me, lass?” asked the old woman sharply.

“I want to know – here’s t’ sixpence – what I shud du,” said the young lass. “’Twud be a pity to lose such a marrow, hey?”

“Say yer prayers, lass; I can’t help ye,” says the old woman darkly. “If ye gaa wi’ the people, ye’ll never come back. Ye munna talk wi’ them, nor eat wi’ them, nor drink wi’ them, nor tak a pin’s-worth by way o’ gift fra them – mark weel what I say – or ye’re lost!”

The girl looked down, plainly much vexed.

The old woman stared at her with a mysterious frown steadily, for a few seconds.

“Tell me, lass, and tell me true, are ye in luve wi’ that lad?”

“What for shud I?” said the girl with a careless toss of her head, and blushing up to her very temples.

“I see how it is,” said the old woman, with a groan, and repeated the words, sadly thinking; and walked out of the door a step or two, and looked jealously round. “The lass is witched, the lass is witched!”

“Did ye see him since?” asked Mother Carke, returning.

The girl was still embarrassed; and now she spoke in a lower tone, and seemed subdued.

“I thought I sid him as I came here, walkin’ beside me among the trees; but I consait it was only the trees themsels that lukt like rinnin’ one behind another, as I walked on.”

“I can tell thee nowt, lass, but what I telt ye afoore,” answered the old woman peremptorily. “Get ye heyam, and don’t delay on the way; and say yer prayers as ye gaa; and let none but good thoughts come nigh ye; and put nayer foot autside the door-steyan again till ye gaa to be christened; and get that done a Sunda’ next.”

And with this charge, given with grisly earnestness, she saw her over the stile, and stood upon it watching her retreat, until the trees quite hid her and her path from view.

The sky grew cloudy and thunderous, and the air darkened rapidly, as the girl, a little frightened by Mall Carke’s view of the case, walked homeward by the lonely path among the trees.

A black cat, which had walked close by her – for these creatures sometimes take a ramble in search of their prey among the woods and thickets – crept from under the hollow of an oak, and was again with her. It seemed to her to grow bigger and bigger as the darkness deepened, and its green eyes glared as large as halfpennies in her affrighted vision as the thunder came booming along the heights from the Willarden-road.

She tried to drive it away; but it growled and hissed awfully, and set up its back as if it would spring at her, and finally it skipped up into a tree, where they grew thickest at each side of her path, and accompanied her, high over head, hopping from bough to bough as if meditating a pounce upon her shoulders. Her fancy being full of strange thoughts, she was frightened, and she fancied that it was haunting her steps, and destined to undergo some hideous transformation, the moment she ceased to guard her path with prayers.

She was frightened for a while after she got home. The dark looks of Mother Carke were always before her eyes, and a secret dread prevented her passing the threshold of her home again that night.

Next day it was different. She had got rid of the awe with which Mother Carke had inspired her. She could not get the tall dark-featured lord, in the black velvet dress, out of her head. He had “taken her fancy”; she was growing to love him. She could think of nothing else.

Bessie Hennock, a neighbour’s daughter, came to see her that day, and proposed a walk toward the ruins of Hawarth Castle, to gather “blaebirries.” So off the two girls went together.

In the thicket, along the slopes near the ivied walls of Hawarth Castle, the companions began to fill their baskets. Hours passed. The sun was sinking near the west, and Laura Silver Bell had not come home.

Over the hatch of the farmhouse door the maids leant ever and anon with outstretched necks, watching for a sign of the girl’s return, and wondering, as the shadows lengthened, what had become of her.

At last, just as the rosy sunset gilding began to overspread the landscape, Bessie Hennock, weeping into her apron, made her appearance without her companion.

Her account of their adventures was curious.

I will relate the substance of it more connectedly than her agitation would allow her to give it, and without the disguise of the rude Northumbrian dialect.

The girl said, that, as they got along together among the brambles that grow beside the brook that bounds the Pie-Mag field, she on a sudden saw a very tall big-boned man, with an ill-favoured smirched face, and dressed in worn and rusty black, standing at the other side of a little stream. She was frightened; and while looking at this dirty, wicked, starved figure, Laura Silver Bell touched her, gazing at the same tall scarecrow, but with a countenance full of confusion and even rapture. She was peeping through the bush behind which she stood, and with a sigh she said:

“Is na that a conny lad? Agoy! See his bonny velvet clothes, his sword and sash; that’s a lord, I can tell ye; and weel I know who he follows, who he luves, and who he’ll wed.”

Bessie Hennock thought her companion daft.

“See how luvesome he luks!” whispered Laura.

Bessie looked again, and saw him gazing at her companion with a malignant smile, and at the same time he beckoned her to approach.

“Darrat ta! gaa not near him! he’ll wring thy neck!” gasped Bessie in great fear, as she saw Laura step forward with a look of beautiful bashfulness and joy.

She took the hand he stretched across the stream, more for love of the hand than any need of help, and in a moment was across and by his side, and his long arm about her waist.

“Fares te weel, Bessie, I’m gain my ways,” she called, leaning her head to his shoulder; “and tell gud Fadder Lew I’m gain my ways to be happy, and may be, at lang last, I’ll see him again.”

And with a farewell wave of her hand, she went away with her dismal partner; and Laura Silver Bell was never more seen at home, or among the “coppies” and “wickwoods,” the bonny fields and bosky hollows, by Dardale Moss.

Bessie Hennock followed them for a time.

She crossed the brook, and though they seemed to move slowly enough, she was obliged to run to keep them in view; and she all the time cried to her continually, “Come back, come back, bonnie Laurie!” until, getting over a bank, she was met by a white-faced old man, and so frightened was she, that she thought she fainted outright. At all events, she did not come to herself until the birds were singing their vespers in the amber light of sunset, and the day was over.

No trace of the direction of the girl’s flight was ever discovered. Weeks and months passed, and more than a year.

At the end of that time, one of Mall Carke’s goats died, as she suspected, by the envious practices of a rival witch who lived at the far end of Dardale Moss.

All alone in her stone cabin the old woman had prepared her charm to ascertain the author of her misfortune.

The heart of the dead animal, stuck all over with pins, was burnt in the fire; the windows, doors, and every other aperture of the house being first carefully stopped. After the heart, thus prepared with suitable incantations, is consumed in the fire, the first person who comes to the door or passes by it is the offending magician.

Mother Carke completed these lonely rites at dead of night. It was a dark night, with the glimmer of the stars only, and a melancholy night-wind was soughing through the scattered woods that spread around.

After a long and dead silence, there came a heavy thump at the door, and a deep voice called her by name.

She was startled, for she expected no man’s voice; and peeping from the window, she saw, in the dim light, a coach and four horses, with gold-laced footmen, and coachman in wig and cocked hat, turned out as if for a state occasion.

She unbarred the door; and a tall gentleman, dressed in black, waiting at the threshold, entreated her, as the only sage femme within reach, to come in the coach and attend Lady Lairdale, who was about to give birth to a baby, promising her handsome payment.

Lady Lairdale! She had never heard of her.

“How far away is it?”

“Twelve miles on the old road to Golden Friars.”

Her avarice is roused, and she steps into the coach. The footman claps-to the door; the glass jingles with the sound of a laugh. The tall dark-faced gentleman in black is seated opposite; they are driving at a furious pace; they have turned out of the road into a narrower one, dark with thicker and loftier forest than she was accustomed to. She grows anxious; for she knows every road and by-path in the country round, and she has never seen this one.

He encourages her. The moon has risen above the edge of the horizon, and she sees a noble old castle. Its summit of tower, watchtower and battlement, glimmers faintly in the moonlight. This is their destination.

She feels on a sudden all but overpowered by sleep; but although she nods, she is quite conscious of the continued motion, which has become even rougher.

She makes an effort, and rouses herself. What has become of the coach, the castle, the servants? Nothing but the strange forest remains the same.

She is jolting along on a rude hurdle, seated on rushes, and a tall, big-boned man, in rags, sits in front, kicking with his heel the ill-favoured beast that pulls them along, every bone of which sticks out, and holding the halter which serves for reins. They stop at the door of a miserable building of loose stone, with a thatch so sunk and rotten, that the roof-tree and couples protrude in crooked corners, like the bones of the wretched horse, with enormous head and ears, that dragged them to the door.

The long gaunt man gets down, his sinister face grimed like his hands.

It was the same grimy giant who had accosted her on the lonely road near Deadman’s Grike. But she feels that she “must go through with it” now, and she follows him into the house.

Two rushlights were burning in the large and miserable room, and on a coarse ragged bed lay a woman groaning piteously.

“That’s Lady Lairdale,” says the gaunt dark man, who then began to stride up and down the room rolling his head, stamping furiously, and thumping one hand on the palm of the other, and talking and laughing in the corners, where there was no one visible to hear or to answer.

Old Mall Carke recognized in the faded half-starved creature who lay on the bed, as dark now and grimy as the man, and looking as if she had never in her life washed hands or face, the once blithe and pretty Laura Lew.

The hideous being who was her mate continued in the same odd fluctuations of fury, grief, and merriment; and whenever she uttered a groan, he parodied it with another, as Mother Carke thought, in saturnine derision.

At length he strode into another room, and banged the door after him.

In due time the poor woman’s pains were over, and a daughter was born.

Such an imp! with long pointed ears, flat nose, and enormous restless eyes and mouth. It instantly began to yell and talk in some unknown language, at the noise of which the father looked into the room, and told the sage femme that she should not go unrewarded.

The sick woman seized the moment of his absence to say in the ear of Mall Carke:

“If ye had not been at ill work tonight, he could not hev fetched ye. Tak no more now than your rightful fee, or he’ll keep ye here.”

At this moment he returned with a bag of gold and silver coins, which he emptied on the table, and told her to help herself.

She took four shillings, which was her primitive fee, neither more nor less; and all his urgency could not prevail with her to take a farthing more. He looked so terrible at her refusal, that she rushed out of the house.

He ran after her.

“You’ll take your money with you,” he roared, snatching up the bag, still half full, and flung it after her.

It lighted on her shoulder; and partly from the blow, partly from terror, she fell to the ground; and when she came to herself, it was morning, and she was lying across her own door-stone.

It is said that she never more told fortune or practised spell. And though all that happened sixty years ago and more, Laura Silver Bell, wise folk think, is still living, and will so continue till the day of doom among the fairies.

“Belgravia Annual” magazine, 1872

SIR DOMINICK’S BARGAIN

A LEGEND OF DUNORAN

(1838 / 1872)

SEE APPENDIX FOR EARLY VERSION

In the early autumn of the year 1838, business called me to the south of Ireland. The weather was delightful, the scenery and people were new to me, and sending my luggage on by the mail-coach route in charge of a servant, I hired a serviceable nag at a posting-house, and, full of the curiosity of an explorer, I commenced a leisurely journey of five-and-twenty miles on horseback, by sequestered crossroads, to my place of destination. By bog and hill, by plain and ruined castle, and many a winding stream, my picturesque road led me.

I had started late, and having made little more than half my journey, I was thinking of making a short halt at the next convenient place, and letting my horse have a rest and a feed, and making some provision also for the comforts of his rider.

It was about four o’clock when the road, ascending a gradual steep, found a passage through a rocky gorge between the abrupt termination of a range of mountain to my left and a rocky hill, that rose dark and sudden at my right. Below me lay a little thatched village, under a long line of gigantic beech-trees, through the boughs of which the lowly chimneys sent up their thin turf-smoke. To my left, stretched away for miles, ascending the mountain range I have mentioned, a wild park, through whose sward and ferns the rock broke, time-worn and lichen-stained. This park was studded with straggling wood, which thickened to something like a forest, behind and beyond the little village I was approaching, clothing the irregular ascent of the hillsides with beautiful, and in some places discoloured foliage.

As you descend, the road winds slightly, with the grey park-wall, built of loose stone, and mantled here and there with ivy, at its left, and crosses a shallow ford; and as I approached the village, through breaks in the woodlands, I caught glimpses of the long front of an old ruined house, placed among the trees, about halfway up the picturesque mountainside.

The solitude and melancholy of this ruin piqued my curiosity, and when I had reached the rude thatched public-house, with the sign of St. Columbkill, with robes, mitre, and crozier displayed over its lintel, having seen to my horse and made a good meal myself on a rasher and eggs, I began to think again of the wooded park and the ruinous house, and resolved on a ramble of half an hour among its sylvan solitudes.

The name of the place, I found, was Dunoran; and beside the gate a stile admitted to the grounds, through which, with a pensive enjoyment, I began to saunter towards the dilapidated mansion.

A long grass-grown road, with many turns and windings, led up to the old house, under the shadow of the wood.

The road, as it approached the house skirted the edge of a precipitous glen, clothed with hazel, dwarf-oak, and thorn, and the silent house stood with its wide-open hall door facing this dark ravine, the further edge of which was crowned with towering forest; and great trees stood about the house and its deserted courtyard and stables.

I walked in and looked about me, through passages overgrown with nettles and weeds; from room to room with ceilings rotted, and here and there a great beam dark and worn, with tendrils of ivy trailing over it. The tall walls with rotten plaster were stained and mouldy, and in some rooms the remains of decayed wainscoting crazily swung to and fro. The almost sashless windows were darkened also with ivy, and about the tall chimneys the jackdaws were wheeling, while from the huge trees that overhung the glen in sombre masses at the other side, the rooks kept up a ceaseless cawing.

As I walked through these melancholy passages – peeping only into some of the rooms, for the flooring was quite gone in the middle, and bowed down toward the centre, and the house was very nearly un-roofed, a state of things which made the exploration a little critical – I began to wonder why so grand a house, in the midst of scenery so picturesque, had been permitted to go to decay; I dreamed of the hospitalities of which it had long ago been the rallying place, and I thought what a scene of Redgauntlet revelries it might disclose at midnight.

The great staircase was of oak, which had stood the weather wonderfully, and I sat down upon its steps, musing vaguely on the transitoriness of all things under the sun.

Except for the hoarse and distant clamour of the rooks, hardly audible where I sat, no sound broke the profound stillness of the spot. Such a sense of solitude I have seldom experienced before. The air was stirless, there was not even the rustle of a withered leaf along the passage. It was oppressive. The tall trees that stood close about the building darkened it, and added something of awe to the melancholy of the scene.

In this mood I heard, with an unpleasant surprise, close to me, a voice that was drawling, and, I fancied, sneering, repeat the words: “Food for worms, dead and rotten; God over all.”

There was a small window in the wall, here very thick, which had been built up, and in the dark recess of this, deep in the shadow, I now saw a sharp-featured man, sitting with his feet dangling. His keen eyes were fixed on me, and he was smiling cynically, and before I had well recovered my surprise, he repeated the distich:

“If death was a thing that money could buy,

The rich they would live, and the poor they would die.

“It was a grand house in its day, sir,” he continued, “Dunoran House, and the Sarsfields. Sir Dominick Sarsfield was the last of the old stock. He lost his life not six foot away from where you are sitting.”

As he thus spoke he let himself down, with a little jump, on to the ground.

He was a dark-faced, sharp-featured, little hunchback, and had a walking-stick in his hand, with the end of which he pointed to a rusty stain in the plaster of the wall.

“Do you mind that mark, sir?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, standing up, and looking at it, with a curious anticipation of something worth hearing.

“That’s about seven or eight feet from the ground, sir, and you’ll not guess what it is.”

“I dare say not,” said I, “unless it is a stain from the weather.”

“’tis nothing so lucky, sir,” he answered, with the same cynical smile and a wag of his head, still pointing at the mark with his stick. “That’s a splash of brains and blood. It’s there this hundhred years; and it will never leave it while the wall stands.”

“He was murdered, then?”

“Worse than that, sir,” he answered.

“He killed himself, perhaps?”

“Worse than that, itself, this cross between us and harm! I’m oulder than I look, sir; you wouldn’t guess my years.”

He became silent, and looked at me, evidently inviting a guess.

“Well, I should guess you to be about five-and-fifty.”

He laughed, and took a pinch of snuff, and said:

“I’m that, your honour, and something to the back of it. I was seventy last Candlemas. You would not a’ thought that, to look at me.”

“Upon my word I should not; I can hardly believe it even now. Still, you don’t remember Sir Dominick Sarsfield’s death?” I said, glancing up at the ominous stain on the wall.

“No, sir, that was a long while before I was born. But my grandfather was butler here long ago, and many a time I heard tell how Sir Dominick came by his death. There was no masther in the great house ever sinst that happened. But there was two sarvants in care of it, and my aunt was one o’ them; and she kep’ me here wid her till I was nine year old, and she was lavin’ the place to go to Dublin; and from that time it was let to go down. The wind sthript the roof, and the rain rotted the timber, and little by little, in sixty years’ time, it kem to what you see. But I have a likin’ for it still, for the sake of ould times; and I never come this way but I take a look in. I don’t think it’s many more times I’ll be turnin’ to see the ould place, for I’ll be undher the sod myself before long.”

“You’ll outlive younger people,” I said.

And, quitting that trite subject, I ran on:

“I don’t wonder that you like this old place; it is a beautiful spot, such noble trees.”

“I wish ye seen the glin when the nuts is ripe; they’re the sweetest nuts in all Ireland, I think,” he rejoined, with a practical sense of the picturesque. “You’d fill your pockets while you’d be lookin’ about you.”

“These are very fine old woods,” I remarked. “I have not seen any in Ireland I thought so beautiful.”

“Eiah! your honour, the woods about here is nothing to what they wor. Al the mountains along here was wood when my father was a gossoon, and Murroa Wood was the grandest of them all. All oak mostly, and all cut down as bare as the road. Not one left here that’s fit to compare with them. Which way did your honour come hither – from Limerick?”

“No. Killaloe.”

“Well, then, you passed the ground where Murroa Wood was in former times. You kem undher Lisnavoura, the steep knob of a hill about a mile above the village here. ’twas near that Murroa Wood was, and ’twas there Sir Dominick Sarsfield first met the devil, the Lord between us and harm, and a bad meeting it was for him and his.”

I had become interested in the adventure which had occurred in the very scenery which had so greatly attracted me, and my new acquaintance, the little hunchback, was easily entreated to tell me the story, and spoke thus, so soon as we had each resumed his seat:

~   ~   ~   ~

It was a fine estate when Sir Dominick came into it; and grand doings there was entirely, feasting and fiddling, free quarters for all the pipers in the counthry round, and a welcome for everyone that liked to come. There was wine, by the hogshead, for the quality; and potteen enough to set a town a-fire, and beer and cidher enough to float a navy, for the boys and girls, and the likes o’ me. It was kep’ up the best part of a month, till the weather broke, and the rain spoilt the sod for the moneen jigs, and the fair of Allybally Killudeen comin’ on they wor obliged to give over their divarsion, and attind to the pigs.

But Sir Dominick was only beginnin’ when they wor lavin’ off. There was no way of gettin’ rid of his money and estates he did not try – what with drinkin’, dicin’, racin’, cards, and all soarts, it was not many years before the estates wor in debt, and Sir Dominick a distressed man. He showed a bold front to the world as long as he could; and then he sould off his dogs, and most of his horses, and gev out he was going to thravel in France, and the like; and so off with him for awhile; and no one in these parts heard tale or tidings of him for two or three years. Till at last quite unexpected, one night there comes a rapping at the big kitchen window. It was past ten o’clock, and old Connor Hanlon, the butler, my grandfather, was sittin’ by the fire alone, warming his shins over it. There was keen east wind blowing along the mountains that night, and whistling cowld enough, through the tops of the trees, and soundin’ lonesome through the long chimneys.

(And the storyteller glanced up at the nearest stack visible from his seat.)

So he wasn’t quite sure of the knockin’ at the window, and up he gets, and sees his master’s face.

My grandfather was glad to see him safe, for it was a long time since there was any news of him; but he was sorry, too, for it was a changed place and only himself and old Juggy Broadrick in charge of the house, and a man in the stables, and it was a poor thing to see him comin’ back to his own like that.

He shook Con by the hand, and says he:

“I came here to say a word to you. I left my horse with Dick in the stable; I may want him again before morning, or I may never want him.”

And with that he turns into the big kitchen, and draws a stool, and sits down to take an air of the fire.

“Sit down, Connor, opposite me, and listen to what I tell you, and don’t be afeard to say what you think.”

He spoke all the time lookin’ into the fire, with his hands stretched over it, and a tired man he looked.

“An’ why should I be afeard, Masther Dominick?” says my grandfather. “Yourself was a good masther to me, and so was your father, rest his soul, before you, and I’ll say the truth, and dar’ the devil, and more than that, for any Sarsfield of Dunoran, much less yourself, and a good right I’d have.”

“It’s all over with me, Con,” says Sir Dominick.

“Heaven forbid!” says my grandfather.

“’tis past praying for,” says Sir Dominick. “The last guinea’s gone; the ould place will follow it. It must be sold, and I’m come here, I don’t know why, like a ghost to have a last look round me, and go off in the dark again.”

And with that he tould him to be sure, in case he should hear of his death, to give the oak box, in the closet off his room, to his cousin, Pat Sarsfield, in Dublin, and the sword and pistols his grandfather carried in Aughrim, and two or three thrifling things of the kind.

And says he, “Con, they say if the divil gives you money overnight, you’ll find nothing but a bagful of pebbles, and chips, and nutshells, in the morning. If I thought he played fair, I’m in the humour to make a bargain with him tonight.”

“Lord forbid!” says my grandfather, standing up, with a start and crossing himself.

“They say the country’s full of men, listin’ sogers for the King o’ France. If I light on one o’ them, I’ll not refuse his offer. How contrary things goes! How long is it since me an Captain Waller fought the jewel at New Castle?”

“Six years, Masther Dominick, and ye broke his thigh with the bullet the first shot.”

“I did, Con,” says he, “and I wish, instead, he had shot me through the heart. Have you any whisky?”

My grandfather took it out of the buffet, and the masther pours out some into a bowl, and drank it off.

“I’ll go out and have a look at my horse,” says he, standing up. There was sort of a stare in his eyes, as he pulled his riding-cloak about him, as if there was something bad in his thoughts.

“Sure, I won’t be a minute running out myself to the stable, and looking after the horse for you myself,” says my grandfather.

“I’m not goin’ to the stable,” says Sir Dominick; “I may as well tell you, for I see you found it out already – I’m goin’ across the deer-park; if I come back you’ll see me in an hour’s time. But, anyhow, you’d better not follow me, for if you do I’ll shoot you, and that ’id be a bad ending to our friendship.”

And with that he walks down this passage here, and turns the key in the side door at that end of it, and out wid him on the sod into the moonlight and the cowld wind; and my grandfather seen him walkin’ hard towards the park-wall, and then he comes in and closes the door with a heavy heart.

Sir Dominick stopped to think when he got to the middle of the deer-park, for he had not made up his mind, when he left the house, and the whisky did not clear his head, only it gev him courage.

He did not feel the cowld wind now, nor fear death, nor think much of anything but the shame and fall of the old family.

And he made up his mind, if no better thought came to him between that and there, so soon as he came to Murroa Wood, he’d hang himself from one of the oak branches with his cravat.

It was a bright moonlight night, there was just a bit of a cloud driving across the moon now and then, but, only for that, as light a’most as day.

Down he goes, right for the wood of Murroa. It seemed to him every step he took was as long as three, and it was no time till he was among the big oak-trees with their roots spreading from one to another, and their branches stretching overhead like the timbers of a naked roof, and the moon shining down through them, and casting their shadows thick and twist abroad on the ground as black as my shoe.

He was sobering a bit by this time, and he slacked his pace, and he thought ’twould be better to list in the French king’s army, and thry what that might do for him, for he knew a man might take his own life any time, but it would puzzle him to take it back again when he liked.

Just as he made up his mind not to make away with himself, what should he hear but a step clinkin’ along the dry ground under the trees, and soon he sees a grand gentleman right before him comin’ up to meet him.

He was a handsome young man like himself, and he wore a cocked-hat with gold-lace round it, such as officers wears on their coats, and he had on a dress the same as French officers wore in them times.

He stopped opposite Sir Dominick, and he cum to a standstill also.

The two gentlemen took off their hats to one another, and says the stranger:

“I am recruiting, sir,” says he, “for my sovereign, and you’ll find my money won’t turn into pebbles, chips, and nutshells, by tomorrow.”

At the same time he pulls out a big purse full of gold.

The minute he set eyes on that gentleman, Sir Dominick had his own opinion of him; and at those words he felt the very hair standing up on his head.

“Don’t be afraid,” says he, “the money won’t burn you. If it proves honest gold, and if it prospers with you, I’m willing to make a bargain. This is the last day of February,” says he; “I’ll serve you seven years, and at the end of that time you shall serve me, and I’ll come for you when the seven years is over, when the clock turns the minute between February and March; and the first of March ye’ll come away with me, or never. You’ll not find me a bad master, any more than a bad servant. I love my own; and I command all the pleasures and the glory of the world. The bargain dates from this day, and the lease is out at midnight on the last day I told you; and in the year” – he told him the year, it was easy reckoned, but I forget it – “and if you’d rather wait,” he says, “for eight months and twenty eight days, before you sign the writin’, you may, if you meet me here. But I can’t do a great deal for you in the mean time; and if you don’t sign then, all you get from me, up to that time, will vanish away, and you’ll be just as you are tonight, and ready to hang yourself on the first tree you meet.”

Well, the end of it was, Sir Dominick chose to wait, and he came back to the house with a big bag full of money, as round as your hat a’most.

My grandfather was glad enough, you may be sure, to see the master safe and sound again so soon. Into the kitchen he bangs again, and swings the bag o’ money on the table; and he stands up straight, and heaves up his shoulders like a man that has just got shut of a load; and he looks at the bag, and my grandfather looks at him, and from him to it, and back again. Sir Dominick looked as white as a sheet, and says he:

“I don’t know, Con, what’s in it; it’s the heaviest load I ever carried.”

He seemed shy of openin’ the bag; and he made my grandfather heap up a roaring fire of turf and wood, and then, at last, he opens it, and, sure enough, ’twas stuffed full o’ golden guineas, bright and new, as if they were only that minute out o’ the Mint.

Sir Dominick made my grandfather sit at his elbow while he counted every guinea in the bag.

When he was done countin’, and it wasn’t far from daylight when that time came, Sir Dominick made my grandfather swear not to tell a word about it. And a close secret it was for many a day after.

When the eight months and twenty-eight days were pretty near spent and ended, Sir Dominick returned to the house here with a troubled mind, in doubt what was best to be done, and no one alive but my grandfather knew anything about the matter, and he not half what had happened.

As the day drew near, towards the end of October, Sir Dominick grew only more and more troubled in mind.

One time he made up his mind to have no more to say to such things, nor to speak again with the like of them he met with in the wood of Murroa. Then, again, his heart failed him when he thought of his debts, and he not knowing where to turn. Then, only a week before the day, everything began to go wrong with him. One man wrote from London to say that Sir Dominick paid three thousand pounds to the wrong man, and must pay it over again; another demanded a debt he never heard of before; and another, in Dublin, denied the payment of a thundherin’ big bill, and Sir Dominick could nowhere find the receipt, and so on, wid fifty other things as bad.

Well, by the time the night of the 28th of October came round, he was a’most ready to lose his senses with all the demands that was risin’ up again him on all sides, and nothing to meet them but the help of the one dhreadful friend he had to depind on at night in the oak-wood down there below.

So there was nothing for it but to go through with the business that was begun already, and about the same hour as he went last, he takes off the little crucifix he wore round his neck, for he was a Catholic, and his gospel, and his bit o’ the thrue cross that he had in a locket, for since he took the money from the Evil One he was growin’ frightful in himself, and got all he could to guard him from the power of the devil. But tonight, for his life, he daren’t take them with him. So he gives them into my grandfather’s hands without a word, only he looked as white as a sheet o’ paper; and he takes his hat and sword, and telling my grandfather to watch for him, away he goes, to try what would come of it.

It was a fine still night, and the moon – not so bright, though, now as the first time – was shinin’ over heath and rock, and down on the lonesome oak-wood below him.

His heart beat thick as he drew near it. There was not a sound, not even the distant bark of a dog from the village behind him. There was not a lonesomer spot in the country round, and if it wasn’t for his debts and losses that was drivin’ him on half mad, in spite of his fears for his soul and his hopes of paradise, and all his good angel was whisperin’ in his ear, he would a’ turned back, and sent for his clargy, and made his confession and his penance, and changed his ways, and led a good life, for he was frightened enough to have done a great dale.

Softer and slower he stept as he got, once more, in undher the big branches of the oak-threes; and when he got in a bit, near where he met with the bad spirit before, he stopped and looked round him, and felt himself, every bit, turning as cowld as a dead man, and you may be sure he did not feel much betther when he seen the same man steppin’ from behind the big tree that was touchin’ his elbow a’most.

“You found the money good,” says he, “but it was not enough. No matter, you shall have enough and to spare. I’ll see after your luck, and I’ll give you a hint whenever it can serve you; and any time you want to see me you have only to come down here, and call my face to mind, and wish me present. You shan’t owe a shilling by the end of the year, and you shall never miss the right card, the best throw, and the winning horse. Are you willing?”

The young gentleman’s voice almost stuck in his throat, and his hair was rising on his head, but he did get out a word or two to signify that he consented; and with that the Evil One handed him a needle, and bid him give him three drops of blood from his arm; and he took them in the cup of an acorn, and gave him a pen, and bid him write some words that he repeated, and that Sir Dominick did not understand, on two thin slips of parchment. He took one himself and the other he sunk in Sir Dominick’s arm at the place where he drew the blood, and he closed the flesh over it. And that’s as true as you’re sittin’ there!

Well, Sir Dominick went home. He was a frightened man, and well he might be. But in a little time he began to grow aisier in his mind. Anyhow, he got out of debt very quick, and money came tumbling in to make him richer, and everything he took in hand prospered, and he never made a wager, or played a game, but he won; and for all that, there was not a poor man on the estate that was not happier than Sir Dominick.

So he took again to his old ways; for, when the money came back, all came back, and there were hounds and horses, and wine galore, and no end of company, and grand doin’s, and divarsion, up here at the great house. And some said Sir Dominick was thinkin’ of gettin’ married; and more said he wasn’t. But, anyhow, there was somethin’ troublin’ him more than common, and so one night, unknownst to all, away he goes to the lonesome oak-wood. It was something, maybe, my grandfather thought was troublin’ him about a beautiful young lady he was jealous of, and mad in love with her. But that was only guess.

Well, when Sir Dominick got into the wood this time, he grew more in dread than ever; and he was on the point of turnin’ and lavin’ the place, when who should he see, close beside him, but my gentleman, seated on a big stone undher one of the trees. In place of looking the fine young gentleman in goold lace and grand clothes he appeared before, he was now in rags, he looked twice the size he had been, and his face smutted with soot, and he had a murdherin’ big steel hammer, as heavy as a half-hundred, with a handle a yard long, across his knees. It was so dark under the tree, he did not see him quite clear for some time.

He stood up, and he looked awful tall entirely. And what passed between them in that discourse my grandfather never heered. But Sir Dominick was as black as night afterwards, and hadn’t a laugh for anything nor a word a’most for anyone, and he only grew worse and worse, and darker and darker. And now this thing, whatever it was, used to come to him of its own accord, whether he wanted it or no; sometimes in one shape, and sometimes in another, in lonesome places, and sometimes at his side by night when he’d be ridin’ home alone, until at last he lost heart altogether and sent for the priest.

The priest was with him a long time, and when he heered the whole story, he rode off all the way for the bishop, and the bishop came here to the great house next day, and he gev Sir Dominick a good advice. He toult him he must give over dicin’, and swearin’, and drinkin’, and all bad company, and live a vartuous steady life until the seven years bargain was out, and if the divil didn’t come for him the minute afther the stroke of twelve the first morning of the month of March, he was safe out of the bargain. There was not more than eight or ten months to run now before the seven years wor out, and he lived all the time according to the bishop’s advice, as strict as if he was “in retreat.”

Well, you may guess he felt quare enough when the mornin’ of the 28th of February came.

The priest came up by appointment, and Sir Dominick and his raverence wor together in the room you see there, and kep’ up their prayers together till the clock struck twelve, and a good hour after, and not a sign of a disturbance, nor nothing came near them, and the priest slep’ that night in the house in the room next Sir Dominick’s, and all went over as comfortable as could be, and they shook hands and kissed like two comrades after winning a battle.

So, now, Sir Dominick thought he might as well have a pleasant evening, after all his fastin’ and praying; and he sent round to half a dozen of the neighbouring gentlemen to come and dine with him, and his raverence stayed and dined also, and a roarin’ bowl o’ punch they had, and no end o’ wine, and the swearin’ and dice, and cards and guineas changing hands, and songs and stories, that wouldn’t do anyone good to hear, and the priest slipped away, when he seen the turn things was takin’, and it was not far from the stroke of twelve when Sir Dominick, sitting at the head of his table, swears, “this is the best first of March I ever sat down with my friends.”

“It ain’t the first o’ March,” says Mr. Hiffernan of Ballyvoreen. He was a scholard, and always kep’ an almanack.

“What is it, then?” says Sir Dominick, startin’ up, and dhroppin’ the ladle into the bowl, and starin’ at him as if he had two heads.

“’tis the twenty-ninth of February, leap year,” says he. And just as they were talkin’, the clock strikes twelve; and my grandfather, who was half asleep in a chair by the fire in the hall, openin’ his eyes, sees a short square fellow with a cloak on, and long black hair bushin’ out from under his hat, standin’ just there where you see the bit o’ light shinin’ again’ the wall.

(My hunchbacked friend pointed with his stick to a little patch of red sunset light that relieved the deepening shadow of the passage.)

“Tell your master,” says he, in an awful voice, like the growl of a baist, “that I’m here by appointment, and expect him downstairs this minute.”

Up goes my grandfather, by these very steps you are sittin’ on.

“Tell him I can’t come down yet,” says Sir Dominick, and he turns to the company in the room, and says he with a cold sweat shinin’ on his face, “for God’s sake, gentlemen, will any of you jump from the window and bring the priest here?” One looked at another and no one knew what to make of it, and in the mean time, up comes my grandfather again, and says he, tremblin’, “He says, sir, unless you go down to him, he’ll come up to you.”

“I don’t understand this, gentlemen, I’ll see what it means,” says Sir Dominick, trying to put a face on it, and walkin’ out o’ the room like a man through the press-room, with the hangman waitin’ for him outside. Down the stairs he comes, and two or three of the gentlemen peeping over the banisters, to see. My grandfather was walking six or eight steps behind him, and he seen the stranger take a stride out to meet Sir Dominick, and catch him up in his arms, and whirl his head against the wall, and wi’ that the hall-doore flies open, and out goes the candles, and the turf and wood-ashes flyin’ with the wind out o’ the hall-fire, ran in a drift o’ sparks along the floore by his feet.

Down runs the gintlemen. Bang goes the hall-doore. Some comes runnin’ up, and more runnin’ down, with lights. It was all over with Sir Dominick. They lifted up the corpse, and put its shoulders again’ the wall; but there was not a gasp left in him. He was cowld and stiffenin’ already.

Pat Donovan was comin’ up to the great house late that night and after he passed the little brook, that the carriage track up to the house crosses, and about fifty steps to this side of it, his dog, that was by his side, makes a sudden wheel, and springs over the wall, and sets up a yowlin’ inside you’d hear a mile away; and that minute two men passed him by in silence, goin’ down from the house, one of them short and square, and the other like Sir Dominick in shape, but there was little light under the trees where he was, and they looked only like shadows; and as they passed him by he could not hear the sound of their feet and he drew back to the wall frightened; and when he got up to the great house, he found all in confusion, and the master’s body, with the head smashed to pieces, lying just on that spot.

~   ~   ~   ~

The narrator stood up and indicated with the point of his stick the exact site of the body, and, as I looked, the shadow deepened, the red stain of sunlight vanished from the wall, and the sun had gone down behind the distant hill of New Castle, leaving the haunted scene in the deep grey of darkening twilight.

So I and the storyteller parted, not without good wishes on both sides, and a little “tip,” which seemed not unwelcome, from me.

It was dusk and the moon up by the time I reached the village, remounted my nag, and looked my last on the scene of the terrible legend of Dunoran.

originally “The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh”

“Dublin University Magazine”, Mar. 1838
early version (see appendix) —
The Purcell Papers: Volume I (1880)

revised as “Sir Dominick’s Bargain”

revised version (the above story) —
“All The Year Round” magazine, 06 Jul. 1872

Madam Crowl’s Ghost And Other Tales of Mystery (1923)

NOVELETTES AND NOVELLAS

THE MURDERED COUSIN

(1838 / 1851)

SEE APPENDIX FOR EARLY VERSION

“And they lay wait for their own blood: they lurk privily for their own lives.

“So are the ways of every one that is greedy of gain; which taketh away the life of the owner thereof.”

This story of the Irish peerage is written, as nearly as possible, in the very words in which it was related by its “heroine,” the late Countess D———, and is therefore told in the first person.

My mother died when I was an infant, and of her I have no recollection, even the faintest. By her death my education was left solely to the direction of my surviving parent. He entered upon his task with a stern appreciation of the responsibility thus cast upon him. My religious instruction was prosecuted with an almost exaggerated anxiety; and I had, of course, the best masters to perfect me in all those accomplishments which my station and wealth might seem to require. My father was what is called an oddity, and his treatment of me, though uniformly kind, was governed less by affection and tenderness, than by a high and unbending sense of duty. Indeed I seldom saw or spoke to him except at mealtimes, and then, though gentle, he was usually reserved and gloomy. His leisure hours, which were many, were passed either in his study or in solitary walks; in short, he seemed to take no further interest in my happiness or improvement, than a conscientious regard to the discharge of his own duty would seem to impose.

Shortly before my birth an event occurred which had contributed much to induce and to confirm my father’s unsocial habits; it was the fact that a suspicion of murder had fallen upon his younger brother, though not sufficiently definite to lead to any public proceedings, yet strong enough to ruin him in public opinion. This disgraceful and dreadful doubt cast upon the family name, my father felt deeply and bitterly, and not the less so that he himself was thoroughly convinced of his brother’s innocence. The sincerity and strength of this conviction he shortly afterwards proved in a manner which produced the catastrophe of my story.

Before, however, I enter upon my immediate adventures, I ought to relate the circumstances which had awakened that suspicion to which I have referred, inasmuch as they are in themselves somewhat curious, and in their effects most intimately connected with my own after-history.

My uncle, Sir Arthur Tyrrell, was a gay and extravagant man, and, among other vices, was ruinously addicted to gaming. This unfortunate propensity, even after his fortune had suffered so severely as to render retrenchment imperative, nevertheless continued to engross him, nearly to the exclusion of every other pursuit. He was, however, a proud, or rather a vain man, and could not bear to make the diminution of his income a matter of triumph to those with whom he had hitherto competed; and the consequence was, that he frequented no longer the expensive haunts of his dissipation, and retired from the gay world, leaving his coterie to discover his reasons as best they might. He did not, however, forego his favourite vice, for though he could not worship his great divinity in those costly temples where he was formerly wont to take his place, yet he found it very possible to bring about him a sufficient number of the votaries of chance to answer all his ends. The consequence was, that Carrickleigh, which was the name of my uncle’s residence, was never without one or more of such visitors as I have described. It happened that upon one occasion he was visited by one Hugh Tisdall, a gentleman of loose, and, indeed, low habits, but of considerable wealth, and who had, in early youth, travelled with my uncle upon the Continent. The period of this visit was winter, and, consequently, the house was nearly deserted excepting by its ordinary inmates; it was, therefore, highly acceptable, particularly as my uncle was aware that his visitor’s tastes accorded exactly with his own.

Both parties seemed determined to avail themselves of their mutual suitability during the brief stay which Mr. Tisdall had promised; the consequence was, that they shut themselves up in Sir Arthur’s private room for nearly all the day and the greater part of the night, during the space of almost a week, at the end of which the servant having one morning, as usual, knocked at Mr. Tisdall’s bedroom door repeatedly, received no answer, and, upon attempting to enter, found that it was locked. This appeared suspicious, and the inmates of the house having been alarmed, the door was forced open, and, on proceeding to the bed, they found the body of its occupant perfectly lifeless, and hanging halfway out, the head downwards, and near the floor. One deep wound had been inflicted upon the temple, apparently with some blunt instrument, which had penetrated the brain, and another blow, less effective – probably the first aimed – had grazed his head, removing some of the scalp. The door had been double locked upon the inside, in evidence of which the key still lay where it had been placed in the lock. The window, though not secured on the interior, was closed; a circumstance not a little puzzling, as it afforded the only other mode of escape from the room. It looked out, too, upon a kind of courtyard, round which the old buildings stood, formerly accessible by a narrow doorway and passage lying in the oldest side of the quadrangle, but which had since been built up, so as to preclude all ingress or egress; the room was also upon the second story, and the height of the window considerable; in addition to all which the stone windowsill was much too narrow to allow of anyone’s standing upon it when the window was closed. Near the bed were found a pair of razors belonging to the murdered man, one of them upon the ground, and both of them open. The weapon which inflicted the mortal wound was not to be found in the room, nor were any footsteps or other traces of the murderer discoverable. At the suggestion of Sir Arthur himself, the coroner was instantly summoned to attend, and an inquest was held. Nothing, however, in any degree conclusive was elicited. The walls, ceiling, and floor of the room were carefully examined, in order to ascertain whether they contained a trapdoor or other concealed mode of entrance, but no such thing appeared. Such was the minuteness of investigation employed, that, although the grate had contained a large fire during the night, they proceeded to examine even the very chimney, in order to discover whether escape by it were possible. But this attempt, too, was fruitless, for the chimney, built in the old fashion, rose in a perfectly perpendicular line from the hearth, to a height of nearly fourteen feet above the roof, affording in its interior scarcely the possibility of ascent, the flue being smoothly plastered, and sloping towards the top like an inverted funnel; promising, too, even if the summit were attained, owing to its great height, but a precarious descent upon the sharp and steep-ridged roof; the ashes, too, which lay in the grate, and the soot, as far as it could be seen, were undisturbed, a circumstance almost conclusive upon the point.

Sir Arthur was of course examined. His evidence was given with clearness and unreserve, which seemed calculated to silence all suspicion. He stated that, up to the day and night immediately preceding the catastrophe, he had lost to a heavy amount, but that, at their last sitting, he had not only won back his original loss, but upwards of £4,000 in addition; in evidence of which he produced an acknowledgement of debt to that amount in the handwriting of the deceased, bearing date the night of the catastrophe. He had mentioned the circumstance to Lady Tyrrell, and in presence of some of his domestics; which statement was supported by their respective evidence. One of the jury shrewdly observed, that the circumstance of Mr. Tisdall’s having sustained so heavy a loss might have suggested to some ill-minded persons, accidentally hearing it, the plan of robbing him, after having murdered him in such a manner as might make it appear that he had committed suicide; a supposition which was strongly supported by the razors having been found thus displaced and removed from their case. Two persons had probably been engaged in the attempt, one watching by the sleeping man, and ready to strike him in case of his awakening suddenly, while the other was procuring the razors and employed in inflicting the fatal gash, so as to make it appear to have been the act of the murdered man himself. It was said that while the juror was making this suggestion Sir Arthur changed colour. There was nothing, however, like legal evidence to implicate him, and the consequence was that the verdict was found against a person or persons unknown, and for some time the matter was suffered to rest, until, after about five months, my father received a letter from a person signing himself Andrew Collis, and representing himself to be the cousin of the deceased. This letter stated that his brother, Sir Arthur, was likely to incur not merely suspicion but personal risk, unless he could account for certain circumstances connected with the recent murder, and contained a copy of a letter written by the deceased, and dated the very day upon the night of which the murder had been perpetrated. Tisdall’s letter contained, among a great deal of other matter, the passages which follow:

“I have had sharp work with Sir Arthur: he tried some of his stale tricks, but soon found that I was Yorkshire, too; it would not do – you understand me. We went to the work like good ones, head, heart, and soul; and in fact, since I came here, I have lost no time. I am rather fagged, but I am sure to be well paid for my hardship; I never want sleep so long as I can have the music of a dice-box, and wherewithal to pay the piper. As I told you, he tried some of his queer turns, but I foiled him like a man, and, in return, gave him more than he could relish of the genuine dead knowledge. In short, I have plucked the old baronet as never baronet was plucked before; I have scarce left him the stump of a quill. I have got promissory notes in his hand to the amount of ———; if you like round numbers, say five-and-twenty thousand pounds, safely deposited in my portable strong box, alias, double-clasped pocketbook. I leave this ruinous old rat-hole early on tomorrow, for two reasons: first, I do not want to play with Sir Arthur deeper than I think his security would warrant; and, secondly, because I am safer a hundred miles away from Sir Arthur than in the house with him. Look you, my worthy, I tell you this between ourselves – I may be wrong – but, by God, I am sure as that I am now living, that Sir A——— attempted to poison me last night. So much for old friendship on both sides. When I won the last stake, a heavy one enough, my friend leant his forehead upon his hands, and you’ll laugh when I tell you that his head literally smoked like a hot dumpling. I do not know whether his agitation was produced by the plan which he had against me, or by his having lost so heavily; though it must be allowed that he had reason to be a little funked, whichever way his thoughts went; but he pulled the bell, and ordered two bottles of Champagne. While the fellow was bringing them, he wrote a promissory note to the full amount, which he signed, and, as the man came in with the bottles and glasses, he desired him to be off. He filled a glass for me, and, while he thought my eyes were off, for I was putting up his note at the time, he dropped something slyly into it, no doubt to sweeten it; but I saw it all, and, when he handed it to me, I said, with an emphasis which he might easily understand, ‘There is some sediment in it, I’ll not drink it.’ ‘Is there?’ said he, and at the same time snatched it from my hand and threw it into the fire. What do you think of that? Have I not a tender bird in hand? Win or lose, I will not play beyond five thousand tonight, and tomorrow sees me safe out of the reach of Sir Arthur’s Champagne.”

Of the authenticity of this document, I never heard my father express a doubt; and I am satisfied that, owing to his strong conviction in favour of his brother, he would not have admitted it without sufficient inquiry, inasmuch as it tended to confirm the suspicions which already existed to his prejudice. Now, the only point in this letter which made strongly against my uncle, was the mention of the “double-clasped pocketbook,” as the receptacle of the papers likely to involve him, for this pocketbook was not forthcoming, nor anywhere to be found, nor had any papers referring to his gaming transactions been discovered upon the dead man.

But whatever might have been the original intention of this man, Collis, neither my uncle nor my father ever heard more of him; he published the letter, however, in Faulkner’s newspaper, which was shortly afterwards made the vehicle of a much more mysterious attack. The passage in that journal to which I allude, appeared about four years afterwards, and while the fatal occurrence was still fresh in public recollection. It commenced by a rambling preface, stating that “a certain person whom certain persons thought to be dead, was not so, but living, and in full possession of his memory, and moreover, ready and able to make great delinquents tremble”: it then went on to describe the murder, without, however, mentioning names; and in doing so, it entered into minute and circumstantial particulars of which none but an eyewitness could have been possessed, and by implications almost too unequivocal to be regarded in the light of insinuation, to involve the “titled gambler” in the guilt of the transaction.

My father at once urged Sir Arthur to proceed against the paper in an action of libel, but he would not hear of it, nor consent to my father’s taking any legal steps whatever in the matter. My father, however, wrote in a threatening tone to Faulkner, demanding a surrender of the author of the obnoxious article; the answer to this application is still in my possession, and is penned in an apologetic tone: it states that the manuscript had been handed in, paid for, and inserted as an advertisement, without sufficient inquiry, or any knowledge as to whom it referred. No step, however, was taken to clear my uncle’s character in the judgment of the public; and, as he immediately sold a small property, the application of the proceeds of which were known to none, he was said to have disposed of it to enable himself to buy off the threatened information; however the truth might have been, it is certain that no charges respecting the mysterious murder were afterwards publicly made against my uncle, and, as far as external disturbances were concerned, he enjoyed henceforward perfect security and quiet.

A deep and lasting impression, however, had been made upon the public mind, and Sir Arthur Tyrrell was no longer visited or noticed by the gentry of the county, whose attentions he had hitherto received. He accordingly affected to despise those courtesies which he no longer enjoyed, and shunned even that society which he might have commanded. This is all that I need recapitulate of my uncle’s history, and I now recur to my own.

Although my father had never, within my recollection, visited, or been visited by my uncle, each being of unsocial, procrastinating, and indolent habits, and their respective residences being very far apart – the one lying in the county of Galway, the other in that of Cork – he was strongly attached to his brother, and evinced his affection by an active correspondence, and by deeply and proudly resenting that neglect which had branded Sir Arthur as unfit to mix in society.

When I was about eighteen years of age, my father, whose health had been gradually declining, died, leaving me in heart wretched and desolate, and, owing to his habitual seclusion, with few acquaintances, and almost no friends. The provisions of his will were curious, and when I was sufficiently come to myself to listen to, or comprehend them, surprised me not a little: all his vast property was left to me, and to the heirs of my body, forever; and, in default of such heirs, it was to go after my death to my uncle, Sir Arthur, without any entail. At the same time, the will appointed him my guardian, desiring that I might be received within his house, and reside with his family, and under his care, during the term of my minority; and in consideration of the increased expense consequent upon such an arrangement, a handsome allowance was allotted to him during the term of my proposed residence. The object of this last provision I at once understood; my father desired, by making it the direct apparent interest of Sir Arthur that I should die without issue, while at the same time he placed my person wholly in his power, to prove to the world how great and unshaken was his confidence in his brother’s innocence and honour. It was a strange, perhaps an idle scheme, but as I had been always brought up in the habit of considering my uncle as a deeply injured man, and had been taught, almost as a part of my religion, to regard him as the very soul of honour, I felt no further uneasiness respecting the arrangement than that likely to affect a shy and timid girl at the immediate prospect of taking up her abode for the first time in her life among strangers. Previous to leaving my home, which I felt I should do with a heavy heart, I received a most tender and affectionate letter from my uncle, calculated, if anything could do so, to remove the bitterness of parting from scenes familiar and dear from my earliest childhood, and in some degree to reconcile me to the measure. It was upon a fine autumn day that I approached the old domain of Carrickleigh. I shall not soon forget the impression of sadness and of gloom which all that I saw produced upon my mind; the sunbeams were falling with a rich and melancholy lustre upon the fine old trees, which stood in lordly groups, casting their long sweeping shadows over rock and sward; there was an air of neglect and decay about the spot, which amounted almost to desolation, and mournfully increased as we approached the building itself, near which the ground had been originally more artificially and carefully cultivated than elsewhere, and where consequently neglect more immediately and strikingly betrayed itself.

As we proceeded, the road wound near the beds of what had been formerly two fish-ponds, which were now nothing more than stagnant swamps, overgrown with rank weeds, and here and there encroached upon by the straggling underbrush; the avenue itself was much broken; and in many places the stones were almost concealed by grass and nettles; the loose stone walls which had here and there intersected the broad park, were, in many places, broken down, so as no longer to answer their original purpose as fences; piers were now and then to be seen, but the gates were gone; and to add to the general air of dilapidation, some huge trunks were lying scattered through the venerable old trees, either the work of the winter storms, or perhaps the victims of some extensive but desultory scheme of denudation, which the projector had not capital or perseverance to carry into full effect.

After the carriage had travelled a full mile of this avenue, we reached the summit of a rather abrupt eminence, one of the many which added to the picturesqueness, if not to the convenience of this rude approach; from the top of this ridge the grey walls of Carrickleigh were visible, rising at a small distance in front, and darkened by the hoary wood which crowded around them; it was a quadrangular building of considerable extent, and the front, where the great entrance was placed, lay towards us, and bore unequivocal marks of antiquity; the time-worn, solemn aspect of the old building, the ruinous and deserted appearance of the whole place, and the associations which connected it with a dark page in the history of my family, combined to depress spirits already predisposed for the reception of sombre and dejecting impressions. When the carriage drew up in the grass-grown courtyard before the hall door, two lazy-looking men, whose appearance well accorded with that of the place which they tenanted, alarmed by the obstreperous barking of a great chained dog, ran out from some half-ruinous outhouses, and took charge of the horses; the hall door stood open, and I entered a gloomy and imperfectly-lighted apartment, and found no one within it. However, I had not long to wait in this awkward predicament, for before my luggage had been deposited in the house, indeed before I had well removed my cloak and other muffles, so as to enable me to look around, a young girl ran lightly into the hall, and kissing me heartily and somewhat boisterously exclaimed, “My dear cousin, my dear Margaret – I am so delighted – so out of breath, we did not expect you till ten o’clock; my father is somewhere about the place, he must be close at hand. James – Corney – run out and tell your master; my brother is seldom at home, at least at any reasonable hour; you must be so tired – so fatigued – let me show you to your room; see that Lady Margaret’s luggage is all brought up; you must lie down and rest yourself. Deborah, bring some coffee – up these stairs; we are so delighted to see you – you cannot think how lonely I have been; how steep these stairs are, are not they? I am so glad you are come – I could hardly bring myself to believe that you were really coming; how good of you, dear Lady Margaret.” There was real good nature and delight in my cousin’s greeting, and a kind of constitutional confidence of manner which placed me at once at ease, and made me feel immediately upon terms of intimacy with her. The room into which she ushered me, although partaking in the general air of decay which pervaded the mansion and all about it, had, nevertheless, been fitted up with evident attention to comfort, and even with some dingy attempt at luxury; but what pleased me most was that it opened, by a second door, upon a lobby which communicated with my fair cousin’s apartment; a circumstance which divested the room, in my eyes, of the air of solitude and sadness which would otherwise have characterised it, to a degree almost painful to one so depressed and agitated as I was.

After such arrangements as I found necessary were completed, we both went down to the parlour, a large wainscotted room, hung round with grim old portraits, and, as I was not sorry to see, containing, in its ample grate, a large and cheerful fire. Here my cousin had leisure to talk more at her ease; and from her I learned something of the manners and the habits of the two remaining members of her family, whom I had not yet seen. On my arrival I had known nothing of the family among whom I was come to reside, except that it consisted of three individuals, my uncle, and his son and daughter, Lady Tyrrell having been long dead; in addition to this very scanty stock of information, I shortly learned from my communicative companion, that my uncle was, as I had suspected, completely retired in his habits, and besides that, having been, so far back as she could well recollect, always rather strict, as reformed rakes frequently become, he had latterly been growing more gloomily and sternly religious than heretofore. Her account of her brother was far less favourable, though she did not say anything directly to his disadvantage. From all that I could gather from her, I was led to suppose that he was a specimen of the idle, coarse-mannered, profligate “squirearchy” – a result which might naturally have followed from the circumstance of his being, as it were, outlawed from society, and driven for companionship to grades below his own – enjoying, too, the dangerous prerogative of spending a good deal of money. However, you may easily suppose that I found nothing in my cousin’s communication fully to bear me out in so very decided a conclusion.

I awaited the arrival of my uncle, which was every moment to be expected, with feelings half of alarm, half of curiosity – a sensation which I have often since experienced, though to a less degree, when upon the point of standing for the first time in the presence of one of whom I have long been in the habit of hearing or thinking with interest. It was, therefore, with some little perturbation that I heard, first a slight bustle at the outer door, then a slow step traverse the hall, and finally witnessed the door open, and my uncle enter the room. He was a striking looking man; from peculiarities both of person and of dress, the whole effect of his appearance amounted to extreme singularity. He was tall, and when young his figure must have been strikingly elegant; as it was, however, its effect was marred by a very decided stoop; his dress was of a sober colour, and in fashion anterior to anything which I could remember. It was, however, handsome, and by no means carelessly put on; but what completed the singularity of his appearance was his uncut, white hair, which hung in long, but not at all neglected curls, even so far as his shoulders, and which combined with his regularly classic features, and fine dark eyes, to bestow upon him an air of venerable dignity and pride, which I have seldom seen equalled elsewhere. I rose as he entered, and met him about the middle of the room; he kissed my cheek and both my hands, saying—

“You are most welcome, dear child, as welcome as the command of this poor place and all that it contains can make you. I am rejoiced to see you – truly rejoiced. I trust that you are not much fatigued; pray be seated again.” He led me to my chair, and continued, “I am glad to perceive you have made acquaintance with Emily already; I see, in your being thus brought together, the foundation of a lasting friendship. You are both innocent, and both young. God bless you – God bless you, and make you all that I could wish.”

He raised his eyes, and remained for a few moments silent, as if in secret prayer. I felt that it was impossible that this man, with feelings manifestly so tender, could be the wretch that public opinion had represented him to be. I was more than ever convinced of his innocence. His manners were, or appeared to me, most fascinating. I know not how the lights of experience might have altered this estimate. But I was then very young, and I beheld in him a perfect mingling of the courtesy of polished life with the gentlest and most genial virtues of the heart. A feeling of affection and respect towards him began to spring up within me, the more earnest that I remembered how sorely he had suffered in fortune and how cruelly in fame. My uncle having given me fully to understand that I was most welcome, and might command whatever was his own, pressed me to take some supper; and on my refusing, he observed that, before bidding me good night, he had one duty further to perform, one in which he was convinced I would cheerfully acquiesce. He then proceeded to read a chapter from the Bible; after which he took his leave with the same affectionate kindness with which he had greeted me, having repeated his desire that I should consider everything in his house as altogether at my disposal. It is needless to say how much I was pleased with my uncle – it was impossible to avoid being so; and I could not help saying to myself, if such a man as this is not safe from the assaults of slander, who is? I felt much happier than I had done since my father’s death, and enjoyed that night the first refreshing sleep which had visited me since that calamity. My curiosity respecting my male cousin did not long remain unsatisfied; he appeared upon the next day at dinner. His manners, though not so coarse as I had expected, were exceedingly disagreeable; there was an assurance and a forwardness for which I was not prepared; there was less of the vulgarity of manner, and almost more of that of the mind, than I had anticipated. I felt quite uncomfortable in his presence; there was just that confidence in his look and tone, which would read encouragement even in mere toleration; and I felt more disgusted and annoyed at the coarse and extravagant compliments which he was pleased from time to time to pay me, than perhaps the extent of the atrocity might fully have warranted. It was, however, one consolation that he did not often appear, being much engrossed by pursuits about which I neither knew nor cared anything; but when he did, his attentions, either with a view to his amusement, or to some more serious object, were so obviously and perseveringly directed to me, that young and inexperienced as I was, even I could not be ignorant of their significance. I felt more provoked by this odious persecution than I can express, and discouraged him with so much vigour, that I did not stop even at rudeness to convince him that his assiduities were unwelcome; but all in vain.

This had gone on for nearly a twelve-month, to my infinite annoyance, when one day, as I was sitting at some needlework with my companion, Emily, as was my habit, in the parlour, the door opened, and my cousin Edward entered the room. There was something, I thought, odd in his manner, a kind of struggle between shame and impudence, a kind of flurry and ambiguity, which made him appear, if possible, more than ordinarily disagreeable.

“Your servant, ladies,” he said, seating himself at the same time; “sorry to spoil your tête-à-tête; but never mind, I’ll only take Emily’s place for a minute or two, and then we part for a while, fair cousin. Emily, my father wants you in the corner turret; no shilly-shally, he’s in a hurry.” She hesitated. “Be off – tramp, march, I say,” he exclaimed, in a tone which the poor girl dared not disobey.

She left the room, and Edward followed her to the door. He stood there for a minute or two, as if reflecting what he should say, perhaps satisfying himself that no one was within hearing in the hall. At length he turned about, having closed the door, as if carelessly, with his foot, and advancing slowly, in deep thought, he took his seat at the side of the table opposite to mine. There was a brief interval of silence, after which he said:

“I imagine that you have a shrewd suspicion of the object of my early visit; but I suppose I must go into particulars. Must I?”

“I have no conception,” I replied, “what your object may be.”

“Well, well,” said he becoming more at his ease as he proceeded, “it may be told in a few words. You know that it is totally impossible, quite out of the question, that an offhand young fellow like me, and a good-looking girl like yourself, could meet continually as you and I have done, without an attachment – a liking growing up on one side or other; in short, I think I have let you know as plainly as if I spoke it, that I have been in love with you, almost from the first time I saw you.” He paused, but I was too much horrified to speak. He interpreted my silence favourably. “I can tell you,” he continued, “I’m reckoned rather hard to please, and very hard to hit. I can’t say when I was taken with a girl before, so you see fortune reserved me – .”

Here the odious wretch actually put his arm round my waist: the action at once restored me to utterance, and with the most indignant vehemence I released myself from his hold, and at the same time said:

“I have, sir, of course, perceived your most disagreeable attentions; they have long been a source of great annoyance to me; and you must be aware that I have marked my disapprobation, my disgust, as unequivocally as I possibly could, without actual indelicacy.”

I paused, almost out of breath from the rapidity with which I had spoken; and without giving him time to renew the conversation, I hastily quitted the room, leaving him in a paroxysm of rage and mortification. As I ascended the stairs, I heard him open the parlour door with violence, and take two or three rapid strides in the direction in which I was moving. I was now much frightened, and ran the whole way until I reached my room, and having locked the door, I listened breathlessly, but heard no sound. This relieved me for the present; but so much had I been overcome by the agitation and annoyance attendant upon the scene which I had just passed through, that when my cousin Emily knocked at the door, I was weeping in great agitation. You will readily conceive my distress, when you reflect upon my strong dislike to my cousin Edward, combined with my youth and extreme inexperience. Any proposal of such a nature must have agitated me; but that it should come from the man whom, of all others, I instinctively most loathed and abhorred, and to whom I had, as clearly as manner could do it, expressed the state of my feelings, was almost too annoying to be borne; it was a calamity, too, in which I could not claim the sympathy of my cousin Emily, which had always been extended to me in my minor grievances. Still I hoped that it might not be unattended with good; for I thought that one inevitable and most welcome consequence would result from this painful éclaircissement, in the discontinuance of my cousin’s odious persecution.

When I arose next morning, it was with the fervent hope that I might never again behold his face, or even hear his name; but such a consummation, though devoutly to be wished, was hardly likely to occur. The painful impressions of yesterday were too vivid to be at once erased; and I could not help feeling some dim foreboding of coming annoyance and evil. To expect on my cousin’s part anything like delicacy or consideration for me, was out of the question. I saw that he had set his heart upon my property, and that he was not likely easily to forego such a prize, possessing what might have been considered opportunities and facilities almost to compel my compliance. I now keenly felt the unreasonableness of my father’s conduct in placing me to reside with a family, with all the members of which, with one exception, he was wholly unacquainted, and I bitterly felt the helplessness of my situation. I determined, however, in the event of my cousin’s persevering in his addresses, to lay all the particulars before my uncle, although he had never, in kindness or intimacy, gone a step beyond our first interview, and to throw myself upon his hospitality and his sense of honour for protection against a repetition of such annoyances.

My cousin’s conduct may appear to have been an inadequate cause for such serious uneasiness; but my alarm was awakened neither by his acts nor by words, but entirely by his manner, which was strange and even intimidating. At the beginning of our yesterday’s interview, there was a sort of bullying swagger in his air, which, towards the end, gave place to something bordering upon the brutal vehemence of an undisguised ruffian, a transition which had tempted me into a belief that he might seek, even forcibly, to extort from me a consent to his wishes, or by means still more horrible, of which I scarcely dared to trust myself to think, to possess himself of my property.

I was early next day summoned to attend my uncle in his private room, which lay in a corner turret of the old building; and thither I accordingly went, wondering all the way what this unusual measure might prelude. When I entered the room, he did not rise in his usual courteous way to greet me, but simply pointed to a chair opposite to his own; this boded nothing agreeable. I sat down, however, silently waiting until he should open the conversation.

“Lady Margaret,” at length he said, in a tone of greater sternness than I thought him capable of using, “I have hitherto spoken to you as a friend, but I have not forgotten that I am also your guardian, and that my authority as such gives me a right to controul your conduct. I shall put a question to you, and I expect and will demand a plain, direct answer. Have I rightly been informed that you have contemptuously rejected the suit and hand of my son Edward?”

I stammered forth with a good deal of trepidation:

“I believe, that is, I have, sir, rejected my cousin’s proposals; and my coldness and discouragement might have convinced him that I had determined to do so.”

“Madame,” replied he, with suppressed, but, as it appeared to me, intense anger, “I have lived long enough to know that coldness and discouragement, and such terms, form the common cant of a worthless coquette. You know to the full, as well as I, that coldness and discouragement may be so exhibited as to convince their object that he is neither distasteful nor indifferent to the person who wears that manner. You know, too, none better, that an affected neglect, when skilfully managed, is amongst the most formidable of the allurements which artful beauty can employ. I tell you, madame, that having, without one word spoken in discouragement, permitted my son’s most marked attentions for a twelvemonth or more, you have no right to dismiss him with no further explanation than demurely telling him that you had always looked coldly upon him, and neither your wealth nor your ladyship (there was an emphasis of scorn on the word which would have become Sir Giles Overreach himself) can warrant you in treating with contempt the affectionate regard of an honest heart.”

I was too much shocked at this undisguised attempt to bully me into an acquiescence in the interested and unprincipled plan for their own aggrandisement, which I now perceived my uncle and his son had deliberately formed, at once to find strength or collectedness to frame an answer to what he had said. At length I replied, with a firmness that surprised myself:

“In all that you have just now said, sir, you have grossly misstated my conduct and motives. Your information must have been most incorrect, as far as it regards my conduct towards my cousin; my manner towards him could have conveyed nothing but dislike; and if anything could have added to the strong aversion which I have long felt towards him, it would be his attempting thus to frighten me into a marriage which he knows to be revolting to me, and which is sought by him only as a means for securing to himself whatever property is mine.”

As I said this, I fixed my eyes upon those of my uncle, but he was too old in the world’s ways to falter beneath the gaze of more searching eyes than mine; he simply said—

“Are you acquainted with the provisions of your father’s will?”

I answered in the affirmative; and he continued: – “Then you must be aware that if my son Edward were, which God forbid, the unprincipled, reckless man, the ruffian you pretend to think him” – (here he spoke very slowly, as if he intended that every word which escaped him should be registered in my memory, while at the same time the expression of his countenance underwent a gradual but horrible change, and the eyes which he fixed upon me became so darkly vivid, that I almost lost sight of everything else) – “if he were what you have described him, do you think, child, he would have found no shorter way than marriage to gain his ends? A single blow, an outrage not a degree worse than you insinuate, would transfer your property to us!!”

I stood staring at him for many minutes after he had ceased to speak, fascinated by the terrible, serpent-like gaze, until he continued with a welcome change of countenance:

“I will not speak again to you, upon this topic, until one month has passed. You shall have time to consider the relative advantages of the two courses which are open to you. I should be sorry to hurry you to a decision. I am satisfied with having stated my feelings upon the subject, and pointed out to you the path of duty. Remember this day month; not one word sooner.”

He then rose, and I left the room, much agitated and exhausted.

This interview, all the circumstances attending it, but most particularly the formidable expression of my uncle’s countenance while he talked, though hypothetically, of murder, combined to arouse all my worst suspicions of him. I dreaded to look upon the face that had so recently worn the appalling livery of guilt and malignity. I regarded it with the mingled fear and loathing with which one looks upon an object which has tortured them in a nightmare.

In a few days after the interview, the particulars of which I have just detailed, I found a note upon my toilet-table, and on opening it I read as follows:

My Dear Lady Margaret,

You will be, perhaps, surprised to see a strange face in your room today. I have dismissed your Irish maid, and secured a French one to wait upon you; a step rendered necessary by my proposing shortly to visit the Continent with all my family.

Your faithful guardian,

Arthur Tyrell.”

On inquiry, I found that my faithful attendant was actually gone, and far on her way to the town of Galway; and in her stead there appeared a tall, rawboned, ill-looking, elderly Frenchwoman, whose sullen and presuming manners seemed to imply that her vocation had never before been that of a lady’s-maid. I could not help regarding her as a creature of my uncle’s, and therefore to be dreaded, even had she been in no other way suspicious.

Days and weeks passed away without any, even a momentary doubt upon my part, as to the course to be pursued by me. The allotted period had at length elapsed; the day arrived upon which I was to communicate my decision to my uncle. Although my resolution had never for a moment wavered, I could not shake off the dread of the approaching colloquy; and my heart sank within me as I heard the expected summons. I had not seen my cousin Edward since the occurrence of the grand éclaircissement; he must have studiously avoided me; I suppose from policy, it could not have been from delicacy. I was prepared for a terrific burst of fury from my uncle, as soon as I should make known my determination; and I not unreasonably feared that some act of violence or of intimidation would next be resorted to. Filled with these dreary forebodings, I fearfully opened the study door, and the next minute I stood in my uncle’s presence. He received me with a courtesy which I dreaded, as arguing a favourable anticipation respecting the answer which I was to give; and after some slight delay he began by saying—

“It will be a relief to both of us, I believe, to bring this conversation as soon as possible to an issue. You will excuse me, then, my dear niece, for speaking with a bluntness which, under other circumstances, would be unpardonable. You have, I am certain, given the subject of our last interview fair and serious consideration; and I trust that you are now prepared with candour to lay your answer before me. A few words will suffice; we perfectly understand one another.”

He paused; and I, though feeling that I stood upon a mine which might in an instant explode, nevertheless answered with perfect composure: “I must now, sir, make the same reply which I did upon the last occasion, and I reiterate the declaration which I then made, that I never can nor will, while life and reason remain, consent to a union with my cousin Edward.”

This announcement wrought no apparent change in Sir Arthur, except that he became deadly, almost lividly pale. He seemed lost in dark thought for a minute, and then, with a slight effort, said, “You have answered me honestly and directly; and you say your resolution is unchangeable; well, would it had been otherwise – would it had been otherwise – but be it as it is; I am satisfied.”

He gave me his hand – it was cold and damp as death; under an assumed calmness, it was evident that he was fearfully agitated. He continued to hold my hand with an almost painful pressure, while, as if unconsciously, seeming to forget my presence, he muttered, “Strange, strange, strange, indeed! fatuity, helpless fatuity!” there was here a long pause. “Madness indeed to strain a cable that is rotten to the very heart; it must break – and then – all goes.” There was again a pause of some minutes, after which, suddenly changing his voice and manner to one of wakeful alacrity, he exclaimed,

“Margaret, my son Edward shall plague you no more. He leaves this country tomorrow for France; he shall speak no more upon this subject – never, never more; whatever events depended upon your answer must now take their own course; but as for this fruitless proposal, it has been tried enough; it can be repeated no more.”

At these words he coldly suffered my hand to drop, as if to express his total abandonment of all his projected schemes of alliance; and certainly the action, with the accompanying words, produced upon my mind a more solemn and depressing effect than I believed possible to have been caused by the course which I had determined to pursue; it struck upon my heart with an awe and heaviness which will accompany the accomplishment of an important and irrevocable act, even though no doubt or scruple remains to make it possible that the agent should wish it undone.

“Well,” said my uncle, after a little time, “we now cease to speak upon this topic, never to resume it again. Remember you shall have no farther uneasiness from Edward; he leaves Ireland for France tomorrow; this will be a relief to you; may I depend upon your honour that no word touching the subject of this interview shall ever escape you?” I gave him the desired assurance; he said, “It is well; I am satisfied; we have nothing more, I believe, to say upon either side, and my presence must be a restraint upon you, I shall therefore bid you farewell.” I then left the apartment, scarcely knowing what to think of the strange interview which had just taken place.

On the next day my uncle took occasion to tell me that Edward had actually sailed, if his intention had not been prevented by adverse winds or weather; and two days after he actually produced a letter from his son, written, as it said, on board, and despatched while the ship was getting under weigh. This was a great satisfaction to me, and as being likely to prove so, it was no doubt communicated to me by Sir Arthur.

During all this trying period I had found infinite consolation in the society and sympathy of my dear cousin Emily. I never, in afterlife, formed a friendship so close, so fervent, and upon which, in all its progress, I could look back with feelings of such unalloyed pleasure, upon whose termination I must ever dwell with so deep, so yet unembittered a sorrow. In cheerful converse with her I soon recovered my spirits considerably, and passed my time agreeably enough, although still in the utmost seclusion. Matters went on smoothly enough, although I could not help sometimes feeling a momentary, but horrible uncertainty respecting my uncle’s character; which was not altogether unwarranted by the circumstances of the two trying interviews, the particulars of which I have just detailed. The unpleasant impression which these conferences were calculated to leave upon my mind was fast wearing away, when there occurred a circumstance, slight indeed in itself, but calculated irrepressibly to awaken all my worst suspicions, and to overwhelm me again with anxiety and terror.

I had one day left the house with my cousin Emily, in order to take a ramble of considerable length, for the purpose of sketching some favourite views, and we had walked about half a mile when I perceived that we had forgotten our drawing materials, the absence of which would have defeated the object of our walk. Laughing at our own thoughtlessness, we returned to the house, and leaving Emily outside, I ran upstairs to procure the drawing-books and pencils which lay in my bedroom. As I ran up the stairs, I was met by the tall, ill-looking Frenchwoman, evidently a good deal flurried; “Que veut Madame?” said she, with a more decided effort to be polite, than I had ever known her make before. “No, no – no matter,” said I, hastily running by her in the direction of my room. “Madame,” cried she, in a high key, “restez ici s’il vous plaît, votre chambre n’est pas faite.” I continued to move on without heeding her. She was some way behind me, and feeling that she could not otherwise prevent my entrance, for I was now upon the very lobby, she made a desperate attempt to seize hold of my person; she succeeded in grasping the end of my shawl, which she drew from my shoulders, but slipping at the same time upon the polished oak floor, she fell at full length upon the boards. A little frightened as well as angry at the rudeness of this strange woman, I hastily pushed open the door of my room, at which I now stood, in order to escape from her; but great was my amazement on entering to find the apartment preoccupied. The window was open, and beside it stood two male figures; they appeared to be examining the fastenings of the casement, and their backs were turned towards the door. One of them was my uncle; they both had turned on my entrance, as if startled; the stranger was booted and cloaked, and wore a heavy, broadleafed hat over his brows; he turned but for a moment, and averted his face; but I had seen enough to convince me that he was no other than my cousin Edward. My uncle had some iron instrument in his hand, which he hastily concealed behind his back; and coming towards me, said something as if in an explanatory tone; but I was too much shocked and confounded to understand what it might be. He said something about “repairs – window-frames – cold, and safety.” I did not wait, however, to ask or to receive explanations, but hastily left the room. As I went down stairs I thought I heard the voice of the Frenchwoman in all the shrill volubility of excuse, and others uttering suppressed but vehement imprecations, or what seemed to me to be such.

I joined my cousin Emily quite out of breath. I need not say that my head was too full of other things to think much of drawing for that day. I imparted to her frankly the cause of my alarms, but, at the same time, as gently as I could; and with tears she promised vigilance, devotion, and love. I never had reason for a moment to repent the unreserved confidence which I then reposed in her. She was no less surprised than I at the unexpected appearance of Edward, whose departure for France neither of us had for a moment doubted, but which was now proved by his actual presence to be nothing more than an imposture practised, I feared, for no good end. The situation in which I had found my uncle had very nearly removed all my doubts as to his designs; I magnified suspicions into certainties, and dreaded night after night that I should be murdered in my bed. The nervousness produced by sleepless nights and days of anxious fears increased the horrors of my situation to such a degree, that I at length wrote a letter to a Mr. Jefferies, an old and faithful friend of my father’s, and perfectly acquainted with all his affairs, praying him, for God’s sake, to relieve me from my present terrible situation, and communicating without reserve the nature and grounds of my suspicions. This letter I kept sealed and directed for two or three days always about my person, for discovery would have been ruinous, in expectation of an opportunity, which might be safely trusted, of having it placed in the post-office; as neither Emily nor I were permitted to pass beyond the precincts of the demesne itself, which was surrounded by high walls formed of dry stone, the difficulty of procuring such an opportunity was greatly enhanced.

At this time Emily had a short conversation with her father, which she reported to me instantly. After some indifferent matter, he had asked her whether she and I were upon good terms, and whether I was unreserved in my disposition. She answered in the affirmative; and he then inquired whether I had been much surprised to find him in my chamber on the other day. She answered that I had been both surprised and amused. “And what did she think of George Wilson’s appearance?” “Who?” inquired she. “Oh! the architect,” he answered, “who is to contract for the repairs of the house; he is accounted a handsome fellow.” “She could not see his face,” said Emily, “and she was in such a hurry to escape that she scarcely observed him.” Sir Arthur appeared satisfied, and the conversation ended.

This slight conversation, repeated accurately to me by Emily, had the effect of confirming, if indeed anything was required to do so, all that I had before believed as to Edward’s actual presence; and I naturally became, if possible, more anxious than ever to despatch the letter to Mr. Jefferies. An opportunity at length occurred. As Emily and I were walking one day near the gate of the demesne, a lad from the village happened to be passing down the avenue from the house; the spot was secluded, and as this person was not connected by service with those whose observation I dreaded, I committed the letter to his keeping, with strict injunctions that he should put it, without delay, into the receiver of the town post-office; at the same time I added a suitable gratuity, and the man having made many protestations of punctuality, was soon out of sight. He was hardly gone when I began to doubt my discretion in having trusted him; but I had no better or safer means of despatching the letter, and I was not warranted in suspecting him of such wanton dishonesty as a disposition to tamper with it; but I could not be quite satisfied of its safety until I had received an answer, which could not arrive for a few days. Before I did, however, an event occurred which a little surprised me. I was sitting in my bedroom early in the day, reading by myself, when I heard a knock at the door. “Come in,” said I, and my uncle entered the room. “Will you excuse me,” said he, “I sought you in the parlour, and thence I have come here. I desired to say a word to you. I trust that you have hitherto found my conduct to you such as that of a guardian towards his ward should be.” I dared not withhold my assent. “And,” he continued, “I trust that you have not found me harsh or unjust, and that you have perceived, my dear niece, that I have sought to make this poor place as agreeable to you as may be?” I assented again; and he put his hand in his pocket, whence he drew a folded paper, and dashing it upon the table with startling emphasis he said, “Did you write that letter?” The sudden and fearful alteration of his voice, manner, and face, but more than all, the unexpected production of my letter to Mr. Jefferies, which I at once recognised, so confounded and terrified me, that I felt almost choking. I could not utter a word. “Did you write that letter?” he repeated, with slow and intense emphasis. “You did, liar and hypocrite. You dared to write that foul and infamous libel; but it shall be your last. Men will universally believe you mad, if I choose to call for an inquiry. I can make you appear so. The suspicions expressed in this letter are the hallucinations and alarms of a moping lunatic. I have defeated your first attempt, madam; and by the holy God, if ever you make another, chains, darkness, and the keeper’s whip shall be your portion.” With these astounding words he left the room, leaving me almost fainting.

I was now almost reduced to despair; my last cast had failed; I had no course left but that of escaping secretly from the castle, and placing myself under the protection of the nearest magistrate. I felt if this were not done, and speedily, that I should be murdered. No one, from mere description, can have an idea of the unmitigated horror of my situation; a helpless, weak, inexperienced girl, placed under the power, and wholly at the mercy of evil men, and feeling that I had it not in my power to escape for one moment from the malignant influences under which I was probably doomed to fall; with a consciousness, too, that if violence, if murder were designed, no human being would be near to aid me; my dying shriek would be lost in void space.

I had seen Edward but once during his visit, and as I did not meet him again, I began to think that he must have taken his departure; a conviction which was to a certain degree satisfactory, as I regarded his absence as indicating the removal of immediate danger. Emily also arrived circuitously at the same conclusion, and not without good grounds, for she managed indirectly to learn that Edward’s black horse had actually been for a day and part of a night in the castle stables, just at the time of her brother’s supposed visit. The horse had gone, and as she argued, the rider must have departed with it.

This point being so far settled, I felt a little less uncomfortable; when being one day alone in my bedroom, I happened to look out from the window, and to my unutterable horror, I beheld peering through an opposite casement, my cousin Edward’s face. Had I seen the evil one himself in bodily shape, I could not have experienced a more sickening revulsion. I was too much appalled to move at once from the window, but I did so soon enough to avoid his eye. He was looking fixedly down into the narrow quadrangle upon which the window opened. I shrunk back unperceived, to pass the rest of the day in terror and despair. I went to my room early that night, but I was too miserable to sleep.

At about twelve o’clock, feeling very nervous, I determined to call my cousin Emily, who slept, you will remember, in the next room, which communicated with mine by a second door. By this private entrance I found my way into her chamber, and without difficulty persuaded her to return to my room and sleep with me. We accordingly lay down together, she undressed, and I with my clothes on, for I was every moment walking up and down the room, and felt too nervous and miserable to think of rest or comfort. Emily was soon fast asleep, and I lay awake, fervently longing for the first pale gleam of morning, and reckoning every stroke of the old clock with an impatience which made every hour appear like six.

It must have been about one o’clock when I thought I heard a slight noise at the partition door between Emily’s room and mine, as if caused by somebody’s turning the key in the lock. I held my breath, and the same sound was repeated at the second door of my room, that which opened upon the lobby; the sound was here distinctly caused by the revolution of the bolt in the lock, and it was followed by a slight pressure upon the door itself, as if to ascertain the security of the lock. The person, whoever it might be, was probably satisfied, for I heard the old boards of the lobby creak and strain, as if under the weight of somebody moving cautiously over them. My sense of hearing became unnaturally, almost painfully acute. I suppose the imagination added distinctness to sounds vague in themselves. I thought that I could actually hear the breathing of the person who was slowly returning along the lobby.

At the head of the staircase there appeared to occur a pause; and I could distinctly hear two or three sentences hastily whispered; the steps then descended the stairs with apparently less caution. I ventured to walk quickly and lightly to the lobby door, and attempted to open it; it was indeed fast locked upon the outside, as was also the other. I now felt that the dreadful hour was come; but one desperate expedient remained – it was to awaken Emily, and by our united strength, to attempt to force the partition door, which was slighter than the other, and through this to pass to the lower part of the house, whence it might be possible to escape to the grounds, and so to the village. I returned to the bedside, and shook Emily, but in vain; nothing that I could do availed to produce from her more than a few incoherent words; it was a deathlike sleep. She had certainly drunk of some narcotic, as, probably, had I also, in spite of all the caution with which I had examined everything presented to us to eat or drink. I now attempted, with as little noise as possible, to force first one door, then the other; but all in vain. I believe no strength could have affected my object, for both doors opened inwards. I therefore collected whatever moveables I could carry thither, and piled them against the doors, so as to assist me in whatever attempts I should make to resist the entrance of those without. I then returned to the bed and endeavoured again, but fruitlessly, to awaken my cousin. It was not sleep, it was torpor, lethargy, death. I knelt down and prayed with an agony of earnestness; and then seating myself upon the bed, I awaited my fate with a kind of terrible tranquillity.

I heard a faint clanking sound from the narrow court which I have already mentioned, as if caused by the scraping of some iron instrument against stones or rubbish. I at first determined not to disturb the calmness which I now experienced, by uselessly watching the proceedings of those who sought my life; but as the sounds continued, the horrible curiosity which I felt overcame every other emotion, and I determined, at all hazards, to gratify it. I, therefore, crawled upon my knees to the window, so as to let the smallest possible portion of my head appear above the sill.

The moon was shining with an uncertain radiance upon the antique grey buildings, and obliquely upon the narrow court beneath; one side of it was therefore clearly illuminated, while the other was lost in obscurity, the sharp outlines of the old gables, with their nodding clusters of ivy, being at first alone visible. Whoever or whatever occasioned the noise which had excited my curiosity, was concealed under the shadow of the dark side of the quadrangle. I placed my hand over my eyes to shade them from the moonlight, which was so bright as to be almost dazzling, and, peering into the darkness, I first dimly, but afterwards gradually, almost with full distinctness, beheld the form of a man engaged in digging what appeared to be a rude hole close under the wall. Some implements, probably a shovel and pickaxe, lay beside him, and to these he every now and then applied himself as the nature of the ground required. He pursued his task rapidly, and with as little noise as possible. “So,” thought I, as shovelful after shovelful, the dislodged rubbish mounted into a heap, “they are digging the grave in which, before two hours pass, I must lie, a cold, mangled corpse. I am theirs – I cannot escape.” I felt as if my reason was leaving me. I started to my feet, and in mere despair I applied myself again to each of the two doors alternately. I strained every nerve and sinew, but I might as well have attempted, with my single strength, to force the building itself from its foundations. I threw myself madly upon the ground, and clasped my hands over my eyes as if to shut out the horrible images which crowded upon me.

The paroxysm passed away. I prayed once more with the bitter, agonised fervour of one who feels that the hour of death is present and inevitable. When I arose, I went once more to the window and looked out, just in time to see a shadowy figure glide stealthily along the wall. The task was finished. The catastrophe of the tragedy must soon be accomplished. I determined now to defend my life to the last; and that I might be able to do so with some effect, I searched the room for something which might serve as a weapon; but either through accident, or else in anticipation of such a possibility, everything which might have been made available for such a purpose had been removed.

I must then die tamely and without an effort to defend myself. A thought suddenly struck me; might it not be possible to escape through the door, which the assassin must open in order to enter the room? I resolved to make the attempt. I felt assured that the door through which ingress to the room would be effected was that which opened upon the lobby. It was the more direct way, besides being, for obvious reasons, less liable to interruption than the other. I resolved, then, to place myself behind a projection of the wall, the shadow would serve fully to conceal me, and when the door should be opened, and before they should have discovered the identity of the occupant of the bed, to creep noiselessly from the room, and then to trust to Providence for escape. In order to facilitate this scheme, I removed all the lumber which I had heaped against the door; and I had nearly completed my arrangements, when I perceived the room suddenly darkened, by the close approach of some shadowy object to the window. On turning my eyes in that direction, I observed at the top of the casement, as if suspended from above, first the feet, then the legs, then the body, and at length the whole figure of a man present itself. It was Edward Tyrrell. He appeared to be guiding his descent so as to bring his feet upon the centre of the stone block which occupied the lower part of the window; and having secured his footing upon this, he kneeled down and began to gaze into the room. As the moon was gleaming into the chamber, and the bed-curtains were drawn, he was able to distinguish the bed itself and its contents. He appeared satisfied with his scrutiny, for he looked up and made a sign with his hand. He then applied his hands to the window-frame, which must have been ingeniously contrived for the purpose, for with apparently no resistance the whole frame, containing casement and all, slipped from its position in the wall, and was by him lowered into the room. The cold night wind waved the bed-curtains, and he paused for a moment; all was still again, and he stepped in upon the floor of the room. He held in his hand what appeared to be a steel instrument, shaped something like a long hammer. This he held rather behind him, while, with three long, tip-toe strides, he brought himself to the bedside. I felt that the discovery must now be made, and held my breath in momentary expectation of the execration in which he would vent his surprise and disappointment. I closed my eyes; there was a pause, but it was a short one. I heard two dull blows, given in rapid succession; a quivering sigh, and the long-drawn, heavy breathing of the sleeper was forever suspended. I unclosed my eyes, and saw the murderer fling the quilt across the head of his victim; he then, with the instrument of death still in his hand, proceeded to the lobby door, upon which he tapped sharply twice or thrice. A quick step was then heard approaching, and a voice whispered something from without. Edward answered, with a kind of shuddering chuckle, “Her ladyship is past complaining; unlock the door, in the devil’s name, unless you’re afraid to come in, and help me to lift her out of the window.” The key was turned in the lock, the door opened, and my uncle entered the room. I have told you already that I had placed myself under the shade of a projection of the wall, close to the door. I had instinctively shrunk down cowering towards the ground on the entrance of Edward through the window. When my uncle entered the room, he and his son both stood so very close to me that his hand was every moment upon the point of touching my face. I held my breath, and remained motionless as death.

“You had no interruption from the next room?” said my uncle.

“No,” was the brief reply.

“Secure the jewels, Ned; the French harpy must not lay her claws upon them. You’re a steady hand, by God; not much blood – eh?”

“Not twenty drops,” replied his son, “and those on the quilt.”

“I’m glad it’s over,” whispered my uncle again; “we must lift the – the thing through the window, and lay the rubbish over it.”

They then turned to the bedside, and, winding the bedclothes round the body, carried it between them slowly to the window, and exchanging a few brief words with someone below, they shoved it over the windowsill, and I heard it fall heavily on the ground underneath.

“I’ll take the jewels,” said my uncle; “there are two caskets in the lower drawer.”

He proceeded, with an accuracy which, had I been more at ease, would have furnished me with matter of astonishment, to lay his hand upon the very spot where my jewels lay; and having possessed himself of them, he called to his son:

“Is the rope made fast above?”

“I’m no fool; to be sure it is,” replied he.

They then lowered themselves from the window; and I rose lightly and cautiously, scarcely daring to breathe, from my place of concealment, and was creeping towards the door, when I heard my uncle’s voice, in a sharp whisper, exclaim, “Get up again; God damn you, you’ve forgot to lock the room door”; and I perceived, by the straining of the rope which hung from above, that the mandate was instantly obeyed. Not a second was to be lost. I passed through the door, which was only closed, and moved as rapidly as I could, consistently with stillness, along the lobby. Before I had gone many yards, I heard the door through which I had just passed roughly locked on the inside. I glided down the stairs in terror, lest, at every corner, I should meet the murderer or one of his accomplices. I reached the hall, and listened, for a moment, to ascertain whether all was silent around. No sound was audible; the parlour windows opened on the park, and through one of them I might, I thought, easily effect my escape. Accordingly, I hastily entered; but, to my consternation, a candle was burning in the room, and by its light I saw a figure seated at the dinner-table, upon which lay glasses, bottles, and the other accompaniments of a drinking party. Two or three chairs were placed about the table, irregularly, as if hastily abandoned by their occupants. A single glance satisfied me that the figure was that of my French attendant. She was fast asleep, having, probably, drank deeply. There was something malignant and ghastly in the calmness of this bad woman’s features, dimly illuminated as they were by the flickering blaze of the candle. A knife lay upon the table, and the terrible thought struck me – “Should I kill this sleeping accomplice in the guilt of the murderer, and thus secure my retreat?” Nothing could be easier; it was but to draw the blade across her throat, the work of a second.

An instant’s pause, however, corrected me. “No,” thought I, “the God who has conducted me thus far through the valley of the shadow of death, will not abandon me now. I will fall into their hands, or I will escape hence, but it shall be free from the stain of blood; His will be done.” I felt a confidence arising from this reflection, an assurance of protection which I cannot describe. There were no other means of escape, so I advanced, with a firm step and collected mind, to the window. I noiselessly withdrew the bars, and unclosed the shutters; I pushed open the casement, and without waiting to look behind me, I ran with my utmost speed, scarcely feeling the ground beneath me, down the avenue, taking care to keep upon the grass which bordered it. I did not for a moment slacken my speed, and I had now gained the central point between the park-gate and the mansion-house. Here the avenue made a wider circuit, and in order to avoid delay, I directed my way across the smooth sward round which the carriageway wound, intending, at the opposite side of the level, at a point which I distinguished by a group of old birch trees, to enter again upon the beaten track, which was from thence tolerably direct to the gate. I had, with my utmost speed, got about half way across this broad flat, when the rapid tramp of a horse’s hoofs struck upon my ear. My heart swelled in my bosom, as though I would smother. The clattering of galloping hoofs approached; I was pursued; they were now upon the sward on which I was running; there was not a bush or a bramble to shelter me; and, as if to render escape altogether desperate, the moon, which had hitherto been obscured, at this moment shone forth with a broad, clear light, which made every object distinctly visible. The sounds were now close behind me. I felt my knees bending under me, with the sensation which unnerves one in a dream. I reeled, I stumbled, I fell; and at the same instant the cause of my alarm wheeled past me at full gallop. It was one of the young fillies which pastured loose about the park, whose frolics had thus all but maddened me with terror. I scrambled to my feet, and rushed on with weak but rapid steps, my sportive companion still galloping round and round me with many a frisk and fling, until, at length, more dead than alive, I reached the avenue-gate, and crossed the stile, I scarce knew how. I ran through the village, in which all was silent as the grave, until my progress was arrested by the hoarse voice of a sentinel, who cried “Who goes there?” I felt that I was now safe. I turned in the direction of the voice, and fell fainting at the soldier’s feet. When I came to myself, I was sitting in a miserable hovel, surrounded by strange faces, all bespeaking curiosity and compassion. Many soldiers were in it also; indeed, as I afterwards found, it was employed as a guardroom by a detachment of troops quartered for that night in the town. In a few words I informed their officer of the circumstances which had occurred, describing also the appearance of the persons engaged in the murder; and he, without further loss of time than was necessary to procure the attendance of a magistrate, proceeded to the mansion-house of Carrickleigh, taking with him a party of his men. But the villains had discovered their mistake, and had effected their escape before the arrival of the military.

The Frenchwoman was, however, arrested in the neighbourhood upon the next day. She was tried and condemned at the ensuing assizes; and previous to her execution confessed that “she had a hand in making Hugh Tisdall’s bed.” She had been a housekeeper in the castle at the time, and a chère amie of my uncle’s. She was, in reality, able to speak English like a native, but had exclusively used the French language, I suppose to facilitate her designs. She died the same hardened wretch she had lived, confessing her crimes only, as she alleged, that her doing so might involve Sir Arthur Tyrrell, the great author of her guilt and misery, and whom she now regarded with unmitigated detestation.

With the particulars of Sir Arthur’s and his son’s escape, as far as they are known, you are acquainted. You are also in possession of their after fate; the terrible, the tremendous retribution which, after long delays of many years, finally overtook and crushed them. Wonderful and inscrutable are the dealings of God with his creatures!

Deep and fervent as must always be my gratitude to heaven for my deliverance, effected by a chain of providential occurrences, the failing of a single link of which must have ensured my destruction, it was long before I could look back upon it with other feelings than those of bitterness, almost of agony. The only being that had ever really loved me, my nearest and dearest friend, ever ready to sympathise, to counsel, and to assist; the gayest, the gentlest, the warmest heart; the only creature on earth that cared for me; her life had been the price of my deliverance; and I then uttered the wish, which no event of my long and sorrowful life has taught me to recall, that she had been spared, and that, in her stead, I were mouldering in the grave, forgotten, and at rest.

aka “Footsteps in the Lobby”

originally “Passage in the Secret History
of an Irish Countess”

“Dublin University Magazine”, Nov. 1838
early version (see appendix) —
The Purcell Papers: Volume II (1880)

revised as “The Murdered Cousin”

revised version (the above story) —
Ghost Stories And Tales Of Mystery (1851)

later developed as Uncle Silas (1864)

A CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY
OF A TYRONE FAMILY

(1839)

In the following narrative I have endeavoured to give as nearly as possible the ipsissima verba of the valued friend from whom I received it, conscious that any aberration from her mode of telling the tale of her own life would at once impair its accuracy and its effect.

Would that, with her words, I could also bring before you her animated gesture, the expressive countenance, the solemn and thrilling air and accent with which she related the dark passages in her strange story; and, above all, that I could communicate the impressive consciousness that the narrator had seen with her own eyes, and personally acted in the scenes which she described. These accompaniments, taken with the additional circumstance that she who told the tale was one far too deeply and sadly impressed with religious principle to misrepresent or fabricate what she repeated as fact, gave to the tale a depth of interest which the recording of the events themselves could hardly have produced.

I became acquainted with the lady from whose lips I heard this narrative nearly twenty years since, and the story struck my fancy so much that I committed it to paper while it was still fresh in my mind; and should its perusal afford you entertainment for a listless half hour, my labour shall not have been bestowed in vain.

I find that I have taken the story down as she told it, in the first person, and perhaps this is as it should be.

She began as follows:

~   ~   ~   ~

My maiden name was Richardson, the designation of a family of some distinction in the county of Tyrone. I was the younger of two daughters, and we were the only children. There was a difference in our ages of nearly six years, so that I did not, in my childhood, enjoy that close companionship which sisterhood, in other circumstances, necessarily involves; and while I was still a child, my sister was married.

The person upon whom she bestowed her hand was a Mr. Carew, a gentleman of property and consideration in the north of England.

I remember well the eventful day of the wedding; the thronging carriages, the noisy menials, the loud laughter, the merry faces, and the gay dresses. Such sights were then new to me, and harmonized ill with the sorrowful feelings with which I regarded the event which was to separate me from a sister whose tenderness alone had hitherto more than supplied all that I wanted in my mother’s affection.

The day soon arrived which was to remove the happy couple from Ashtown House. The carriage stood at the hall door, and my poor sister kissed me again and again, telling me that I should see her soon.

The carriage drove away, and I gazed after it until my eyes filled with tears, and, returning slowly to my chamber, I wept more bitterly and, so to speak, more desolately, than ever I had wept before.

My father had never seemed to love or to take an interest in me. He had desired a son, and I think he never thoroughly forgave me my unfortunate sex.

My having come into the world at all as his child he regarded as a kind of fraudulent intrusion; and as his antipathy to me had its origin in an imperfection of mine too radical for removal, I never even hoped to stand high in his good graces.

My mother was, I dare say, as fond of me as she was of anyone; but she was a woman of a masculine and a worldly cast of mind. She had no tenderness or sympathy for the weaknesses, or even for the affections, of woman’s nature, and her demeanour towards me was peremptory, and often even harsh.

It is not to be supposed, then, that I found in the society of my parents much to supply the loss of my sister. About a year after her marriage, we received letters from Mr. Carew, containing accounts of my sister’s health, which, though not actually alarming, were calculated to make us seriously uneasy. The symptoms most dwelt upon were loss of appetite, and a cough.

The letters concluded by intimating that he would avail himself of my father and mother’s repeated invitation to spend some time at Ashtown, particularly as the physician who had been consulted as to my sister’s health had strongly advised a removal to her native air.

There were added repeated assurances that nothing serious was apprehended, as it was supposed that a deranged state of the liver was the only source of the symptoms which at first had seemed to intimate consumption.

In accordance with this announcement, my sister and Mr. Carew arrived in Dublin, where one of my father’s carriages awaited them, in readiness to start upon whatever day or hour they might choose for their departure.

It was arranged that Mr. Carew was, as soon as the day upon which they were to leave Dublin was definitely fixed, to write to my father, who intended that the two last stages should be performed by his own horses, upon whose speed and safety far more reliance might be placed than upon those of the ordinary post-horses, which were at that time, almost without exception, of the very worst order. The journey, one of about ninety miles, was to be divided; the larger portion being reserved for the second day.

On Sunday a letter reached us, stating that the party would leave Dublin on Monday, and in due course reach Ashtown upon Tuesday evening.

Tuesday came: the evening closed in, and yet no carriage; darkness came on, and still no sign of our expected visitors.

Hour after hour passed away, and it was now past twelve; the night was remarkably calm, scarce a breath stirring, so that any sound, such as that produced by the rapid movement of a vehicle, would have been audible at a considerable distance. For some such sound I was feverishly listening.

It was, however, my father’s rule to close the house at nightfall, and the window-shutters being fastened, I was unable to reconnoitre the avenue as I would have wished. It was nearly one o’clock, and we began almost to despair of seeing them upon that night, when I thought I distinguished the sound of wheels, but so remote and faint as to make me at first very uncertain. The noise approached; it became louder and clearer; it stopped for a moment.

I now heard the shrill screaming of the rusty iron, as the avenue gate revolved on its hinges; again came the sound of wheels in rapid motion.

“It is they,” said I, starting up; “the carriage is in the avenue.”

We all stood for a few moments breathlessly listening. On thundered the vehicle with the speed of the whirlwind; crack went the whip, and clatter went the wheels, as it rattled over the uneven pavement of the court. A general and furious barking from all the dogs about the house hailed its arrival.

We hurried to the hall in time to hear the steps let down with the sharp clanging noise peculiar to the operation, and the hum of voices exerted in the bustle of arrival. The hall door was now thrown open, and we all stepped forth to greet our visitors.

The court was perfectly empty; the moon was shining broadly and brightly upon all around; nothing was to be seen but the tall trees with their long spectral shadows, now wet with the dews of midnight.

We stood gazing from right to left as if suddenly awakened from a dream; the dogs walked suspiciously, growling and snuffling about the court, and by totally and suddenly ceasing their former loud barking, expressed the predominance of fear.

We stared one upon another in perplexity and dismay, and I think I never beheld more pale faces assembled. By my father’s directions, we looked about to find anything which might indicate or account for the noise which we had heard; but no such thing was to be seen – even the mire which lay upon the avenue was undisturbed. We returned to the house, more panic-struck than I can describe.

On the next day, we learned by a messenger, who had ridden hard the greater part of the night, that my sister was dead. On Sunday evening she had retired to bed rather unwell, and on Monday her indisposition declared itself unequivocally to be malignant fever. She became hourly worse, and, on Tuesday night, a little after midnight, she expired.

I mention this circumstance, because it was one upon which a thousand wild and fantastical reports were founded, though one would have thought that the truth scarcely required to be improved upon; and again, because it produced a strong and lasting effect upon my spirits, and indeed, I am inclined to think, upon my character.

I was, for several years after this occurrence, long after the violence of my grief subsided, so wretchedly low-spirited and nervous, that I could scarcely be said to live; and during this time, habits of indecision, arising out of a listless acquiescence in the will of others, a fear of encountering even the slightest opposition, and a disposition to shrink from what are commonly called amusements, grew upon me so strongly, that I have scarcely even yet altogether overcome them.

We saw nothing more of Mr. Carew. He returned to England as soon as the melancholy rites attendant upon the event which I have just mentioned were performed; and not being altogether inconsolable, he married again within two years; after which, owing to the remoteness of our relative situations, and other circumstances, we gradually lost sight of him.

I was now an only child; and, as my elder sister had died without issue, it was evident that, in the ordinary course of things, my father’s property, which was altogether in his power, would go to me; and the consequence was, that before I was fourteen, Ashtown House was besieged by a host of suitors. However, whether it was that I was too young, or that none of the aspirants to my hand stood sufficiently high in rank or wealth, I was suffered by both parents to do exactly as I pleased; and well was it for me, as I afterwards found, that fortune, or rather Providence, had so ordained it, that I had not suffered my affections to become in any degree engaged, for my mother would never have suffered any silly fancy of mine, as she was in the habit of styling an attachment, to stand in the way of her ambitious views – views which she was determined to carry into effect in defiance of every obstacle, and in order to accomplish which she would not have hesitated to sacrifice anything so unreasonable and contemptible as a girlish passion.

When I reached the age of sixteen, my mother’s plans began to develop themselves; and, at her suggestion, we moved to Dublin to sojourn for the winter, in order that no time might be lost in disposing of me to the best advantage.

I had been too long accustomed to consider myself as of no importance whatever, to believe for a moment that I was in reality the cause of all the bustle and preparation which surrounded me; and being thus relieved from the pain which a consciousness of my real situation would have inflicted, I journeyed towards the capital with a feeling of total indifference.

My father’s wealth and connection had established him in the best society, and consequently, upon our arrival in the metropolis, we commanded whatever enjoyment or advantages its gaieties afforded.

The tumult and novelty of the scenes in which I was involved did not fail considerably to amuse me, and my mind gradually recovered its tone, which was naturally cheerful.

It was almost immediately known and reported that I was an heiress, and of course my attractions were pretty generally acknowledged.

Among the many gentlemen whom it was my fortune to please, one, ere long, established himself in my mother’s good graces, to the exclusion of all less important aspirants. However, I had not understood or even remarked his attentions, nor in the slightest degree suspected his or my mother’s plans respecting me, when I was made aware of them rather abruptly by my mother herself.

We had attended a splendid ball, given by Lord M———, at his residence in Stephen’s Green, and I was, with the assistance of my waiting-maid, employed in rapidly divesting myself of the rich ornaments which, in profuseness and value, could scarcely have found their equals in any private family in Ireland.

I had thrown myself into a lounging-chair beside the fire, listless and exhausted after the fatigues of the evening, when I was aroused from the reverie into which I had fallen by the sound of footsteps approaching my chamber, and my mother entered.

“Fanny, my dear,” said she, in her softest tone, “I wish to say a word or two with you before I go to rest. You are not fatigued, love, I hope?”

“No, no, madam, I thank you,” said I, rising at the same time from my seat, with the formal respect so little practised now.

“Sit down, my dear,” said she, placing herself upon a chair beside me; “I must chat with you for a quarter of an hour or so. Saunders” (to the maid), “you may leave the room; do not close the room door, but shut that of the lobby.”

This precaution against curious ears having been taken as directed, my mother proceeded:

“You have observed, I should suppose, my dearest Fanny – indeed, you must have observed Lord Glenfallen’s marked attentions to you?”

“I assure you, madam—” I began.

“Well, well, that is all right,” interrupted my mother. “Of course, you must be modest upon the matter; but listen to me for a few moments, my love, and I will prove to your satisfaction that your modesty is quite unnecessary in this case. You have done better than we could have hoped, at least, so very soon. Lord Glenfallen is in love with you. I give you joy of your conquest;” and, saying this, my mother kissed my forehead.

“In love with me!” I exclaimed in unfeigned astonishment.

“Yes, in love with you,” repeated my mother; “devotedly, distractedly in love with you. Why, my dear, what is there wonderful in it? Look in the glass, and look at these,” she continued, pointing, with a smile, to the jewels which I had just removed from my person, and which now lay in a glittering heap upon the table.

“May there not—” said I, hesitating between confusion and real alarm, “is it not possible that some mistake may be at the bottom of all this?”

“Mistake, dearest! none,” said my mother. “None; none in the world. Judge for yourself; read this, my love.” And she placed in my hand a letter, addressed to herself, the seal of which was broken. I read it through with no small surprise. After some very fine complimentary flourishes upon my beauty and perfections, as also upon the antiquity and high reputation of our family, it went on to make a formal proposal of marriage, to be communicated or not to me at present, as my mother should deem expedient; and the letter wound up by a request that the writer might be permitted, upon our return to Ashtown House, which was soon to take place, as the spring was now tolerably advanced, to visit us for a few days, in case his suit was approved.

“Well, well, my dear,” said my mother, impatiently; “do you know who Lord Glenfallen is?”

“I do, madam,” said I, rather timidly; for I dreaded an altercation with my mother.

“Well, dear, and what frightens you?” continued she. “Are you afraid of a title? What has he done to alarm you? He is neither old nor ugly.”

I was silent, though I might have said, “He is neither young nor handsome.”

“My dear Fanny,” continued my mother, “in sober seriousness, you have been most fortunate in engaging the affections of a nobleman such as Lord Glenfallen, young and wealthy, with first-rate – yes, acknowledged first-rate abilities, and of a family whose influence is not exceeded by that of any in Ireland. Of course, you see the offer in the same light that I do – indeed, I think you must.”

This was uttered in no very dubious tone. I was so much astonished by the suddenness of the whole communication, that I literally did not know what to say.

“You are not in love?” said my mother, turning sharply, and fixing her dark eyes upon me with severe scrutiny.

“No, madam,” said I, promptly; horrified – what young lady would not have been? – at such a query.

“I’m glad to hear it,” said my mother, drily. “Once, nearly twenty years ago, a friend of mine consulted me as to how he should deal with a daughter who had made what they call a love-match – beggared herself, and disgraced her family; and I said, without hesitation, take no care for her, but cast her off. Such punishment I awarded for an offence committed against the reputation of a family not my own; and what I advised respecting the child of another, with full as small compunction I would do with mine. I cannot conceive anything more unreasonable or intolerable than that the fortune and the character of a family should be marred by the idle caprices of a girl.”

She spoke this with great severity, and paused as if she expected some observation from me.

I, however, said nothing.

“But I need not explain to you, my dear Fanny,” she continued, “my views upon this subject; you have always known them well, and I have never yet had reason to believe you are likely to offend me voluntarily, or to abuse or neglect any of those advantages which reason and duty tell you should be improved. Come hither, my dear; kiss me, and do not look so frightened. Well, now, about this letter – you need not answer it yet; of course, you must be allowed time to make up your mind. In the meantime, I will write to his lordship to give him my permission to visit us at Ashtown. Good-night, my love.”

And thus ended one of the most disagreeable, not to say astounding, conversations I had ever had. It would not be easy to describe exactly what were my feelings towards Lord Glenfallen; – whatever might have been my mother’s suspicions, my heart was perfectly disengaged – and hitherto, although I had not been made in the slightest degree acquainted with his real views, I had liked him very much as an agreeable, well-informed man, whom I was always glad to meet in society. He had served in the navy in early life, and the polish which his manners received in his after intercourse with courts and cities had not served to obliterate that frankness of manner which belongs proverbially to the sailor.

Whether this apparent candour went deeper than the outward bearing, I was yet to learn. However, there was no doubt that, as far as I had seen of Lord Glenfallen, he was, though perhaps not so young as might have been desired in a lover, a singularly pleasing man; and whatever feeling unfavourable to him had found its way into my mind, arose altogether from the dread, not an unreasonable one, that constraint might be practised upon my inclinations. I reflected, however, that Lord Glenfallen was a wealthy man, and one highly thought of; and although I could never expect to love him in the romantic sense of the term, yet I had no doubt but that, all things considered, I might be more happy with him than I could hope to be at home.

When next I met him it was with no small embarrassment; his tact and good breeding, however, soon reassured me, and effectually prevented my awkwardness being remarked upon. And I had the satisfaction of leaving Dublin for the country with the full conviction that nobody, not even those most intimate with me, even suspected the fact of Lord Glenfallen’s having made me a formal proposal.

This was to me a very serious subject of self-gratulation, for, besides my instinctive dread of becoming the topic of the speculations of gossip, I felt that if the situation which I occupied in relation to him were made publicly known, I should stand committed in a manner which would scarcely leave me the power of retraction.

The period at which Lord Glenfallen had arranged to visit Ashtown House was now fast approaching, and it became my mother’s wish to form me thoroughly to her will, and to obtain my consent to the proposed marriage before his arrival, so that all things might proceed smoothly, without apparent opposition or objection upon my part. Whatever objections, therefore, I had entertained were to be subdued; whatever disposition to resistance I had exhibited or had been supposed to feel, were to be completely eradicated before he made his appearance; and my mother addressed herself to the task with a decision and energy against which even the barriers her imagination had created could hardly have stood.

If she had, however, expected any determined opposition from me, she was agreeably disappointed. My heart was perfectly free, and all my feelings of liking and preference were in favour of Lord Glenfallen; and I well knew that in case I refused to dispose of myself as I was desired, my mother had alike the power and the will to render my existence as utterly miserable as even the most ill-assorted marriage could possibly have made it.

You will remember, my good friend, that I was very young and very completely under the control of my parents, both of whom, my mother particularly, were unscrupulously determined in matters of this kind, and willing, when voluntary obedience on the part of those within their power was withheld, to compel a forced acquiescence by an unsparing use of all the engines of the most stern and rigorous domestic discipline.

All these combined, not unnaturally induced me to resolve upon yielding at once, and without useless opposition, to what appeared almost to be my fate.

The appointed time was come, and my now accepted suitor arrived; he was in high spirits, and, if possible, more entertaining than ever.

I was not, however, quite in the mood to enjoy his sprightliness; but whatever I wanted in gaiety was amply made up in the triumphant and gracious good-humour of my mother, whose smiles of benevolence and exultation were showered around as bountifully as the summer sunshine.

I will not weary you with unnecessary details. Let it suffice to say, that I was married to Lord Glenfallen with all the attendant pomp and circumstance of wealth, rank, and grandeur. According to the usage of the times, now humanely reformed, the ceremony was made, until long past midnight, the season of wild, uproarious, and promiscuous feasting and revelry.

Of all this I have a painfully vivid recollection, and particularly of the little annoyances inflicted upon me by the dull and coarse jokes of the wits and wags who abound in all such places, and upon all such occasions.

I was not sorry when, after a few days, Lord Glenfallen’s carriage appeared at the door to convey us both from Ashtown; for any change would have been a relief from the irksomeness of ceremonial and formality which the visits received in honour of my newly-acquired titles hourly entailed upon me.

It was arranged that we were to proceed to Cahergillagh, one of the Glenfallen estates, lying, however, in a southern county; so that, owing to the difficulty of the roads at the time, a tedious journey of three days intervened.

I set forth with my noble companion, followed by the regrets of some, and by the envy of many; though God knows I little deserved the latter. The three days of travel were now almost spent, when passing the brow of a wild heathy hill, the domain of Cahergillagh opened suddenly upon our view.

It formed a striking and a beautiful scene. A lake of considerable extent stretching away towards the west, and reflecting from its broad, smooth waters the rich glow of the setting sun, was overhung by steep hills, covered by a rich mantle of velvet sward, broken here and there by the grey front of some old rock, and exhibiting on their shelving sides and on their slopes and hollows every variety of light and shade. A thick wood of dwarf oak, birch, and hazel skirted these hills, and clothed the shores of the lake, running out in rich luxuriance upon every promontory, and spreading upward considerably upon the side of the hills.

“There lies the enchanted castle,” said Lord Glenfallen, pointing towards a considerable level space intervening between two of the picturesque hills which rose dimly around the lake.

This little plain was chiefly occupied by the same low, wild wood which covered the other parts of the domain; but towards the centre, a mass of taller and statelier forest trees stood darkly grouped together, and among them stood an ancient square tower, with many buildings of a humbler character, forming together the manor-house, or, as it was more usually called, the Court of Cahergillagh.

As we approached the level upon which the mansion stood, the winding road gave us many glimpses of the time-worn castle and its surrounding buildings; and seen as it was through the long vistas of the fine old trees, and with the rich glow of evening upon it, I have seldom beheld an object more picturesquely striking.

I was glad to perceive, too, that here and there the blue curling smoke ascended from stacks of chimneys now hidden by the rich, dark ivy which, in a great measure, covered the building. Other indications of comfort made themselves manifest as we approached; and indeed, though the place was evidently one of considerable antiquity, it had nothing whatever of the gloom of decay about it.

“You must not, my love,” said Lord Glenfallen, “imagine this place worse than it is. I have no taste for antiquity – at least I should not choose a house to reside in because it is old. Indeed, I do not recollect that I was even so romantic as to overcome my aversion to rats and rheumatism, those faithful attendants upon your noble relics of feudalism; and I much prefer a snug, modern, unmysterious bedroom, with well-aired sheets, to the waving tapestry, mildewed cushions, and all the other interesting appliances of romance. However, though I cannot promise you all the discomfort generally belonging to an old castle, you will find legends and ghostly lore enough to claim your respect; and if old Martha be still to the fore, as I trust she is, you will soon have a supernatural and appropriate anecdote for every closet and corner of the mansion. But here we are – so, without more ado, welcome to Cahergillagh!”

We now entered the hall of the castle, and while the domestics were employed in conveying our trunks and other luggage which we had brought with us for immediate use, to the apartments which Lord Glenfallen had selected for himself and me, I went with him into a spacious sitting-room, wainscoted with finely-polished black oak, and hung round with the portraits of various worthies of the Glenfallen family.

This room looked out upon an extensive level covered with the softest green sward, and irregularly bounded by the wild wood I have before mentioned, through the leafy arcade formed by whose boughs and trunks the level beams of the setting sun were pouring. In the distance a group of dairymaids were plying their task, which they accompanied throughout with snatches of Irish songs which, mellowed by the distance, floated not unpleasingly to the ear; and beside them sat or lay, with all the grave importance of conscious protection, six or seven large dogs of various kinds. Farther in the distance, and through the cloisters of the arching wood, two or three ragged urchins were employed in driving such stray kine as had wandered farther than the rest to join their fellows.

As I looked upon the scene which I have described, a feeling of tranquillity and happiness came upon me, which I have never experienced in so strong a degree; and so strange to me was the sensation that my eyes filled with tears.

Lord Glenfallen mistook the cause of my emotion, and taking me kindly and tenderly by the hand, he said:

“Do not suppose, my love, that it is my intention to settle here. Whenever you desire to leave this, you have only to let me know your wish, and it shall be complied with; so I must entreat of you not to suffer any circumstances which I can control to give you one moment’s uneasiness. But here is old Martha; you must be introduced to her, one of the heirlooms of our family.”

A hale, good-humoured, erect old woman was Martha, and an agreeable contrast to the grim, decrepit hag which my fancy had conjured up, as the depositary of all the horrible tales in which I doubted not this old place was most fruitful.

She welcomed me and her master with a profusion of gratulations, alternately kissing our hands and apologizing for the liberty; until at length Lord Glenfallen put an end to this somewhat fatiguing ceremonial by requesting her to conduct me to my chamber, if it were prepared for my reception.

I followed Martha up an old-fashioned oak staircase into a long, dim passage, at the end of which lay the door which communicated with the apartments which had been selected for our use; here the old woman stopped, and respectfully requested me to proceed.

I accordingly opened the door, and was about to enter, when something like a mass of black tapestry, as it appeared, disturbed by my sudden approach, fell from above the door, so as completely to screen the aperture; the startling unexpectedness of the occurrence, and the rustling noise which the drapery made in its descent, caused me involuntarily to step two or three paces backward. I turned, smiling and half-ashamed, to the old servant, and said,

“You see what a coward I am.”

The woman looked puzzled, and, without saying any more, I was about to draw aside the curtain and enter the room, when, upon turning to do so, I was surprised to find that nothing whatever interposed to obstruct the passage.

I went into the room, followed by the servant-woman, and was amazed to find that it, like the one below, was wainscoted, and that nothing like drapery was to be found near the door.

“Where is it?” said I; “what has become of it?”

“What does your ladyship wish to know?” said the old woman.

“Where is the black curtain that fell across the door, when I attempted first to come to my chamber?” answered I.

“The cross of Christ about us!” said the old woman, turning suddenly pale.

“What is the matter, my good friend?” said I; “you seem frightened.”

“Oh no, no, your ladyship,” said the old woman, endeavouring to conceal her agitation; but in vain, for tottering towards a chair, she sank into it, looking so deadly pale and horror-struck that I thought every moment she would faint.

“Merciful God, keep us from harm and danger!” muttered she at length.

“What can have terrified you so?” said I, beginning to fear that she had seen something more than had met my eye. “You appear ill, my poor woman!”

“Nothing, nothing, my lady,” said she, rising. “I beg your ladyship’s pardon for making so bold. May the great God defend us from misfortune!”

“Martha,” said I, “something has frightened you very much, and I insist on knowing what it is; your keeping me in the dark upon the subject will make me much more uneasy than anything you could tell me. I desire you, therefore, to let me know what agitates you; I command you to tell me.”

“Your ladyship said you saw a black curtain falling across the door when you were coming into the room,” said the old woman.

“I did,” said I; “but though the whole thing appears somewhat strange, I cannot see anything in the matter to agitate you so excessively.”

“It’s for no good you saw that, my lady,” said the crone; “something terrible is coming. It’s a sign, my lady – a sign that never fails.”

“Explain, explain what you mean, my good woman,” said I, in spite of myself, catching more than I could account for, of her superstitious terror.

“Whenever something – something bad is going to happen to the Glenfallen family, someone that belongs to them sees a black handkerchief or curtain just waved or falling before their faces. I saw it myself,” continued she, lowering her voice, “when I was only a little girl, and I’ll never forget it. I often heard of it before, though I never saw it till then, nor since, praised be God. But I was going into Lady Jane’s room to waken her in the morning; and sure enough when I got first to the bed and began to draw the curtain, something dark was waved across the division, but only for a moment; and when I saw rightly into the bed, there she was lying cold and dead, God be merciful to me! So, my lady, there is small blame to me to be daunted when any one of the family sees it; for it’s many the story I heard of it, though I saw it but once.”

I was not of a superstitious turn of mind, yet I could not resist a feeling of awe very nearly allied to the fear which my companion had so unreservedly expressed; and when you consider my situation, the loneliness, antiquity, and gloom of the place, you will allow that the weakness was not without excuse.

In spite of old Martha’s boding predictions, however, time flowed on in an unruffled course. One little incident, however, though trifling in itself, I must relate, as it serves to make what follows more intelligible.

Upon the day after my arrival, Lord Glenfallen of course desired to make me acquainted with the house and domain; and accordingly we set forth upon our ramble. When returning, he became for some time silent and moody, a state so unusual with him as considerably to excite my surprise.

I endeavoured by observations and questions to arouse him – but in vain. At length, as we approached the house, he said, as if speaking to himself,

“’Twere madness – madness – madness,” repeating the words bitterly; “sure and speedy ruin.”

There was here a long pause; and at length, turning sharply towards me, in a tone very unlike that in which he had hitherto addressed me, he said,

“Do you think it possible that a woman can keep a secret?”

“I am sure,” said I, “that women are very much belied upon the score of talkativeness, and that I may answer your question with the same directness with which you put it – I reply that I do think a woman can keep a secret.”

“But I do not,” said he, drily.

We walked on in silence for a time. I was much astonished at his unwonted abruptness – I had almost said rudeness.

After a considerable pause he seemed to recollect himself, and with an effort resuming his sprightly manner, he said,

“Well, well, the next thing to keeping a secret well is not to desire to possess one; talkativeness and curiosity generally go together. Now I shall make test of you, in the first place, respecting the latter of these qualities. I shall be your Bluebeard – tush, why do I trifle thus? Listen to me, my dear Fanny; I speak now in solemn earnest. What I desire is intimately, inseparably connected with your happiness and honour as well as my own; and your compliance with my request will not be difficult. It will impose upon you a very trifling restraint during your sojourn here, which certain events which have occurred since our arrival have determined me shall not be a long one. You must promise me, upon your sacred honour, that you will visit only that part of the castle which can be reached from the front entrance, leaving the back entrance and the part of the building commanded immediately by it to the menials, as also the small garden whose high wall you see yonder; and never at any time seek to pry or peep into them, nor to open the door which communicates from the front part of the house through the corridor with the back. I do not urge this in jest or in caprice, but from a solemn conviction that danger and misery will be the certain consequences of your not observing what I prescribe. I cannot explain myself further at present. Promise me, then, these things, as you hope for peace here and for mercy hereafter.”

I did make the promise as desired, and he appeared relieved; his manner recovered all its gaiety and elasticity: but the recollection of the strange scene which I have just described dwelt painfully upon my mind.

More than a month passed away without any occurrence worth recording; but I was not destined to leave Cahergillagh without further adventure. One day, intending to enjoy the pleasant sunshine in a ramble through the woods, I ran up to my room to procure my hat and cloak. Upon entering the chamber I was surprised and somewhat startled to find it occupied. Beside the fireplace, and nearly opposite the door, seated in a large, old-fashioned elbow-chair, was placed the figure of a lady. She appeared to be nearer fifty than forty, and was dressed suitably to her age, in a handsome suit of flowered silk; she had a profusion of trinkets and jewellery about her person, and many rings upon her fingers. But although very rich, her dress was not gaudy or in ill taste. But what was remarkable in the lady was, that although her features were handsome, and upon the whole pleasing, the pupil of each eye was dimmed with the whiteness of cataract, and she was evidently stone-blind. I was for some seconds so surprised at this unaccountable apparition, that I could not find words to address her.

“Madam,” said I, “there must be some mistake here – this is my bedchamber.”

“Marry come up,” said the lady, sharply; “your chamber! Where is Lord Glenfallen?”

“He is below, madam,” replied I; “and I am convinced he will be not a little surprised to find you here.”

“I do not think he will,” said she, “with your good leave; talk of what you know something about. Tell him I want him. Why does the minx dilly-dally so?”

In spite of the awe which this grim lady inspired, there was something in her air of confident superiority which, when I considered our relative situations, was not a little irritating.

“Do you know, madam, to whom you speak?” said I.

“I neither know nor care,” said she; “but I presume that you are someone about the house, so again I desire you, if you wish to continue here, to bring your master hither forthwith.”

“I must tell you, madam,” said I, “that I am Lady Glenfallen.”

“What’s that?” said the stranger, rapidly.

“I say, madam,” I repeated, approaching her that I might be more distinctly heard, “that I am Lady Glenfallen.”

“It’s a lie, you trull!” cried she, in an accent which made me start, and at the same time, springing forward, she seized me in her grasp, and shook me violently, repeating, “It’s a lie – it’s a lie!” with a rapidity and vehemence which swelled every vein of her face. The violence of her action, and the fury which convulsed her face, effectually terrified me, and disengaging myself from her grasp, I screamed as loud as I could for help. The blind woman continued to pour out a torrent of abuse upon me, foaming at the mouth with rage, and impotently shaking her clenched fist towards me.

I heard Lord Glenfallen’s step upon the stairs, and I instantly ran out; as I passed him I perceived that he was deadly pale, and just caught the words: “I hope that demon has not hurt you?”

I made some answer, I forget what, and he entered the chamber, the door of which he locked upon the inside. What passed within I know not; but I heard the voices of the two speakers raised in loud and angry altercation.

I thought I heard the shrill accents of the woman repeat the words, “Let her look to herself;” but I could not be quite sure. This short sentence, however, was, to my alarmed imagination, pregnant with fearful meaning.

The storm at length subsided, though not until after a conference of more than two long hours. Lord Glenfallen then returned, pale and agitated.

“That unfortunate woman,” said he, “is out of her mind. I daresay she treated you to some of her ravings; but you need not dread any further interruption from her: I have brought her so far to reason. She did not hurt you, I trust.”

“No, no,” said I; “but she terrified me beyond measure.”

“Well,” said he, “she is likely to behave better for the future; and I dare swear that neither you nor she would desire, after what has passed, to meet again.”

This occurrence, so startling and unpleasant, so involved in mystery, and giving rise to so many painful surmises, afforded me no very agreeable food for rumination.

All attempts on my part to arrive at the truth were baffled; Lord Glenfallen evaded all my inquiries, and at length peremptorily forbade any further allusion to the matter. I was thus obliged to rest satisfied with what I had actually seen, and to trust to time to resolve the perplexities in which the whole transaction had involved me.

Lord Glenfallen’s temper and spirits gradually underwent a complete and most painful change; he became silent and abstracted, his manner to me was abrupt and often harsh, some grievous anxiety seemed ever present to his mind; and under its influence his spirits sank and his temper became soured.

I soon perceived that his gaiety was rather that which the stir and excitement of society produce, than the result of a healthy habit of mind; every day confirmed me in the opinion, that the considerate good-nature which I had so much admired in him was little more than a mere manner; and to my infinite grief and surprise, the gay, kind, open-hearted nobleman who had for months followed and flattered me, was rapidly assuming the form of a gloomy, morose, and singularly selfish man. This was a bitter discovery, and I strove to conceal it from myself as long as I could; but the truth was not to be denied, and I was forced to believe that my husband no longer loved me, and that he was at little pains to conceal the alteration in his sentiments.

One morning after breakfast, Lord Glenfallen had been for some time walking silently up and down the room, buried in his moody reflections, when pausing suddenly, and turning towards me, he exclaimed:

“I have it – I have it! We must go abroad, and stay there too; and if that does not answer, why – why, we must try some more effectual expedient. Lady Glenfallen, I have become involved in heavy embarrassments. A wife, you know, must share the fortunes of her husband, for better for worse; but I will waive my right if you prefer remaining here – here at Cahergillagh. For I would not have you seen elsewhere without the state to which your rank entitles you; besides, it would break your poor mother’s heart,” he added, with sneering gravity. “So make up your mind – Cahergillagh or France. I will start if possible in a week, so determine between this and then.”

He left the room, and in a few moments I saw him ride past the window, followed by a mounted servant. He had directed a domestic to inform me that he should not be back until the next day.

I was in very great doubt as to what course of conduct I should pursue as to accompanying him in the continental tour so suddenly determined upon. I felt that it would be a hazard too great to encounter; for at Cahergillagh I had always the consciousness to sustain me, that if his temper at any time led him into violent or unwarrantable treatment of me, I had a remedy within reach, in the protection and support of my own family, from all useful and effective communication with whom, if once in France, I should be entirely debarred.

As to remaining at Cahergillagh in solitude, and, for aught I knew, exposed to hidden dangers, it appeared to me scarcely less objectionable than the former proposition; and yet I feared that with one or other I must comply, unless I was prepared to come to an actual breach with Lord Glenfallen. Full of these unpleasing doubts and perplexities, I retired to rest.

I was wakened, after having slept uneasily for some hours, by some person shaking me rudely by the shoulder; a small lamp burned in my room, and by its light, to my horror and amazement, I discovered that my visitant was the selfsame blind old lady who had so terrified me a few weeks before.

I started up in the bed, with a view to ring the bell, and alarm the domestics; but she instantly anticipated me by saying:

“Do not be frightened, silly girl! If I had wished to harm you, I could have done it while you were sleeping; I need not have wakened you. Listen to me, now, attentively and fearlessly, for what I have to say interests you to the full as much as it does me. Tell me here, in the presence of God, did Lord Glenfallen marry you – actually marry you? Speak the truth, woman.”

“As surely as I live and speak,” I replied, “did Lord Glenfallen marry me, in presence of more than a hundred witnesses.”

“Well,” continued she, “he should have told you then, before you married him, that he had a wife living, – that I am his wife. I feel you tremble – tush! do not be frightened. I do not mean to harm you. Mark me now – you are not his wife. When I make my story known you will be so neither in the eye of God nor of man. You must leave this house upon tomorrow. Let the world know that your husband has another wife living; go you into retirement, and leave him to justice, which will surely overtake him. If you remain in this house after tomorrow, you will reap the bitter fruits of your sin.”

So saying, she quitted the room, leaving me very little disposed to sleep.

Here was food for my very worst and most terrible suspicions; still there was not enough to remove all doubt. I had no proof of the truth of this woman’s statement.

Taken by itself, there was nothing to induce me to attach weight to it; but when I viewed it in connection with the extraordinary mystery of some of Lord Glenfallen’s proceedings, his strange anxiety to exclude me from certain portions of the mansion, doubtless lest I should encounter this person – the strong influence, nay, command which she possessed over him, a circumstance clearly established by the very fact of her residing in the very place where, of all others, he should least have desired to find her – her thus acting, and continuing to act in direct contradiction to his wishes; when, I say, I viewed her disclosure in connection with all these circumstances, I could not help feeling that there was at least a fearful verisimilitude in the allegations which she had made.

Still I was not satisfied, nor nearly so. Young minds have a reluctance almost insurmountable to believing, upon anything short of unquestionable proof, the existence of premeditated guilt in anyone whom they have ever trusted; and in support of this feeling I was assured that if the assertion of Lord Glenfallen, which nothing in this woman’s manner had led me to disbelieve, were true, namely that her mind was unsound, the whole fabric of my doubts and fears must fall to the ground.

I determined to state to Lord Glenfallen freely and accurately the substance of the communication which I had just heard, and in his words and looks to seek for its proof or refutation. Full of these thoughts, I remained wakeful and excited all night, every moment fancying that I heard the step or saw the figure of my recent visitor, towards whom I felt a species of horror and dread which I can hardly describe.

There was something in her face, though her features had evidently been handsome, and were not, at first sight, unpleasing, which, upon a nearer inspection, seemed to indicate the habitual prevalence and indulgence of evil passions, and a power of expressing mere animal anger with an intenseness that I have seldom seen equalled, and to which an almost unearthly effect was given by the convulsive quivering of the sightless eyes.

You may easily suppose that it was no very pleasing reflection to me to consider that, whenever caprice might induce her to return, I was within the reach of this violent and, for aught I knew, insane woman, who had, upon that very night, spoken to me in a tone of menace, of which her mere words, divested of the manner and look with which she uttered them, can convey but a faint idea.

Will you believe me when I tell you that I was actually afraid to leave my bed in order to secure the door, lest I should again encounter the dreadful object lurking in some corner or peeping from behind the window-curtains, so very a child was I in my fears?

The morning came, and with it Lord Glenfallen. I knew not, and indeed I cared not, where he might have been; my thoughts were wholly engrossed by the terrible fears and suspicions which my last night’s conference had suggested to me. He was, as usual, gloomy and abstracted, and I feared in no very fitting mood to hear what I had to say with patience, whether the charges were true or false.

I was, however, determined not to suffer the opportunity to pass, or Lord Glenfallen to leave the room, until, at all hazards, I had unburdened my mind.

“My lord,” said I, after a long silence, summoning up all my firmness, “my lord, I wish to say a few words to you upon a matter of very great importance, of very deep concernment to you and to me.”

I fixed my eyes upon him to discern, if possible, whether the announcement caused him any uneasiness; but no symptom of any such feeling was perceptible.

“Well, my dear,” said he, “this is no doubt a very grave preface, and portends, I have no doubt, something extraordinary. Pray let us have it without more ado.”

He took a chair, and seated himself nearly opposite to me.

“My lord,” said I, “I have seen the person who alarmed me so much a short time since, the blind lady, again, upon last night.” His face, upon which my eyes were fixed, turned pale; he hesitated for a moment, and then said:

“And did you, pray, madam, so totally forget or spurn my express command, as to enter that portion of the house from which your promise, I might say your oath, excluded you? Answer me that!” he added fiercely.

“My lord,” said I, “I have neither forgotten your commands, since such they were, nor disobeyed them. I was, last night, wakened from my sleep, as I lay in my own chamber, and accosted by the person whom I have mentioned. How she found access to the room I cannot pretend to say.”

“Ha! this must be looked to,” said he, half reflectively. “And pray,” added he quickly, while in turn he fixed his eyes upon me, “what did this person say? since some comment upon her communication forms, no doubt, the sequel to your preface.”

“Your lordship is not mistaken,” said I; “her statement was so extraordinary that I could not think of withholding it from you. She told me, my lord, that you had a wife living at the time you married me, and that she was that wife.”

Lord Glenfallen became ashy pale, almost livid; he made two or three efforts to clear his voice to speak, but in vain, and turning suddenly from me, he walked to the window. The horror and dismay which, in the olden time, overwhelmed the woman of Endor when her spells unexpectedly conjured the dead into her presence, were but types of what I felt when thus presented with what appeared to be almost unequivocal evidence of the guilt whose existence I had before so strongly doubted.

There was a silence of some moments, during which it were hard to conjecture whether I or my companion suffered most.

Lord Glenfallen soon recovered his self-command; he returned to the table, again sat down, and said:

“What you have told me has so astonished me, has unfolded such a tissue of motiveless guilt, and in a quarter from which I had so little reason to look for ingratitude or treachery, that your announcement almost deprived me of speech; the person in question, however, has one excuse, her mind is, as I told you before, unsettled. You should have remembered that, and hesitated to receive as unexceptionable evidence against the honour of your husband, the ravings of a lunatic. I now tell you that this is the last time I shall speak to you upon this subject, and, in the presence of the God who is to judge me, and as I hope for mercy in the day of judgment, I swear that the charge thus brought against me is utterly false, unfounded, and ridiculous. I defy the world in any point to taint my honour; and, as I have never taken the opinion of madmen touching your character or morals, I think it but fair to require that you will evince a like tenderness for me; and now, once for all, never again dare to repeat to me your insulting suspicions, or the clumsy and infamous calumnies of fools. I shall instantly let the worthy lady who contrived this somewhat original device understand fully my opinion upon the matter. Good morning.”

And with these words he left me again in doubt, and involved in all the horrors of the most agonizing suspense.

I had reason to think that Lord Glenfallen wreaked his vengeance upon the author of the strange story which I had heard, with a violence which was not satisfied with mere words, for old Martha, with whom I was a great favourite, while attending me in my room, told me that she feared her master had ill-used the poor blind Dutchwoman, for that she had heard her scream as if the very life were leaving her, but added a request that I should not speak of what she had told me to anyone, particularly to the master.

“How do you know that she is a Dutchwoman?” inquired I, anxious to learn anything whatever that might throw a light upon the history of this person, who seemed to have resolved to mix herself up in my fortunes.

“Why, my lady,” answered Martha, “the master often calls her the Dutch hag, and other names you would not like to hear, and I am sure she is neither English nor Irish; for, whenever they talk together, they speak some queer foreign lingo, and fast enough, I’ll be bound. But I ought not to talk about her at all; it might be as much as my place is worth to mention her, only you saw her first yourself, so there can be no great harm in speaking of her now.”

“How long has this lady been here?” continued I.

“She came early on the morning after your ladyship’s arrival,” answered she; “but do not ask me any more, for the master would think nothing of turning me out of doors for daring to speak of her at all, much less to you, my lady.”

I did not like to press the poor woman further, for her reluctance to speak on this topic was evident and strong.

You will readily believe that upon the very slight grounds which my information afforded, contradicted as it was by the solemn oath of my husband, and derived from what was, at best, a very questionable source, I could not take any very decisive measures whatever; and as to the menace of the strange woman who had thus unaccountably twice intruded herself into my chamber, although, at the moment, it occasioned me some uneasiness, it was not, even in my eyes, sufficiently formidable to induce my departure from Cahergillagh.

A few nights after the scene which I have just mentioned, Lord Glenfallen having, as usual, retired early to his study, I was left alone in the parlour to amuse myself as best I might.

It was not strange that my thoughts should often recur to the agitating scenes in which I had recently taken a part.

The subject of my reflections, the solitude, the silence, and the lateness of the hour, as also the depression of spirits to which I had of late been a constant prey, tended to produce that nervous excitement which places us wholly at the mercy of the imagination.

In order to calm my spirits I was endeavouring to direct my thoughts into some more pleasing channel, when I heard, or thought I heard, uttered within a few yards of me, in an odd, half-sneering tone, the words,

“There is blood upon your ladyship’s throat.”

So vivid was the impression that I started to my feet, and involuntarily placed my hand upon my neck.

I looked around the room for the speaker, but in vain.

I went then to the room door, which I opened, and peered into the passage, nearly faint with horror lest some leering, shapeless thing should greet me upon the threshold.

When I had gazed long enough to assure myself that no strange object was within sight—

“I have been too much of a rake lately; I am racking out my nerves,” said I, speaking aloud, with a view to reassure myself.

I rang the bell, and, attended by old Martha, I retired to settle for the night.

While the servant was – as was her custom – arranging the lamp which I have already stated always burned during the night in my chamber, I was employed in undressing, and, in doing so, I had recourse to a large looking-glass which occupied a considerable portion of the wall in which it was fixed, rising from the ground to a height of about six feet; this mirror filled the space of a large panel in the wainscoting opposite the foot of the bed.

I had hardly been before it for the lapse of a minute when something like a black pall was slowly waved between me and it.

“Oh, God! there it is,” I exclaimed, wildly. “I have seen it again, Martha – the black cloth.”

“God be merciful to us, then!” answered she, tremulously crossing herself. “Some misfortune is over us.”

“No, no, Martha,” said I, almost instantly recovering my collectedness; for, although of a nervous temperament, I had never been superstitious. “I do not believe in omens. You know I saw, or fancied I saw, this thing before, and nothing followed.”

“The Dutch lady came the next morning,” replied she.

“But surely her coming scarcely deserved such a dreadful warning,” I replied.

“She is a strange woman, my lady,” said Martha; “and she is not gone yet – mark my words.”

“Well, well, Martha,” said I, “I have not wit enough to change your opinions, nor inclination to alter mine; so I will talk no more of the matter. Good-night,” and so I was left to my reflections.

After lying for about an hour awake, I at length fell into a kind of doze; but my imagination was very busy, for I was startled from this unrefreshing sleep by fancying that I heard a voice close to my face exclaim as before,

“There is blood upon your ladyship’s throat.”

The words were instantly followed by a loud burst of laughter.

Quaking with horror, I awakened, and heard my husband enter the room. Even this was a relief.

Scared as I was, however, by the tricks which my imagination had played me, I preferred remaining silent, and pretending to sleep, to attempting to engage my husband in conversation, for I well knew that his mood was such, that his words would not, in all probability, convey anything that had not better be unsaid and unheard.

Lord Glenfallen went into his dressing-room, which lay upon the right-hand side of the bed. The door lying open, I could see him by himself, at full length upon a sofa, and, in about half an hour, I became aware, by his deep and regularly drawn respiration, that he was fast asleep.

When slumber refuses to visit one, there is something peculiarly irritating, not to the temper, but to the nerves, in the consciousness that someone is in your immediate presence, actually enjoying the boon which you are seeking in vain; at least, I have always found it so, and never more than upon the present occasion.

A thousand annoying imaginations harassed and excited me; every object which I looked upon, though ever so familiar, seemed to have acquired a strange phantom-like character, the varying shadows thrown by the flickering of the lamplight seemed shaping themselves into grotesque and unearthly forms, and whenever my eyes wandered to the sleeping figure of my husband, his features appeared to undergo the strangest and most demoniacal contortions.

Hour after hour was told by the old clock, and each succeeding one found me, if possible, less inclined to sleep than its predecessor.

It was now considerably past three; my eyes, in their involuntary wanderings, happened to alight upon the large mirror which was, as I have said, fixed in the wall opposite the foot of the bed. A view of it was commanded from where I lay, through the curtains. As I gazed fixedly upon it, I thought I perceived the broad sheet of glass shifting its position in relation to the bed; I riveted my eyes upon it with intense scrutiny; it was no deception, the mirror, as if acting of its own impulse, moved slowly aside, and disclosed a dark aperture in the wall, nearly as large as an ordinary door; a figure evidently stood in this, but the light was too dim to define it accurately.

It stepped cautiously into the chamber, and with so little noise, that had I not actually seen it, I do not think I should have been aware of its presence. It was arrayed in a kind of woollen nightdress, and a white handkerchief or cloth was bound tightly about the head; I had no difficulty, spite of the strangeness of the attire, in recognizing the blind woman whom I so much dreaded.

She stooped down, bringing her head nearly to the ground, and in that attitude she remained motionless for some moments, no doubt in order to ascertain if any suspicious sounds were stirring.

She was apparently satisfied by her observations, for she immediately recommenced her silent progress towards a ponderous mahogany dressing-table of my husband’s. When she had reached it, she paused again, and appeared to listen attentively for some minutes; she then noiselessly opened one of the drawers, from which, having groped for some time, she took something, which I soon perceived to be a case of razors. She opened it, and tried the edge of each of the two instruments upon the skin of her hand; she quickly selected one, which she fixed firmly in her grasp. She now stooped down as before, and having listened for a time, she, with the hand that was disengaged, groped her way into the dressing-room where Lord Glenfallen lay fast asleep.

I was fixed as if in the tremendous spell of a nightmare. I could not stir even a finger; I could not lift my voice; I could not even breathe; and though I expected every moment to see the sleeping man murdered, I could not even close my eyes to shut out the horrible spectacle which I had not the power to avert.

I saw the woman approach the sleeping figure, she laid the unoccupied hand lightly along his clothes, and having thus ascertained his identity, she, after a brief interval, turned back and again entered my chamber; here she bent down again to listen.

I had now not a doubt but that the razor was intended for my throat; yet the terrific fascination which had locked all my powers so long, still continued to bind me fast.

I felt that my life depended upon the slightest ordinary exertion, and yet I could not stir one joint from the position in which I lay, nor even make noise enough to waken Lord Glenfallen.

The murderous woman now, with long, silent steps, approached the bed; my very heart seemed turning to ice; her left hand, that which was disengaged, was upon the pillow; she gradually slid it forward towards my head, and in an instant, with the speed of lightning, it was clutched in my hair, while, with the other hand, she dashed the razor at my throat.

A slight inaccuracy saved me from instant death; the blow fell short, the point of the razor grazing my throat. In a moment, I know not how, I found myself at the other side of the bed, uttering shriek after shriek; the wretch was however determined, if possible, to murder me.

Scrambling along by the curtains, she rushed round the bed towards me; I seized the handle of the door to make my escape. It was, however, fastened. At all events, I could not open it. From the mere instinct of recoiling terror, I shrunk back into a corner. She was now within a yard of me. Her hand was upon my face.

I closed my eyes fast, expecting never to open them again, when a blow, inflicted from behind by a strong arm, stretched the monster senseless at my feet. At the same moment the door opened, and several domestics, alarmed by my cries, entered the apartment.

I do not recollect what followed, for I fainted. One swoon succeeded another, so long and deathlike, that my life was considered very doubtful.

At about ten o’clock, however, I sank into a deep and refreshing sleep, from which I was awakened at about two, that I might swear my deposition before a magistrate, who attended for that purpose.

I accordingly did so, as did also Lord Glenfallen, and the woman was fully committed to stand her trial at the ensuing assizes.

I shall never forget the scene which the examination of the blind woman and of the other parties afforded.

She was brought into the room in the custody of two servants. She wore a kind of flannel wrapper, which had not been changed since the night before. It was torn and soiled, and here and there smeared with blood, which had flowed in large quantities from a wound in her head. The white handkerchief had fallen off in the scuffle, and her grizzled hair fell in masses about her wild and deadly pale countenance.

She appeared perfectly composed, however, and the only regret she expressed throughout, was at not having succeeded in her attempt, the object of which she did not pretend to conceal.

On being asked her name, she called herself the Countess Glenfallen, and refused to give any other title.

“The woman’s name is Flora Van-Kemp,” said Lord Glenfallen.

“It was, it was, you perjured traitor and cheat!” screamed the woman; and then there followed a volley of words in some foreign language. “Is there a magistrate here?” she resumed; “I am Lord Glenfallen’s wife – I’ll prove it – write down my words. I am willing to be hanged or burned, so he meets his deserts. I did try to kill that doll of his; but it was he who put it into my head to do it – two wives were too many; I was to murder her, or she was to hang me: listen to all I have to say.”

Here Lord Glenfallen interrupted.

“I think, sir,” said he, addressing the magistrate “that we had better proceed to business; this unhappy woman’s furious recriminations but waste our time. If she refuses to answer your questions, you had better, I presume, take my depositions.”

“And are you going to swear away my life, you black-perjured murderer?” shrieked the woman. “Sir, sir, sir, you must hear me,” she continued, addressing the magistrate; “I can convict him – he bid me murder that girl, and then, when I failed, he came behind me, and struck me down, and now he wants to swear away my life. Take down all I say.”

“If it is your intention,” said the magistrate, “to confess the crime with which you stand charged, you may, upon producing sufficient evidence, criminate whom you please.”

“Evidence! – I have no evidence but myself,” said the woman. “I will swear it all – write down my testimony – write it down, I say – we shall hang side by side, my brave lord – all your own handy-work, my gentle husband!”

This was followed by a low, insolent, and sneering laugh, which, from one in her situation, was sufficiently horrible.

“I will not at present hear anything,” replied he, “but distinct answers to the questions which I shall put to you upon this matter.”

“Then you shall hear nothing,” replied she sullenly, and no inducement or intimidation could bring her to speak again.

Lord Glenfallen’s deposition and mine were then given, as also those of the servants who had entered the room at the moment of my rescue.

The magistrate then intimated that she was committed, and must proceed directly to gaol, whither she was brought in a carriage of Lord Glenfallen’s, for his lordship was naturally by no means indifferent to the effect which her vehement accusations against himself might produce, if uttered before every chance hearer whom she might meet with between Cahergillagh and the place of confinement whither she was despatched.

During the time which intervened between the committal and the trial of the prisoner, Lord Glenfallen seemed to suffer agonies of mind which baffled all description; he hardly ever slept, and when he did, his slumbers seemed but the instruments of new tortures, and his waking hours were, if possible, exceeded in intensity of terror by the dreams which disturbed his sleep.

Lord Glenfallen rested, if to lie in the mere attitude of repose were to do so, in his dressing-room, and thus I had an opportunity of witnessing, far oftener than I wished it, the fearful workings of his mind. His agony often broke out into such fearful paroxysms that delirium and total loss of reason appeared to be impending. He frequently spoke of flying from the country, and bringing with him all the witnesses of the appalling scene upon which the prosecution was founded; then, again, he would fiercely lament that the blow which he had inflicted had not ended all.

The assizes arrived, however, and upon the day appointed Lord Glenfallen and I attended in order to give our evidence.

The cause was called on, and the prisoner appeared at the bar.

Great curiosity and interest were felt respecting the trial, so that the court was crowded to excess.

The prisoner, however, without appearing to take the trouble of listening to the indictment, pleaded guilty, and no representations on the part of the court availed to induce her to retract her plea.

After much time had been wasted in a fruitless attempt to prevail upon her to reconsider her words, the court proceeded, according to the usual form, to pass sentence.

This having been done, the prisoner was about to be removed, when she said, in a low, distinct voice:

“A word – a word, my lord! – Is Lord Glenfallen here in the court?”

On being told that he was, she raised her voice to a tone of loud menace, and continued:

“Hardress, Earl of Glenfallen, I accuse you here in this court of justice of two crimes, – first, that you married a second wife while the first was living; and again, that you prompted me to the murder, for attempting which I am to die. Secure him – chain him – bring him here!”

There was a laugh through the court at these words, which were naturally treated by the judge as a violent extemporary recrimination, and the woman was desired to be silent.

“You won’t take him, then?” she said; “you won’t try him? You’ll let him go free?”

It was intimated by the court that he would certainly be allowed “to go free,” and she was ordered again to be removed.

Before, however, the mandate was executed, she threw her arms wildly into the air, and uttered one piercing shriek so full of preternatural rage and despair, that it might fitly have ushered a soul into those realms where hope can come no more.

The sound still rang in my ears, months after the voice that had uttered it was forever silent.

The wretched woman was executed in accordance with the sentence which had been pronounced.

For some time after this event, Lord Glenfallen appeared, if possible, to suffer more than he had done before, and altogether his language, which often amounted to half confessions of the guilt imputed to him, and all the circumstances connected with the late occurrences, formed a mass of evidence so convincing that I wrote to my father, detailing the grounds of my fears, and imploring him to come to Cahergillagh without delay, in order to remove me from my husband’s control, previously to taking legal steps for a final separation.

Circumstanced as I was, my existence was little short of intolerable, for, besides the fearful suspicions which attached to my husband, I plainly perceived that if Lord Glenfallen were not relieved, and that speedily, insanity must supervene. I therefore expected my father’s arrival, or at least a letter to announce it, with indescribable impatience.

About a week after the execution had taken place, Lord Glenfallen one morning met me with an unusually sprightly air.

“Fanny,” said he, “I have it now for the first time in my power to explain to your satisfaction everything which has hitherto appeared suspicious or mysterious in my conduct. After breakfast come with me to my study, and I shall, I hope, make all things clear.”

This invitation afforded me more real pleasure than I had experienced for months. Something had certainly occurred to tranquillize my husband’s mind in no ordinary degree, and I thought it by no means impossible that he would, in the proposed interview, prove himself the most injured and innocent of men.

Full of this hope, I repaired to his study at the appointed hour. He was writing busily when I entered the room, and just raising his eyes, he requested me to be seated.

I took a chair as he desired, and remained silently awaiting his leisure, while he finished, folded, directed, and sealed his letter. Laying it then upon the table with the address downward, he said,

“My dearest Fanny, I know I must have appeared very strange to you and very unkind – often even cruel. Before the end of this week I will show you the necessity of my conduct – how impossible it was that I should have seemed otherwise. I am conscious that many acts of mine must have inevitably given rise to painful suspicions – suspicions which, indeed, upon one occasion, you very properly communicated to me. I have got two letters from a quarter which commands respect, containing information as to the course by which I may be enabled to prove the negative of all the crimes which even the most credulous suspicion could lay to my charge. I expected a third by this morning’s post, containing documents which will set the matter forever at rest, but owing, no doubt, to some neglect, or perhaps to some difficulty in collecting the papers, some inevitable delay, it has not come to hand this morning, according to my expectation. I was finishing one to the very same quarter when you came in, and if a sound rousing be worth anything, I think I shall have a special messenger before two days have passed. I have been anxiously considering with myself, as to whether I had better imperfectly clear up your doubts by submitting to your inspection the two letters which I have already received, or wait till I can triumphantly vindicate myself by the production of the documents which I have already mentioned, and I have, I think, not unnaturally decided upon the latter course. However, there is a person in the next room whose testimony is not without its value – excuse me for one moment.”

So saying, he arose and went to the door of a closet which opened from the study; this he unlocked, and half opening the door, he said, “It is only I,” and then slipped into the room, and carefully closed and locked the door behind him.

I immediately heard his voice in animated conversation. My curiosity upon the subject of the letter was naturally great, so, smothering any little scruples which I might have felt, I resolved to look at the address of the letter which lay, as my husband had left it, with its face upon the table. I accordingly drew it over to me, and turned up the direction.

For two or three moments I could scarce believe my eyes, but there could be no mistake – in large characters were traced the words, “To the Archangel Gabriel in Heaven.”

I had scarcely returned the letter to its original position, and in some degree recovered the shock which this unequivocal proof of insanity produced, when the closet door was unlocked, and Lord Glenfallen re-entered the study, carefully closing and locking the door again upon the outside.

“Whom have you there?” inquired I, making a strong effort to appear calm.

“Perhaps,” said he, musingly, “you might have some objection to seeing her, at least for a time.”

“Who is it?” repeated I.

“Why,” said he, “I see no use in hiding it – the blind Dutchwoman. I have been with her the whole morning. She is very anxious to get out of that closet; but you know she is odd, she is scarcely to be trusted.”

A heavy gust of wind shook the door at this moment with a sound as if something more substantial were pushing against it.

“Ha, ha, ha! – do you hear her?” said he, with an obstreperous burst of laughter.

The wind died away in a long howl, and Lord Glenfallen, suddenly checking his merriment, shrugged his shoulders, and muttered:

“Poor devil, she has been hardly used.”

“We had better not tease her at present with questions,” said I, in as unconcerned a tone as I could assume, although I felt every moment as if I should faint.

“Humph! may be so,” said he. “Well, come back in an hour or two, or when you please, and you will find us here.”

He again unlocked the door, and entered with the same precautions which he had adopted before, locking the door upon the inside; and as I hurried from the room, I heard his voice again exerted as if in eager parley.

I can hardly describe my emotions; my hopes had been raised to the highest, and now, in an instant, all was gone: the dreadful consummation was accomplished – the fearful retribution had fallen upon the guilty man – the mind was destroyed, the power to repent was gone.

The agony of the hours which followed what I would still call my awful interview with Lord Glenfallen, I cannot describe; my solitude was, however, broken in upon by Martha, who came to inform me of the arrival of a gentleman, who expected me in the parlour.

I accordingly descended, and, to my great joy, found my father seated by the fire.

This expedition upon his part was easily accounted for: my communications had touched the honour of the family. I speedily informed him of the dreadful malady which had fallen upon the wretched man.

My father suggested the necessity of placing some person to watch him, to prevent his injuring himself or others.

I rang the bell, and desired that one Edward Cooke, an attached servant of the family, should be sent to me.

I told him distinctly and briefly the nature of the service required of him, and, attended by him, my father and I proceeded at once to the study. The door of the inner room was still closed, and everything in the outer chamber remained in the same order in which I had left it.

We then advanced to the closet door, at which we knocked, but without receiving any answer.

We next tried to open the door, but in vain; it was locked upon the inside. We knocked more loudly, but in vain.

Seriously alarmed, I desired the servant to force the door, which was, after several violent efforts, accomplished, and we entered the closet.

Lord Glenfallen was lying on his face upon a sofa.

“Hush!” said I; “he is asleep.” We paused for a moment.

“He is too still for that,” said my father.

We all of us felt a strong reluctance to approach the figure.

“Edward,” said I, “try whether your master sleeps.”

The servant approached the sofa where Lord Glenfallen lay. He leant his ear towards the head of the recumbent figure, to ascertain whether the sound of breathing was audible. He turned towards us, and said:

“My lady, you had better not wait here; I am sure he is dead!”

“Let me see the face,” said I, terribly agitated; “you may be mistaken.”

The man then, in obedience to my command, turned the body round, and, gracious God! what a sight met my view.

The whole breast of the shirt, with its lace frill, was drenched with his blood, as was the couch underneath the spot where he lay.

The head hung back, as it seemed, almost severed from the body by a frightful gash, which yawned across the throat. The razor which had inflicted the wound was found under his body.

All, then, was over; I was never to learn the history in whose termination I had been so deeply and so tragically involved.

The severe discipline which my mind had undergone was not bestowed in vain. I directed my thoughts and my hopes to that place where there is no more sin, nor danger, nor sorrow.

Thus ends a brief tale whose prominent incidents many will recognize as having marked the history of a distinguished family; and though it refers to a somewhat distant date, we shall be found not to have taken, upon that account, any liberties with the facts.

“Dublin University Magazine”, Oct. 1839

The Purcell Papers: Volume III (1880)

later developed as The Wyvern Mystery (1869)

SPALATRO

(1843)

PART ONE

The Spalatro, surnamed Barbone, of whom we speak, was not the illustrious bandit of Napoleon’s early time, who assumed, or acquired, that name, but the celebrated original, who first bore it two centuries since. This man was nobly born, lost his parents early, squandered his fortune, and then “took to the road” professionally. He speedily became one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, of Italian robbers of any age. His followers were so numerous, so well armed, and so hardy, that none of the states cared unnecessarily to meddle with him, but contented themselves with acting to the best of their ability upon the defensive; it is even said that Venice allowed this desperado a secret stipend upon the condition that her territories should be exempted from his depredations; however this may be, it is certain that he made himself so universally dreaded, that but for his singular rashness, he might have lived in as much security, and died in as much splendour, as ever did an absolute prince. He was, however, foolish enough to visit the city of St. Mark during the carnival, and happening to quarrel with a party of young fellows, he killed three of them, but being overpowered by numbers, was taken, and after a protracted examination before the state inquisition, was executed between the pillars in the piazetta, beside the Doge’s palace.

In the hall of the grand council, in the ducal palace, whither, upon the suppression of the republic, the famous library of St. Mark was transferred, the reader, should he happen to visit it, will find at the right of the great entrance, a series of huge tomes, in which are bound up a heterogenous mass of manuscripts of all kinds – poems, chronicles, and church music. Among them he will discover a voluminous collection, in the handwriting of one who calls himself “Fra Giacomo, the humblest of the servants of God, and of the republic, and messenger of peace to the victims of justice.” He appears for many years to have acted as confessor to the state prisoners of Venice, and jotted down, in his own hand, abundant notes of the secrets of which he thus became possessed.

On this day, writes brother Giacomo, I visited, for the fourth time, the renowned and unhappy Spalatro. He is the boldest criminal I ever spoke with; there is not in him the fear of death or the fear of God. He will neither pray, nor confess, nor have any of the rites of the church. Yesterday as I talked with him in the prison, he fell suddenly upon the floor in a fit of epilepsy, to which it seems he has been long subject. When he was somewhat recovered I began to argue with him on his hardened state of wickedness, and asked him if he never thought how he should fare in the other world, were death to come in one of these fearful seizures; to which he answered readily and coolly, that he knew well how he should fare, and had no need to inquire; thereupon I talked to him long and seriously, and he listened and answered with more respect than heretofore: he told me that he believed in the existence of God, and in that of the devil, but that he thought little about the Christian religion, having no interest in it. He went on with much excitement, and among other strange things he said – “Were I to tell you why I believe in the great spirits I have named, you would think me mad. I have seen things, these eyes have seen them, which my lips shall never tell. Were I to speak them, you and all other men would laugh at me, and you would pronounce the Truth, because it is unlike what you are in the habit of seeing every day, an impossibility and a lie; but of this be assured, that I know better than any other man can what is in store for me; as for your prayers, and relics, and solemnities, I hold them in mere contempt. You can alter no man’s condition. You and your fraternity of monks could more easily dislodge the island upon whose breast this prison sits, than sway in the least degree the immutable destiny of a human soul, or bring its future dwelling one inch nearer to heaven, or farther from hell – tush! I know more of these matters than half your divines.”

When I visited him today, this most unfortunate and sinful man was in extraordinary spirits, and full of jests and levity. I was so disgusted with this, that I was about to leave the cell, when he requested me to stay, at the same time apologising for his thoughtlessness, and assuring me he meant no offence. When he chooses he can be very courteous and even engaging. I stayed with him for a long time, and he has told me the story of his life. Gracious God! such a story. I feel like one just awakened from a fearful dream. I cannot believe, and yet I know not how to reject it. The tale was told with groans, and tears, and tremblings, and agonies of excitement. My mind is full of doubts and fears. I have no more certainty, no more knowledge, mystery and illusion are above, and below, and around me. May God sustain me else my mind will be lost, irrevocably lost in the abyss of horror. The narrative was as follows, I give his own words as nearly as I can:

~   ~   ~   ~

My mother was a lady of high birth, and of some fortune; she married, when a mere girl, a French nobleman, Count d’Orbois. This marriage was in every way unfortunate. The count was attached to the French court, whither he took his lady, and having been thus separated from her friends, she was speedily made to feel the dependence of her condition in the bitter sense of conjugal indifference and desertion. Under these ill auspices, which my after life in no part belied, I entered the world, and forty-eight hours after my birth my father, who had never set eyes upon me, having gambled all night with ill success, fought two duels in the morning, in the second of which he was so unfortunate as to be run twice through the body, and killed on the spot. My mother returned to Rome with some small wreck of property, and after two years of widowhood, being a person of singular beauty, agreeable and lively manners, and of unexceptionable birth, she was proposed for by the Marchese Picardi, and accepted him. My earliest recollections are associated with the noble scenery of the Apennines, to the eastward of Rome, and not far from Celano. There in the grand old castle, which has for ages belonged to the Picardi family, 1 passed the early and the only happy years of my existence. Here, however, I lost my best and tenderest friend, the only one who ever cared very much about me – my mother. She died when I was about six years of age, having had, by her second marriage two children – a son and a daughter.

My stepfather, for he soon made it plain that he was resolved to be no more to me, was a man of a naturally cold and somewhat stern temper. He did not love me, and his preference of the others, however natural, galled and wounded me. I resolved, so soon as I should have the right to demand the small sum of money which was my only inheritance, to claim it, and depart forever from the castle. The feelings of pride and mortification in which this resolution had taken its rise, were far, however, from being always present to my mind. I loved my sister and my brother too – selfish though he was I loved him. I do believe, good father, that I might have been a worthy man, as men go, were it not for a certain pride, which rose into madness even under the show of wrong or oppression, and a kind of ardour and impetuosity which left no room for rest or caution. Although, as I have said, the Marquis Picardi refused me any place in his affections, he did not suffer me to want such an education as became a gentleman. Nor were my instructions confined to the mere corporal accomplishments of fencing, horsemanship, and the like; on the contrary, the larger portion of my time was devoted to intense and ardent study.

My instructor in all intellectual pursuits was an old monk, from the neighbouring monastery of Carmelites; and as some strange adventures in my after life were connected with this man, you will excuse me if I describe him briefly. He was a man of great age, his features were commanding and classic, his forehead was bold and intellectual, and furrowed with lines of deep thought; the baldness of age had supplanted the tonsure, a few locks of snow-white hair, venerably covered his temples, and a long and singularly handsome beard of the same pure white, fell upon his bosom. His figure was rather tall, though slight, and might once have been athletic, but how it was bowed under the weight of years. Clothed in the brown habit of his order, it were hard to conceive a more picturesque impersonation of reverend age. One relic of departed youth alone remained to this venerable man, it was the fiery vivacity of an eye, which seemed as though it had never rested or grown dim – an eye under whose glance the buried secrets of the heart arose and showed themselves, which nothing could baffle or escape. This man, brother Anthony, as they called him in the monastery, was, as I have said, my instructor, and a more learned or subtle, but at the same time a more unchristian one could scarcely have been found. He had in me an ardent and, I believe, by no means an unapt pupil; but in dealing his instructions he had a strange delight in setting my mind to work upon subjects which I verily believe no human mind could bear. The fearful themes of time and eternity, and the Godhead in its vastest attributes, were topics in which he loved to engage the faculties of my mind; and I, entangled in the mazy subtleties of his reasoning, or overwhelmed by the magnitude of conceptions after which my mind strained, but which it had not scope or power to comprehend, felt myself often confounded and appalled to a degree which merged upon madness, in such moments the old monk would forget his gravity, and, leaning back in his chair, indulge in an excess of merriment, which little tended to compose my nerves; and strange to say, though I again and again resolved against conversing upon such matters, yet the old man, whenever he pleased, which was often enough, led me to them, as if to make sport for himself out of the perplexities and terrors in which such discourse never failed to involve me. He had, too, a strange pleasure in unsettling all the most established convictions of my mind, and in thus plunging me into an abyss of fearful uncertainty and scepticism from which I have never quite escaped. This kind of metaphysical conversation he not unfrequently seasoned with indirect and artful ridicule of religion, urging, too, in terms which scarcely affected disguise, a philosophy of sensuality unparalleled even in the doctrines of Epicurus. He had, however, in a remarkable degree, the Satanic art of clothing vice in the fairest disguise; and being himself so old as to have no individual interest, further than the inculcation of abstract truth, in the doctrines which he broached, they found the easier access to my mind. It is scarcely wonderful then, if in the hands of such a teacher, so far from acquiring any higher morality, even my natural sense of right and wrong became confused and blunted. This old man, corrupt in heart and powerful in understanding, acquired a strong control over me. I had no affection for him – such a feeling toward him were impossible; cold and full of satire, his nature exhibited to the eye of youth no one quality which was not essentially repulsive; he had yet such intellectual attributes as to fascinate and command. There was, too, between the situation and the character of the man, a strange and mysterious inconsistency, which filled me with a deep and indefinable interest. Than his station, garb, and habits of life, nothing could be more humble; than his appearance, nothing more worn and aged – yet there were ever breaking from him, not the aspirations of ambition, but the reckless scoffings of conscious and established superiority, and while all his feelings seemed to have withered into the scorched and bitter selfishness of age, his mental faculties were endued with preterhuman energy, and an activity nothing short of stupendous.

~   ~   ~   ~

I was ascending the great stairs of the castle, when methought I heard a shriek. I paused, I listened, I did hear a shriek, and another, and another, in quick succession. It was my sister’s voice; I hurried towards her room. Several passages I had to traverse on the way; the screams were louder and more rapid, I reached the door, it was fast; I rushed against it and stood in the chamber. Heavens! what did I behold – my sister with hair dishevelled, struggling, terrified, locked in the grasp of the aged wretch, my instructor.

You see this arm, good father, it was then as lusty and as sinewy as now; with all the force that frenzy gave, I struck the old villain in the face. I might as well have smitten a rock – he turned upon me like a beast at bay. I heard steps in the passage – servants were approaching, but before they entered the chamber, the old man grappled with me, and seizing me by the throat, to my shame be it spoken, hurled me with tremendous force senseless upon the floor. When I came to myself the old friar had made his escape, and neither at the castle nor the monastery was heard of more. After this affair I remained at the castle but a year, at the end of which I was enabled to realize my old scheme of departure and independence.

Mounted upon a powerful grey horse, whose speed and mettle I had often tried – fully equipped and armed for the road, and with some hundred crowns in my pocket – the remainder of my fortune, a small one enough, being lodged to my credit at Rome – I set forth from the old place which had been my home from my earliest days, to throw myself upon the chances of the world. It was not in nature that I should leave this place without keen regrets. Here all my life had been passed, and here were the only living persons who cared for or knew of my existence. As I rode slowly through the wild wood, which far away skirted the rising ground on which the castle stood, I turned to take a last look of the old building. The temper of our minds clothes even things inanimate with all accordant expression; and as I gazed upon its old grey front, it seemed to me that a familiar face looked sadly and reproachfully upon me. Every window and ivy-mantled battlement and buttress – all the picturesque irregularities – each nook and corner of the fine old pile, suggested to my busy memory some affectionate and pleasant remembrance, which moved my heart that we should thus part, and for a moment so softened me, that I was tempted to reject the long-cherished counsels of my pride, and return to the quiet haunts where I had been so happy. But my evil genius triumphed: the struggle was a short one, and I turned my back forever on the castle, with a heart whose despondency, I might say desolation, gave too trite presage of my after life. I put my horse to a rapid pace, and had soon left the scenes of my childhood far behind, and out of sight forever.

The evening fell before I had accomplished more than half the way which separated the castle from the village in whose hostelrie I proposed to pass the night. The road was broken and difficult of passage – in all respects, except as it served to indicate the direction of my route, rather an obstruction to my progress than tendency to facilitate it. The scenery through which I passed, grand and beautiful at all times, began now to assume that wild and fantastic character which the broad and spectral lights and shadows of a cloudless moon shed on all beneath it. The track which I had for some time followed with much difficulty, now led through a deep and rugged gorge, whose sides, precipitous and broken, were clothed with a dark luxuriant copse. For more than an hour I had neither seen human form nor habitation; but now, for the first time, I felt the depression of solitude. The utter desertion and silence of the place, unbroken except by the moaning of the night wind, filled my mind with that vague, mysterious dread which men attribute to superstition. My heart leaped within me as some broad grey rook, like a sheeted phantom in the hoar light of the moon, suddenly revealed itself; or again, when my excited fancy beheld, in the dark top of some tall fir nodding in the night breeze, a gigantic demon saluting me with “mop and moe,” or beckoning me towards it with long fantastic arms. Full of such fancies, which scare us even when we laugh at them, I slowly and painfully pursued my solitary way, frequently scrambling through sloughs and fragments of timber, which storms had dislodged from among the overhanging rocks – often, too, obliged to dismount and lead my horse among chasms and difficulties where his instinct would scarcely have availed him. The labours and anxieties of my progress, were moreover enhanced by very considerable doubts as to the correctness of the path which I was pursuing – doubts which the difficulty, I might almost say the impracticability of the road, very nearly reduced to certainty. While thus struggling onward, my eye was caught by what appeared to be the figure of a horseman, moving cautiously round an abrupt and shadowy prominence, some four or five hundred yards in advance of me. As this figure slowly approached, I had ample opportunity of scanning his garb and equipments. He was mounted upon a tall, dark-coloured horse, and enveloped in a cloak. He wore, moreover, a broad-rimmed and high-crowned hat. Thus much I could plainly distinguish, as the form of the horseman moved between me and the moonlight. As the distance between us lessened, I cautiously laid my hand upon the butt or one of my holster pistols, resolved, if occasion should render it prudent, to deal very briefly with the cavalier in the cloak. When he had approached within about forty yards, or even less, he, perceiving me, it would appear, for the first time, suddenly reined in, and stood in the centre of my path, in strong and marked relief against the clear light of the moon, motionless and dark, as if horse and man were carved out of black marble. Although I never could accuse myself of much timidity in presence of a human antagonist, my situation was not by any means pleasant. That I stood in the presence and within almost certain range of one of those bandits, of whose quick and deadly aim many a marvellous tale was current, I had little doubt and yet my suspicions were not sufficiently confirmed to warrant me in anticipating his assault by any overt act of self-defence. It was clear that, if shots were to be exchanged, he must have the advantage of the first. With a keen and fixed gaze, therefore, I watched every movement of his, prepared, on the appearance of any gesture indicating an appeal to carbine or pistol, instantly to shoot him, if I could. The figure, however, made no such gesture, but, after a considerable pause, addressed me in a rough, good-humoured voice—

“Signor, you travel late, and on a foul track. Santa Maria! you need a stout heart. Whitherward do you ride?”

“To Vallechia, signor,” replied I. “How far do you call it hence?”

“To Vallechia!” repeated he of the cloak, after a most unceremonious burst of merriment: “from Vallechia, I should say. Why, your back hath been turned upon the high road thither for ten miles at the least.”

“Holy devil!” muttered I, “here is a pleasant adventure! I even suspected as much.”

“Nevertheless,” continued the horseman, “as you have left your track, you may as well leave it a little farther. You will find shelter and food, though both somewhat of the coarsest, about a league farther on, in the village; but if you turn back, it is most like you will have to put up with a supperless nap by the road side. Your nag must be well-nigh on his last legs. What a devil of a blunder!”

“A devil of a blunder, indeed,” echoed I. “I see no better course than that you recommend. About a league ahead you say the village lies?”

With these words I put my horse again to a walk, intending, before I reached my acquaintance – whom, in spite of his frank air and honest voice, I did not quite like – to stop under pretence of setting my saddle-girths to rights; in reality, in order to let him pass me without the necessity of turning my back upon him.

“By Saint Anthony, Signor,” exclaimed he, as I slowly approached him, “your horse has gone lame. This is worse again: see, he stumbles. By Bacchus, you must lead him and walk.”

It was indeed too true. Some strain or damage received in scrambling through the broken inequalities and obstructions of the road had indeed rendered him perfectly lame.

“Holy apostle!” cried my sympathetic acquaintance, “this is the very extremity of ill luck. Yes, you have, indeed, but one course before you now, and well if you can achieve it. You must on to the village. Old Beppo can afford you shelter for the night, as well as a fair bottle of wine, and in the morning, if not before, he will set your beast to rights. An honest companion is old Giuseppe, and a first-rate farrier to boot. Three miles hence you will find the old inn by the road side. But here again – here is another rub. You must follow the road we are upon, seeing you know no other; and thus, at once, we have the distance doubled; – whereas, if you could but make out your way by the bridle track – Stay, it must want nearly two good hours of midnight. I have more than half a mind to turn about and set you on the path. I’m time enough – time enough, sir, for my errand – a funeral; but I am too early by an hour or more. I can walk my horse ten miles in little more than three hours, and there I am before two o’clock. So never make words about it; I am your man: follow me. I’ll lead you as far as the two chestnut trees, and thence I can point out the path to you – so that, unless misfortune is resolved to make a meal of you, you can’t well meet another mishap for this night.”

So saying, my new friend put his horse into a slow walk in the direction in which I was about to move. “Of a truth,” thought I, “a most accommodating gentleman! – somewhat suspicious, though; and yet why should he seem less trustworthy in my eyes than I in his? He may be, after all, a very honest, inoffensive sort of person. At all events, come what will, I cannot part company unless he choose it; after all, we stand but man to man – and the devil is in the dice if I cannot make good my own in a fair field.” With these encouraging reflections, I followed my companion along the unequal road, under the broad shadowy boughs of the wild wood, which covered the sides of the glen. The path, after many windings, opened upon a wide level, surrounded by low hills, and covered unequally by patches of forest. As we pursued our way, my comrade chatted gaily, now and then interrupting his discourse with some fragment of an ancient ditty, and altogether with so frank and joyous an air, that my suspicions gradually disappeared, and instead of keeping cautiously in the rear, I took my place by his side. A handsome face, carrying an expression at once bold and honest, and lit up, as it seemed habitually, with a reckless, jolly good humour, further won upon my good opinion. I laughed and talked freely with him, and it was with real regret that at length I reached the spot where he was to leave me to explore the rest of my way alone.

“Here we are, Signor,” said he, reining in his steed – “here we are at the two chestnuts, and here we part Now mark my directions, for a mistake may cost you your supper. You see that grey rock on which the moon is shining. It stands just beside three or four old trees. Pass by that and turn to your right behind that dark screen of wood; ride through the open glade for about half a mile, and when you reach the open ground, ride right ahead, and a few hundred yards will see you upon the road again then take the left hand, and ten minutes will bring you to the inn, the first building you meet, a large house with some old fruit trees about it – and so signor, good night.”

With these words my companion turned his horse’s head away, and at a slow trot began to retrace his steps. I watched him until his receding figure disappeared in the mists of night; and then, with a light heart, began to follow the course which he had indicated.

By a close attention to the directions which I had received, I reached the road, and was proceeding leisurely upon it toward the object of my immediate search, when my ear was struck by the sound of a voice chanting a song, but so far away that I could distinguish nothing more than that the tones were those of a man. As I rode on, however, the sounds became more and more distinct, and at length I clearly descried the object from whence they issued. A little man was seated by the road side, upon a block of stone, or some other temporary resting-place, and, with folded arms and his legs extended before him, was chanting lustily, and with no very harmonious cadences, some rude amatory verses. Upon seeing me he forthwith suspended his vocal exercises, stood erect, walked two or three paces away from the road – stopped, turned round, and altogether appeared very much discomposed by the interruption which evidently unexpected arrival had caused. Having exchanged a courteous salutation, I had passed on some short distance, when the little man overtook me.

“Signor,” said he, doffing his cap with a lowly reverence, as soon as he had reached my horse’s head, “will you pardon a great liberty?”

“Readily, I dare say,” replied I. “Speak freely – can I serve you?”

“Most essentially, your excellency,” replied he. “I am a poor man, a trader in small wares: they are here in my pack – the whole set are not worth a ducat; and I have not sold to the value of a baiocco. I am, indeed, sir, miserably poor – oh, miserably poor!”

“Do you want an alms?” inquired I.

“No Signor,” he replied; “no, I do not want alms, though I do not know how soon I may,” he added hastily. “Heaven knows I am wretchedly poor!”

“What, then, would you have of me, in the name of patience?” cried I. “Speak out, man.”

“Merely, sir,” replied he, with an effort – “merely your company. I presume your course lies through some neighbouring town, where I might get my supper and rest. An onion and a piece of bread supplies the one, and an armful of straw the other. We poor men must live as we may.”

“You have rightly guessed,” replied I. “I am on the way to a place of refreshment; and unless the guide with whom I have just parted has deceived me, we are now even within a mile of it. So walk with me, and welcome.”

The poor man was profuse in his acknowledgements; and so, toward the village we went, side by side. As we proceeded, I could perceive pretty plainly that my Companion was by no means well at ease. Many and fearful glances he stole around, and not unfrequently I detected him in the act of glancing stealthily and suspiciously at myself. Whatever misgivings, however, he may have had respecting me, they were soon laid at rest, and he began to converse with me with less reserve, and in a tone bordering upon the confidential.

“Signor,” said he, “I am rather a timid traveller, especially in the neighbourhood of these hills. The fact is, sir,” continued he, lowering his voice to a whisper, “I was once robbed among them, about twenty years ago; stripped to my skin, and nothing left me but a pair of old trousers and, after all, I had a run of two miles or more to get out of the villains’ hands. I should have died of fatigue and exhaustion but for the charity of some good monks – the saints reward them!”

The caution of the worthy pedlar was, then, to say the least of it, perfectly justifiable; yet I own that I frequently gratified my taste for the comical during the course of our brief journey, by practising upon the ever-wakeful fears of my companion – ample opportunity for which was afforded in the dim uncertain outline of the rocks and underbrush with which the ground was unequally covered, and which, in many places, offered a rude resemblance to the outline of human figures grouped together. Thus chatting, we had ridden on for some time, when to my infinite satisfaction, and no less so to that of my companion, we came in sight of the object of our march.

The road, at the point at which we had arrived, made a sudden sweep down an abrupt descent, which terminated in the bottom of a glen, intersected in its middle by a winding river, whose foam and eddies glittered like silver in the moonlight. Over this river the road was conducted by an old ivy-mantled bridge, at the far end of which stood the ruins of an ancient town. Some fine old trees cast their broad leaves over the road, and sheltered, in picturesque groups, a quaint and extensive building, which stood upon the near side of the river, having something of the mixed character of a house and a castle – in many parts very much decayed and dilapidated, and in some even ruinous. The deep-mouthed baying of a watchdog now arose from the solitary yard of the old place, enhancing, if anything were required to do so, by its angry howlings, the desolate and melancholy character of the scene. This old building, then, was the inn to which my recent guide had directed me, and a comfortless one, judging by external appearances, it was likely to prove. Arrived at the door, we gave summary notice of our advent by repeated knockings administered with hearty good will, and accompanied by the most vociferous clamours upon honest Beppo. But although these noises, by no means inconsiderable, were improved into a most energizing din by the furious yellings of the watchdog, we had long to wait before our summons produced any other effect than that of wearying ourselves. At length a window at some height in the building was opened, and a shrill cracked voice inquired, in no very courteous tones, what we wanted. After some parley, a window was closed again, and in a short time an old grey-headed little man, half habited, opened the door, and after a curious scrutiny, assisted by the light of a small lamp which he held in his hand, admitted myself and my companion into a kind of hall, whose shattered wainscotting and ruined appearance promise no very cheering reception. Before entering, I transferred my pistols from the holster pipes to my coat pocket, and throwing the reins upon my horse’s neck, trusted to his exhausted condition to keep him from wandering far. At the same time I directed the old man, who was indeed Beppo himself, to have the beast cared for. This done, I followed mine host through several passages and chambers, at the end of which I found myself in a huge old-fashioned kitchen, on whose hearth blazed and crackled a cheerful fire of wood. Stretched upon the stone floor before it lay two boys, fast asleep, and by its side, in a chair, sat a girl, also soundly slumbering. At the harsh and well-known accents of old Beppo, the three sleepers started to their feet, and after some grumblings on their part, and not a few oaths and imprecations on his, they began to apply themselves in right earnest to make us comfortable.

Speedily were we, myself and my humble companion, who at my invitation shared the repast, supplied with a cold pasty and a steaming omelet, and with right good will did we apply ourselves to these right savoury viands, seasoned, too, as I had been led to expect, with a bottle of excellent wine. When I had somewhat appeased the rage of hunger and thirst, I began leisurely to scan the apartment and its inmates. In the former I observed nothing worthy of remark, but to my no small surprise, among the latter I recognised, in the girl whom I had seen sleeping by the hearth on my entrance, a kitchen-wench, who having served in the Picardi castle for several years, had suddenly one night disappeared, without leaving any trace to suggest whitherward she had gone, or what had become of her. On seeing and recognising this poor creature thus unexpectedly, I was about to utter an exclamation of surprise when she checked me by a gesture of alarm and impatience, accompanied by a glance of peculiar significance towards the old innkeeper, who was now standing before the fire, with his back towards us. In compliance with the mute direction of the girl, I thereupon remained silent, having, by a repeated and more accurate inspection, satisfied myself of the identity of the person. There was something in the expression of face with which the girl had glanced at the old man, brief though that glance had been, which left upon my mind an indefinable and unpleasant impression; nor was this ambiguity of feeling towards my host at all favourably determined by the peculiarities of his outward man. He was, as I have said, a small man, his body, disproportioned to his limbs, was long, and curved, like that of a wasp; his shoulders were unusually narrow, and this defect was rendered more conspicuously striking by the enormous magnitude of his disproportioned head; his hair was grizzled and long, his eyebrows bushy, his eyes restless, and in expression very sinister, his nose flat and drooping, his mouth large and furnished with a perfect row of jagged fangs. A considerable projection of the under jaw, added to a face which expressed, in no ordinary degree, cunning and deceit, a character of sternness which, in moments of the smallest excitement, amounted almost to ferocity. Such features and such a cast of countenance were, in themselves, a cautionary notice; and though clothed in all the graces and smiles of what, from the moment that my dress, which was of rich material, caught the light, had become a studiously courteous welcome, could not banish or disguise what, in my mind, appeared the ineffaceable stamp of guilt. I know not how it was, however, though thus clearly appreciating the villainous character stamped upon the face of this man, no shadow of suspicion or thought of danger associated with him for a moment crossed my mind; on the contrary, I felt in unusual spirits, and altogether free from reserve. I laughed, I joked, I sang songs; I compelled the poor little pedlar to do the same, and whether it was that the snug fire and cosy kitchen had kindled the spirit of the vagrant merchant, or, as I more than half suspect, that the wine of which he had partaken contained some strange ingredient, certain it is that he met my gaiety with more than corresponding hilarity and confidence; he sang his best songs, and told a hundred stories of strange adventures, in which he himself had played the part of hero; he even went so far as to boast of his bargains, and dropped plentiful hints to the effect that he was by no means so poor a man as he might seem, and, in short, was to the full as indiscreet as I, if not more so.

Suddenly, however, and almost in the midst of his boisterous jollity, the honest pedlar leaned back in his chair, and was almost instantly fast asleep. The innkeeper shrugged his misshapen shoulders, smiled, and shook his head, observing, at the same time, “Poor devil! how tired he is – pity such a light heart should have so hard a trade. Would you, signor, desire to see your chamber!”

I assented.

“Martha,” continued he, turning to the girl, and pointing to the slumbering pedlar, “let this honest man have such a resting-place as you can make out for him at so short notice. You may as well make it here – not in that corner, devil!” he suddenly exclaimed, fixing on the girl a tremendous look – “not in that corner, you limb of hell!” and then, after a pause, he added, “place it here, in the neighbourhood of the fire, snug and warm; the poor man must be made comfortable. These sluttish servants,” continued he, probably in the way of apology for his unaccountable burst of fury, “are enough to make Job himself blaspheme.”

So saying, and muttering all the way to himself, he led me through several passages to the foot of a clumsy and antique staircase of oak; this we ascended, and traversing the creaking and half rotten flooring of several rooms, whose bare and mildewed walls afforded but a dreary augury of what I was to expect, my host threw open a large door, with massive and dingy pillars of carved wood at either side, and with a low reverence informed me that this was my chamber. I entered, and found a spacious apartment hung with dusty and tattered tapestry, whose desolate appearance was much enhanced by the absence of all furniture, excepting a bed without curtains, whose four tall posts stood at their respective corners naked and comfortless as the shorn masts of a wreck; two or three old chairs and one small table completed the garniture of the room. Opposite to the foot of the bed, and at the same side with the door through which we had entered, was the hearth, exhibiting a huge and shadowy chasm, which might have stabled, at least, two horses comfortably. The cheerless aspect of this place, with all its dust, cobwebs, and nakedness about it, speedily subdued the frolicsome spirit which had kindled so madly within me in the snug old kitchen, by the roaring fire of crackling faggots. There was something hungry and treacherous in the dark and comfortless chamber, which accorded well with the sinister and forbidding aspect of my host – something which indistinctly boded danger, and whispered to the startled ear beware! My host placed the candle upon the table, and, with another profound reverence and a courteous benediction, took his departure.

I was now alone. It is wonderful how intensely the outward securing of things, the mere forms and colour of what surrounds us, will move the temper of the mind. Had my host conducted me to a snug modern-looking chamber of moderate dimensions, with due allowance of tables, chairs, wardrobes, and curtains, and containing, above all, a cheery fire in the grate, I should probably have enjoyed the same cheerful good humour, sleeping or waking, throughout the night; but as it was, in so vast and old chamber, through whose damp vacancy a solitary candle shed a partial and uncertain light, if possible more depressing than darkness itself, far, as it seemed, from the inhabited part of the mansion, and separated by a long succession of passages, and chambers, and staircases, which I should have been puzzled to retrace, from all the human inhabitants of the house, I felt, I knew not how, a certain suspicion and uneasiness creep over me, which I could neither account for nor control; Without undressing, I threw myself upon the bed, leaving the candle burning upon the table beside me. I soon fell into an uneasy slumber, from which, however, I speedily started with that vague sensation of horror which sometimes overcomes the slumbering mind. I gazed fearfully round the room; it was empty as before. I sat up in the bed, and raised the candle above my head, so that its light might fall more distinctly on every object; but no, there was nothing to awaken my suspicions; all was silent, and just as I had left it. I lay down again, but could not sleep. I felt restless, anxious, and almost awestruck. A kind of vague, superstitious excitement came upon me; I could not rest; I could not remain still; I got up, and, taking the candle in my hand, resolved to satisfy myself that nothing was lurking in the obscure corners of the room. I seized my naked sword in one hand, and the candle in the other, and proceeded to search every nook and cranny of the chamber. I even went so far as to examine the huge chimney: in its dark chasm the faint light of the candle was lost at once, and I remember well thrusting, as high as my arm could reach with my rapier, but without any result except that two or three bats whirred down, and flitted around me in wide, uneven circles. Few who have ever indulged the kind of uneasiness which at that moment actuated me, can be ignorant that when once yielded to, it asserts the most capricious and unreasonable dominion over its victim, leading him, in his fantastic search, to places which, so far from affording verge enough to a human being, could scarcely accommodate a reasonably-proportioned guinea-pig. In the course of my exploratory rambles, I clambered upon the table to examine the windowsills, which were placed high in the wall, and deeply sunk, lest some assassin should lie coiled in their recesses; and although, as you may have easily anticipated, I found nothing of the kind, yet my scrutiny was rewarded by a discovery which did not tend to quiet my uneasiness. This was no other than a complete set of thick, and by no means antique iron stauncheons, strong and firmly sunk into the stone window-frame above and below. Each window exhibited the same sinister and gaol-like security. I confess I thought this precaution somewhat strange, nor were my suspicions diminished by observing that these bars were unlike all the other garniture of the room, sound and in good repair, in some places exhibiting, apparently with the freshness of yesterday, traces of the skill of the plumber and the smith. I turned now to the door, and opening it, looked out open the dark passage. There was nothing there but the chill night air, which floated cheerlessly into the chamber, causing my candle to flare and flicker like a torch. I closed it again, and having examined the priming of my pistols, and laid them along with my sword close beside me, I threw myself once more upon the bed. I scorned to admit even to myself that I feared anything. I had an unbounded reliance upon my own activity and strength, and a sanguine confidence in my fortune. With my good weapons beside me I set all odds at naught, and though ever and anon something within me whispered – “Leave this room and get thee down – the Philistines be upon thee – bestir thyself, lest they take thee sleeping” – yet such thoughts crossed my mind but fleetingly, and were despised.

As I lay thus listlessly, the sweet slumbers of fatigue stole over me; the chamber in which I lay gradually became confused and indistinct; my fatigues and anxieties were alike forgotten in deep and calm unconsciousness.

From this state of happy oblivion I was aroused by the pressure of a hand upon my shoulder, and the administration of two or three impatient jolts thoroughly awakened me. I started upright in the bed, and mechanically stretched my hand towards the pistols which lay beside me. The precaution was unnecessary; my visitor was a female – the poor girl whose person I had recognised in the kitchen before. The candle had hardly wasted since I had closed my eyes; I could not have slept a quarter of an hour. I gazed fixedly upon the features of the servant girl; they were tense and pale as those of death: there was such mortal agitation in the face as filled my mind with awe. With an impressive and imploring gesture, several times repeated, she enjoined silence, and then leaning forward, she whispered with slow and startling emphasis—

“Within a few minutes, murderers will come to your bedside: I wish you to escape. Draw the tapestry at this side of your bed; you will find a door behind it; a long passage leads from it to a flight of stairs, and they to the kitchen. Wait at the head of the stairs with your drawn sword in your hand, and when you hear me say, God send us all better days, it shall be a signal to you that one of them is about to enter from the kitchen the passage where you stand; drive the sword through him, and run into the kitchen, where you will find another, perhaps two; I shall take care that no more are there. Be firm, and pray to God.”

With these words she glided speedily from the room, leaving me horror-struck at the sudden and ghastly intimation. With silent rapidity I rose from the bed – my preparations were speedily made. I stuck my pistols in my belt, and taking my naked sword under my arm, I soon found the door which my protectress had described. I extinguished the candle, and, entering the passage, closed the door behind me.

This passage was extremely narrow and low; the floor and ceiling were of stone; and, as I imagined, its whole width lay in the thickness of the wall. Along this strange corridor I cautiously pushed my way; and, after a progress which appeared all but interminable, I reached the first of a flight of steep stone steps, leading downwards, and here I paused. I had hardly ceased to move when I became conscious that every sound, even that of the lightest foot-tread upon the kitchen floor, was distinctly audible where I stood. I heard the shuffling of many feet to and fro, accompanied by a great deal of whispering. These sounds continuing for a long time, without being followed by any decisive result, my nerves were gradually wrought by the suspense in which I stood to such a pitch of excitement, that I could not remain still. I descended the stairs with the utmost caution. When I had reached the foot, I found a space which afforded little more than standing room. Straight before me, and within a few inches of my face, was the door which opened upon the kitchen. This was a double door, constructed, as I afterwards found, so as to resemble from without a sort of cupboard. A broad chink in the centre, where the two valves met, admitted a bright stream of light; and placing my eye at the aperture, I witnessed, unobserved, a scene which no occurrence of my afterlife has availed to obliterate.

At the side of the chamber opposite to that at which I was placed, stood the bed in which lay the poor pedlar: his deep stertorous breathing sufficiently attested the soundness of the slumber in which lie was locked. A blazing faggot flamed and flickered on the hearth, throwing an intense but uncertain light over the whole scene. Close by the fire stood two stout fellows, in one of whom I recognised, without difficulty, my good-humoured guide. Beside them sat a third, with his legs extended towards the cheering blaze, while with an air of sublime abstraction, he leisurely smoked a long pipe. At the same time I observed the girl to whom I owed the timely warning, whose success was yet so doubtful, employed in carrying towards the bed in which my poor comrade was sleeping, a large tub, or bucket. Beside the bed stood Giuseppe himself, a hideous incarnation of evil, glaring upon the unconscious slumberer. A boy, resting his head upon the foot of the bed, was fast asleep also. Such was the scene which my first glance through the aperture of the door revealed, under the fierce and restless light of the blazing wood fire. The baleful and ominous scowl which darkened the features of the ill-favoured innkeeper, and something like a foreboding of what was about to happen, rivetted my attention to the group about the humble bed where the poor little traveller lay he innkeeper stooped forward, and with a sudden jerk of his hand threw the bedclothes down, so as to leave the upper part of the body of the sleeper bare, except for the coarse shirt which covered it. He next slid his arm gently under the shoulders of the unconscious man, and slowly drew his body towards the edge of the bed. At this moment the girl placed the bucket at the side of the pallet, and with an expression of strange horror turned towards the door where I stood, and passed on from my sight. Giuseppe now drew the shoulders completely over the edge of the couch, so that the head hung down towards the floor. The poor wretch continued to sleep. The innkeeper beckoned now to one of his companions, who stood at the fire. The man came over to the bed, and listlessly shoved the bucket with his foot, until he had brought it directly under the head of the sleeping man. 1 could endure no more. My resolution was taken. I set my shoulder against the door, and strained every muscle in my body in the desperate effort to burst it open. The effort, tremendous though it was, was made in vain. The door was fastened without, and that so effectively, that the assault with which I had just taxed its strength had hardly availed to make the fastenings creak. Well was it for me, however, that this sound, slight though it was, occurred while the villain was shoving the bucket, as I have just told you, with his foot along the floor. Had that little sound but reached the ear of any of the wretches who occupied the chamber, I must have perished. On such threads hang the lives of men! Weak and exhausted by the fruitless effort which I had made, I resigned myself in mute horror to witness the tragedy which I had no power to prevent. Giuseppe now, in a whisper which froze the life-blood at my heart, repeated the significant words – “Il coltello,” the knife. His companion instantly turned to a cupboard, a few steps aside, and returned bearing in his hand the instrument, whose broad blade, as he walked along, he wiped in his jacket sleeve. The cold sweat burst from every pore in my body. I shook like a man in an ague: a deadly sickness came over me; yet I could not move my eyes from the objects, the sight of which filled me with this agony. The man, with the knife in his grasp, now placed himself by the bed, half sitting upon its edge. Giuseppe took the head of the sleeping man between his hands and supported it with the face turned directly towards the place where I stood. His companion now applied the edge of the knife to the skin of the throat, and moving it slightly along the surface, until it rested upon the spot which he judged most suitable to his purpose, he laid the palm of his left hand upon the back of the blade, and with his whole weight and strength forced it with a mangling gash, so far as almost to sever the head from the body. The crimson blood gushed, or rather spouted, from the chasm, and, with a gurgling sound, poured into the bucket. At the same moment the assassin, dropping the knife upon the floor, threw himself across the body, to control the convulsive strugglings of death. The pedlar had continued fast locked in sleep, until the knife had actually entered his throat. The moment, however, that the fatal stroke was given, the murdered man opened his eyes, and gazed with such an expression of imploring terror and agony, as fancy never beheld. At the same time he opened his mouth – perhaps to shriek – perhaps to pray; but sound was never more to come from thence. Blood bubbled forth, and streamed over his white and quivering face. Again and again he opened his mouth with ghastly strugglings. Nor did this fearful motion cease, until the eye fixed, and the mortal agony ended in death. The innkeeper then wrung the head round, while his companion, with the same knife, ploughed through the tendons and muscles, until they succeeded in actually cutting the head from the trunk. The body lay upon the bed, and the neck still hung bleeding over the tub, into which Giuseppe dropped the head. I could see no more. My brain grew dizzy. A sick faintness came upon me. I clambered, I know not how, up the stairs, and, sitting down upon the uppermost step, I clasped my damp forehead in my hands, and remained for some minutes almost unconscious of everything, absorbed in one dull, vague feeling of horror.

As soon as I came a little to myself, I plainly perceived, by what I could gather from the whisperings which I overheard from below, that the murderers were engaged in removing the body of their victim. Steps now slowly and unsteadily traversed the kitchen – I suppose those of him who carried the horrible burden. The outer door was cautiously opened; the steps passed forth, and the door closed again.

“The gentleman sleeps like a top,” whispered a gruff voice. “He has just put out his candle, and lies still as a dormouse.”

“Take your stiletto,” replied another. “Morning will break before you have finished.”

“Remove your boots, bungler,” cried a female voice. “Your spurs make jingle enough to ring the dead from their graves.”

“Peace, gaol-bird,” cried Giuseppe. “What’s that to thee.”

“Well, well,” exclaimed the girl, with a slow distinct utterance, “God grant us all better days.”

I needed not the warning, I had already placed myself in readiness. After a short delay the door, through which I had just witnessed the scene which I have attempted to describe, opened wide. A broad light flashed upon the rugged and narrow stairs, and a tall figure began to ascend. I stood in the deep shadow awaiting his advance; and as soon as he had arrived within two or three steps of the top, I sprang forward, and lunged full at his breast. This was not done so quickly that he did not catch a glimpse of me, as I started forward, in sufficient time to enable him with his arm perfectly to parry the thrust. As it happened, however, this was all the worse for himself; for instead of turning the sword aside, he merely struck the point upwards, and it entered somewhere near the eye, and, penetrating the brain, killed him on the spot. Without a groan he tumbled headlong over the steps. Springing over his prostrate body, I rushed into the kitchen. Giuseppe and my honest guide were the only males within it. The latter stood nearest to me, and his astonishment at my entrance was such that he did not move. With a deliberate aim of two seconds, I levelled my pistol at his breast and fired, he fell – I know not whether mortally hurt or not, but I never saw him move again. Without the loss of an instant I levelled the second pistol at the innkeeper – but it missed fire – the wretch ran directly to the door, but before his hand had reached the latch I was up with him. With a hideous yell of defiance he sprang round and grappled with me. His strength far exceeded what his figure seemed to promise; but I felt that he was still no match for me. In a moment I hurled him back upon the gory pallet, and planted my knee upon his breast. As we struggled, he caught my left thumb within his teeth, and clenched them upon it until they fairly ground upon the bone. Heedless of the pain, I clutched his throat in my right hand, and pressed with all my might and strength – in vain he struggled – the eyes started – the face blackened. Froth covered my hands, and before two minutes he lay insensible.

“For God’s sake, girl,” cried I, “give me the pistol.” Silently she obeyed me, and for a moment relaxing my grasp, I seized the weapon by the muzzle, and dashed the heavy butt into his skull – he was dead. Yet such was the strength with which his teeth were locked upon my thumb, that I could not release it until I had beaten out nearly half his teeth, I forced the barrel of the pistol into his mouth, and employing it as a lever, I, with much exertion, unlocked the clenched teeth, and loosed the mangled joint. At this moment I heard a heavy step without, the latch was raised, and one of the fellows who had been present at the murder of the pedlar entered. I did not give him time to recover his surprise, hut placing the pistol to his head, I said in a stern and determined voice – “Villain! lead me to a horse. If I am discovered or interrupted, I will blow your brains out.”

“Good Signor,” said the fellow, evidently ill at his ease, “patience for heaven’s sake – be not rash.”

“I give you five seconds,” replied I, “to bring me to a horse: at the end of that time, the condition unfulfilled, I will shoot you through the head, as sure as God is in heaven. Look at those corpses – you see I am in earnest.”

The fellow said not one word more; but, being himself unarmed, led me quietly from the door of the inn at which we stood to that of the stable. I all the time holding him by the back of the collar, with the pistol close by his head.

“Choose a strong one, scoundrel,” said I, as we entered the stable, in which stood several horses ready saddled. I compelled him to lead out the steed, and to mount first himself, and springing up behind him, I commanded him to ride on the shortest track leading to the high road to Rome. The moon had gone down, and the night was now so dark that I could not see many yards before me. In obedience to my directions the fellow rode at a hard trot. We had scarcely crossed the bridge, when two figures loomed suddenly in sight, and so directly in advance of us that it required a sudden and violent exertion of the bit which threw the animal back upon his haunches, to prevent our running foul of this nocturnal patrol.

“Who rides so hard?” inquired one in no very cultured accents. Here I pressed the muzzle of the pistol against my companion’s head, as a salutary hint.

“Who should it be,” exclaimed my comrade, “but a friend – do not you know me?”

“Faith, brother,” replied the same harsh voice, “it is well we did not rob thee, and thou us;” and marvellously tickled with this pleasant conceit he laughed long and lustily. “Any news?” added he – “any rabbits in the burrow? any nightingales in the cage – eh?”

“Aye, two,” replied my companion, “with their necks wrung. You will see more at the inn. Good night.”

We were passing on, when again one of them exclaimed—

“Hey! what the devil have you gotten behind you?”

Again, I let my honest companion feel that the weapon rested upon his skull; and with much nonchalance, he replied—

“What is behind me? why a bag of bloody carrion, if you must have it – but we bandy words too long – when I get rid of this, I’ll find you at old Beppo’s.”

“Well, good luck, most holy sexton,” replied the horseman; “and as for your burthen, requiescat in pace – amen.”

So saying, the two horsemen rode on, and we pursued our way, at the same hard pace until the morning’s light began to streak the east.

Watching my opportunity as we rode rapidly down a steep declivity, I bestowed my companion a vigorous shove, which sent him clean over the horse’s head; and before he had well done rolling I had left him four hundred yards behind me. With a courteous valediction I rode on, and without another adventure reached the glorious city of Rome, where strange things befell me, as I shall tell you. But first give me a cup of wine.

PART TWO

In the heart of a gay capital, possessed of finds which, to my shortsighted inexperience, seemed all but inexhaustible, full of ardour, curiosity, and passion, I threw myself heart and soul into the intoxication and excitement of all the folly, vice and extravagance which revolved around me; with more of inquisitiveness than of depravity, I hunted out vice in all secure and secret haunts, where, undisguised, and maddening, and terrible, it ruled and rioted. The adventures and perils of the wild scenes in which I mixed, had for me a strange attraction; I panted to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; I longed to try and prove those old and mighty rulers of the human kind – the ancient vices of the world in the high places of their power; recklessly I courted danger: wildly I plunged into the unfathomable gulf of sin, and madly did time fly by.

My acquaintances were among the madcap young nobles of the city. There was nothing to withdraw me from the headlong career of sins and follies in which I was borne, except prudence or religion – and I had neither. I resolutely closed my eyes against all distant consequences; I saw but the present – I would see no more. I felt that when my wealth was squandered, I would find a way to get more; I cared not how, provided it were boldly, and in the manner of a soldier of fortune. Even then my coming destiny filled the vision of my mind; I beheld it perhaps with awe, but undismayed; for me it had a dreadful fascination – I rushed towards it with a bosom full of defiance and scornful recklessness.

Fagged and jaded with the last night’s debauch, I rose towards evening from the numb and heavy sleep of excess; and wandered forth to breathe the fresh air upon the Corso. It was the Carnival – the streets were thronged with masks, jugglers, itinerant gamesters with their various apparatus for cheating the incautious; mountebanks and empirics holding forth upon their crazy stages; noble ladies in rich attire walking with their high-born protectors, and shouldered and jostled by countrymen and beggars – all mingled up in the fantastic mazes of a bewildering and gorgeous dream. Captivated by the never-ending variety of the scene before me; hour after hour flew by; and when at length the sun went down, and twilight was succeeded by the wan splendour of the moon, I still was sauntering among the gay and idle throng, whose groups crossed and flitted before my eyes in such rich and grotesque contrariety. “Why so sad, young gentleman?” exclaimed a voice close by my ear, while, at the same time, a particoloured sword of lath was laid smartly upon my shoulder. The speaker was a harlequin, who had turned for a moment from his masked companions to accost me. “Has thy ladylove frowned, or thy Jew friend been cruel? has thy luck been hard and thine head soft? are thy creditors more than thy credit? art thou hungry, or thy sweetheart angry? has she broke her faith, and thou not thy fast? if so, sour looks will never mend the matter – lament tomorrow, but laugh tonight. The gods have given but one excuse for glum looks during carnival, and that is the cholic. If thou hast it, thou art right to be religious; but get thee home and pray in bed: thy public piety is a public nuisance. Owlet, avaunt!” A loud smack from his lath weapon enforced the mandate, and under cover of the horse laugh with which the crowd greeted the conclusion of his lecture, the mask unperceived whispered sharply in my ear as he passed – “Keep your eye on me, friend, and follow me; your doing so may save your life. Enough.” With these strange words he plunged once more into the crowd, and mingled as before in the madcap gaieties of the scene. My curiosity was however excited. I followed him carefully, and thought I could observe him occasionally abstract his attention for a moment from the tricks and railleries with which he abundantly entertained the multitude, to steal a glance toward me, and ascertain that I was present. Gradually the harlequin withdrew himself from the group with which he had borne his part, and by little and little separated himself from the crowd, I still following at a short distance. With many a fantastic pirouette and gambol away he flitted through by-lanes and alleys. Again and again was I obliged to run at the top of my speed to keep my strange conductor in view, watching the tall light form with a vigilance so close and exclusive that I knew not through what streets I passed, and scarcely in what direction I was moving. We passed through the scattered houses of the suburbs; and although I strained my sinews to the utmost, my guide gained upon me so fast that I began to grow fearful of losing him altogether. He was now running lightly by the banks of the Tiber – we passed the thronged dwellings of the city; and the cool air from the quiet country came rushing along the waters, the grateful and refreshing gift of nature. Half-vexed at the pertinacious speed with which my companion pursued his course, and half-suspecting the whole affair to be a hoax, I was just about to stop and turn about, when my intention was anticipated by the mask. He suddenly checked his course, sprang into the air, and, with a grotesque flourish of his sword, turned to the right about, awaiting with a low mock reverence my breathless pursuit. I was soon by his side. “Now in the devil’s name, sir harlequin,” exclaimed I, “for what have you given me this unconscionable race? – your tidings must needs be worth the hearing when a man must run after them as if Beelzebub ran at his heels.”

“Fie, fie,” cried the mask, “devil and Beelzebub are ugly words, and especially now and here. Be, I pray you, a little more pious: you know not what may be near you.” At these words my companion stooped down and lowered his head to a level with the reeds which grew by the river’s brink, in the attitude of one who listens attentively for some distant sound – then raising himself, he added in a lower tone, “We must go further; follow me yet a few steps more.” Accordingly he led the way along the river bank, but now at a slow pace. As he went along he began to sing a strange and mournful air, the like of which I never heard before or since, and that with a management of voice, if possible, stranger still. It appeared to me like the most extraordinary ventriloquism; for the sounds seemed sometimes to come from one side – sometimes from another – sometimes high in air – sometimes so far away as almost to be lost in the distance, and again swelling into a fierce and thrilling loudness, as if the voice was rushing toward us with the speed of a whirlwind. I cannot describe to you the strange effect of this music upon me: I felt ready either to laugh or cry – I felt a weight at my heart and an excitement in my head more than hysterical. The words which he sang were odd, and to me unintelligible; but he threw into them a laboured significance which added to the unpleasantness of the whole. The words have remained fixed in my mind, and to this day I cannot utter them without sensations which perhaps you would laugh at. They ran as follows:

Child of wrath, with the human bride,

Mighty oppressor of earthly kind,

Thy presence walks with us, side by side,

I feel thee, and know thy soft laugh on the wind.

Kiss, kiss his hot lips again and again:

He has given thee his heart; now master his brain.

The excitement under which I laboured increased until it amounted to a degree of horror almost unendurable. Under the vague impulse of superstitious terror, I was about to turn and run from my companion, when he, suddenly looking round, exhibited to my astounded sense the features of the hoary monk or demon, Father Anthony. Nerved by the extremity of terror, I turned my back upon the abhorred shape, and fled with the speed of light toward the city. The attempt to escape was utterly in vain. Though I ran with a speed which nothing but the agony of terror could have sustained, the fiendish monk not only kept up with me, but ran round and round me – sometimes in narrower, sometimes in wider circles, with gambols of preterhuman agility, and grimaces more hideous than nightmare ever saw. Suddenly he stopped short before me, and by an unearthly sympathy I was constrained to do the same: he sat down upon the earth; by an irresistible impulse I did so likewise. We were opposite to one another – face to face, and scarcely a yard asunder. He tossed his arms wildly in the air – I could not choose but do the same: he writhed his features into contortions such as delirium never portrayed, each one of which, with frenzied exaggeration, I felt forced to imitate. Into these hideous grimaces he threw, at times, expressions of demoniac passion so fearfully intense, that hell itself could not have exceeded them: these too, I was forced to follow, and the dreadful passions themselves possessed me in succession, while all the time, independently of these malignant inspirations, there remained within me, as it were looking on, a terrified self-consciousness. He yelled forth blasphemies the most awful, while my very brain sickened with horror – the unearthly power constrained me to echo them all, tone for tone, and word for word. He advanced his face, I did the same – our features almost touched. He burst into a peal of laughter like that if lunacy, I joined howling in the horrible mirth. Every word he spoke, I spoke – every movement he made, I made too. My motions all corresponded with his, with the simultaneousness and accuracy with which shadow follows substance; I felt as if my identity was merging into his. He placed his hand within his bosom – my hand copied the gesture, and rested upon my stiletto; he drew a dagger from his breast – I drew my poignard from mine. At the next instant his weapon was at his throat, and mine at mine. Another moment, and hell would have had its victim; but it was to be otherwise. A voice close by shouted, “In the name of God, young man, forbear,” and at the instant I was disenthralled; the hideous figure cast upon me one livid scowl, and threw himself on the ground. I saw no more, for my senses forsook me. How long the demon had made me the sport of his hellish mockeries I cannot say. As soon as consciousness returned I found myself supported in the arms of an honest peasant – he to whose intervention I owed my life.

“So, so, master,” exclaimed he, “a pleasant frolic this, for the carnival – time was, when you youngsters were satisfied with carving your neighbours’ throats, but nothing will serve you now, forsooth, but cutting your own. In God’s name, young man, why do you seek to harm yourself?”

“Tell me,” said I eagerly, “where he is gone – where is the mask – the harlequin – the devil? Bring me away from this place. Where is the monster you saw before me?”

“Sir,” replied the man, “I see you are disordered. I will go with you to the town; here, take my arm.”

“Where,” I said with increased excitement, “where is the hellish thing that sat on the ground before me?”

“Pshaw, sir,” replied he, “there was nothing before you but yonder old bush; to be sure,” he added, after a thoughtful pause, “it did sway and tremble rather oddly; and then, when I came up, I saw something like an otter sliding softly through the sedges into the stream. But that is all – come on, signor, let us be moving.”

Silently I walked with my friendly guide, who cast many a fearful look around, and muttered many a prayer as we proceeded – so contagious is mysterious terror.

For more than a month I was in mind and body utterly prostrate. There is in youth, however, a recuperative power, an elasticity which never loses its spring while youth remains. In five weeks’ time, after an illness, during which mind and body were bound down in the fiery chains of fever for nearly the space of a month, I was once more mingling in all the pleasures and follies of the capital, as if no fears or perils had ever crossed me. As time wore on, I began to grow weary of uncontrolled indulgence. Fashion is a hard task-master – vice and pleasure tire their pursuers at length more than the severest toil – monotony dulls the edge of enjoyment, and the solicitous repinings of conscience wear the spirits, and irritate and embitter the temper; all this I felt, and half (but only half) resolved to reform, and lead a better life. In this melancholy mood I was wandering through the oldest and least-frequented streets of the city, when a singular adventure befell me. There was walking before me, with slow and feeble steps, an old and venerable man; his dress was of the richest velvet of that hue which we call ruby, lined with yellow satin, and richly overlaid with gold lace; the fashion, however, of his garments was that of another day, and though the suit was no doubt originally a splendid one, it bore no less in its faded colour and tarnished embroider, than in its obsolete construction, the evidences of extreme antiquity. From under the shadow of a broadleafed hat his snow-white hair descended in venerable ringlets, covering the topmost folds of his short velvet cloak. In his hand he carried a crutch-handled stick of ebony, which, with measured and solemn action, he impressed upon the pavement as he proceeded. The figure of the old man was slight, and as well as I could discern, elegantly moulded; he bore about him, too, that indescribable air of high birth and breeding which cannot be mistaken. These circumstances, along with the striking peculiarities of which I have already spoken, irresistibly fixed my attention and engaged my curiosity. As I followed in the track of this old man, he suddenly tottered, as if through weakness or giddiness, and would, no doubt, have fallen upon the pavement, had not I instantly caught him in my arms and supported him. He speedily recovered, and with many courteous professions of gratitude, acknowledged my services. These professions were as courteously received as made, and I offered the aged man the support of my arm, during the remainder of his walk. The tender of my support was accepted with eager gratitude, and arm in arm, at a leisurely pace, we walked down the street together. The old man, as I have said, was soon quite recovered; and as we moved slowly along, he conversed with that easy and courtly gaiety by which age can so pleasingly and irresistibly engage and fascinate the young. Almost without knowing how, so pleasantly had my companion beguiled the way, I found myself at the entrance of a venerable mansion, before which my old acquaintance made a halt. I looked around me, for so completely had my attention been absorbed in the gay conversation of my comrade, that I had scarcely observed the objects through which we were passing. The street was dark and narrow – the houses on either side tall, sombre, and antique, and withal carrying upon them a character of decay and neglect which added gloom and sadness to a scene already sufficiently uncheery. The street had made a curving sweep, so that at the point we stood I could see but little way either up or down. As far as 1 could see, however, it was absolutely empty: there was neither sound of human voice, nor echo of footfalls, but a silence like that of desolation. We stood directly in front of a richly carved and massive stone doorway, the portal of a huge time-worn edifice – a palace, but so weather-stained neglected, and crumbling, that the evidences of its original architectural splendour served only to render its present aspect more solemn and more sad Reading, perhaps, in my face what was passing in my mind, the old man, with a melancholy musing smile, accosted me—

“It is, indeed, a mournful place – little better, perhaps, than a ruin; the street, too, as you observe, well accords with the character of this deserted shrine of hospitality – the spirit of desolation dwells in and about it – the current of human life frets and chafes near and far, but no chance eddy thereof ever finds its way into this dim, silent channel. The roar of human occupation, toil, and jollity, is here swallowed in perennial silence – we never hear it – in almost every house this street contains, you see the monument of some noble family gone to ruin, wasted by prodigality, or struck down into the dust by the heavy arm of power. Those who dwell here seldom seek to look into the staring, noisy world; they think not of the present, but ever upon the past – and oh! how variously Silence here holds her eternal court – see, lest any careless footstep should break the quiet of the place, gentle dame Nature has spread her soft green mantle over the uneven pavement – the long grass waves in the wind here as in a churchyard: yet, amid all this lonely silence, is there any quiet for heart or brain? Oh, eternal, unforgiving spirit! is there any rest – is there any unconsciousness?”

He clasped his hands together – his head sank upon his breast, and I saw the tears fall, one by one, fast upon his bosom.

More shocked than I can describe at what I heard and saw, I stood silently by, scarcely knowing what course to take. I soon, however, grew weary of my foolish situation, and, beginning to regard the whole thing is rather comic than imposing, I asked, somewhat abruptly, whether I could do anything further for him, at the same time observing that the evening would soon close, and that I had better find my way home while I had light. This speech soon brought the old gentleman to his senses. With many apologies he pleaded to be excused.

“Signor,” he continued, “did you but knew half what I have endured, far less what I must still endure, you would pardon this else unpardonable vehemence. I will not, however, weary you with, after all, what is but too common a tale of life. Those who have seen as much of life as I have, are seldom happy. I can, however, as you perhaps have perceived, sometimes forget my griefs; and if you will vouch your forgiveness, by entering so poor and unpromising a dwelling as that before you, you will make me more your debtor, sir, than I am.”

There was a gentleness and even a kindness in the tone and manner in which the old man addressed me which easily prevailed. I at once consented.

From his pocket he drew a key, to which the street door instantly yielded. Closing the hall door, which was of massive oak, he led the way through a stone vaulted passage, and through another door into a spacious and lofty hall, also vaulted, and built of stone; this latter door he also swung to with a heavy crash, which echoed through the empty chamber with many a dreary reverberation. The room in which we now stood was hung round with splendid full-length pictures. It seemed to be a gallery of ancestral portraits. They were superbly painted – evidently from the hands of the most celebrated of our Italian masters: the collection was worth a monarch’s ransom.

“You will find occupation for a few minutes in looking at these old family pictures,” said my host; “and you will, I hope, pardon me if I leave you to entertain yourself for a brief space.” So saying, the old man made a deep reverence, an before I had time to reply, he darted through a door at the far extremity of the apartment, and disappeared.

The pictures were very well worth an attentive examination, and afforded me no small pleasure. But there were three placed side by side, over each of which hung from top to bottom a black velvet pall, and although not without some reluctance upon the score of good breeding, to these my curiosity led me by an irresistible attraction. I took my stand upon a stool which stood beneath these against the wall, and raising the covering of the first, I beheld a faithful and very beautifully painted portrait of my entertainer, arrayed precisely as I had seen him. The painting looked old, and yet it represented him not as any younger than he now was. While musing upon this discrepancy, my eye accidentally fell upon some numerals dimly traced in the corner of the canvass. Heavens! the date they recorded was that of more than a century before: yet the portrait was undoubtedly his. It was a perfect likeness – character, expression, everything – it was a facsimile of the original. My convictions, too, were yet further established by observing traces upon the back of the right hand, which rested upon a crutch-handle stick, a deep scar, which had caught my attention in the original, as his hand lay within my arm in our today’s walk. Again I examined the date, I had read it aright – the year it recorded had been passed nearly a century and a half before, and the mellow tone of the picture itself tallied well with its silent but startling claim to antiquity. With a strange feeling of interest and of horror I suffered the sable drapery to fall again over the picture; and raising the covering of the next, I beheld the portrait of a young lady, richly dressed, and of such surpassing loveliness and grace as my eyes had never seen before. Entranced lost in wonder and rapture, I gazed upon this beautiful vision; a creature so perfect, of such unutterable, such infinite loveliness and grace had never even dimly visited me in my most ethereal fancies. Like one lost in a sad and beautiful dream, I stood rapt and moveless, my heart wrung with vain yearnings, for still the thought stole over me that all this most terrible beauty before whose image I stood in this intense worship of every faculty, had long ago passed to dust and darkness. Thus gazing and dreaming on, the tears flowed silently down my cheeks. Strange fascination!

“You make yourself at home, signor, I’m glad to see,” said the old man, who unperceived by me was standing by my shoulder.

I started, and dropped the velvet curtain, and was for some time so confounded as not to be able to articulate a single word. There stood the old man, his figure disposed in precisely the attitude represented in the portrait, his tall crutch-handled stick in his right hand, and his left buried to the wrist in the bosom of his doublet; there he stood in all points – face, attitude, and garb the breathing incarnation of the picture on which I had just been looking.

“You examine them, these portraits?” inquired the old man.

“Two of them, signor,” I replied with some embarrassment.

“This one,” continued he, raising the pall which covered the first, “is accounted extremely like me; it is the portrait of one of my house, a brave man, who fell one hundred and forty years since in the service of the state of Venice. I am reckoned like him, strangers at least account me so.”

He fixed his eyes upon me, I thought with that uncertain, curious gaze with which those who feel themselves the objects of suspicion, encounter a glance of scrutiny. I averted my eyes, and he, suffering the velvet cloth to drop into its place, turned upon his heel and walked twice or thrice rapidly through the hall; he stopped beside me, and laying his hand kindly upon my shoulder, he said—

“Come, come, you must not grow melancholy, my young friend; you were looking, when I surprised you, at a portrait of singular beauty, that of a young woman. You shall probably have an opportunity before long of comparing the counterfeit with the original. Will that not bring a smile to your cheek? time was when such a promise would have led me blindfold anywhere; but I am partial, perhaps, she is my daughter.”

If the old man looked for compliments upon the beauty of his child, I believe he must have been satisfied, if my words bore any proportion to my feelings. Man never spoke language of more passionate admiration than did I, he smiled and cried “Bravo,” as I finished; then observing that it was growing dark, he placed his arm within mine, and led me from the hall.

We passed through several apartments, lofty, damp, and dark, impressed with the character of desertion and decay, but every where carrying the evidences of former splendour.

We entered a chamber hung with dusky tapestry. The end at which we stood on entering was occupied by a table and some antique chairs, and upon the floor, corresponding with the angles of the table, but at the distance of some six feet, were placed four massive golden candlesticks containing huge wax tapers, which shot into the air to the height of twelve feet, and burned with a flame larger than that of a torch, but white and clear as the light of the sun. The strange effect of these arrangements was much enhanced by another still more extraordinary peculiarity which marked this chamber as unlike any which I had ever seen before. The end of the room at which we stood, as I have already said, was occupied by the table and the other furniture which I have mentioned, but the opposite extremity of the chamber I could not see. It was effectually shrouded from my sight by a light semi-transparent vapour, which rolled and eddied in cloudy volumes within some twenty or thirty feet of the table – beyond this distance it did not come – some invisible influence held it back, and there it hung, forming a strange, heaving barrier, a mysterious impenetrable veil between human vision and sights, perhaps, unsuited to its ken. These odd peculiarities of the room in which I found myself were not without their effect upon my imagination and spirits – a sense of unknown danger overshadowed me. I recounted in my own mind the circumstances of my meeting with my host; everything which had happened since appeared to me to furnish matter of indefinite and horrible suspicion; yet when I looked upon the mild features of the venerable old man, and read in the play of his cheerful eye the returning animation of that gay spirit which had so won upon me at first, I felt my doubts rebuked, and my superstitious fears absolutely ridiculous. Still, however, a gloom was upon me, and it required a perpetual effort to prevent the unpleasant impressions which I could not dispel from deepening into awe and terror.

The old man motioned to me to sit down in one of the great antique chairs by the table, which was covered with golden plates, and dishes, and cups. You will readily believe me when I tell you that I had no desire to eat. I took advantage then of my host’s abstemiousness to avoid partaking of his viands, and this was the first and the last supper at which I ever sat where not one dish was invaded or even uncovered.

“Well,” said my entertainer, “as you will not eat, you needs must drink: if you will imitate my vices, copy at least my solitary virtue.” So saying he drew towards himself one of the cups which stood upon the table, and shoved another to me. “Old men have a right to be selfish,” said he, “and, therefore, wishing myself many repetitions of this evening, and that out of this casual rencounter may arise a lasting union between us, young man, with all my soul I pledge you.” Long and deep was the draught with which the old man drained to its last the golden goblet; as he raised the cup to his lips I raised mine to do him honour, and as I did so I thought I heard someone mutter over my shoulder – “That is not wine.”

I glanced round but there was no one from whom the sounds could have proceeded. I raised the cup once more, the crimson liquid foamed up towards my lips, a slight sensation of giddy sickness passed over me as I lifted the vessel, and the same voice, real or imagined, whispered sharply in my ear the startling words – “But the blood, which is the life of it, thou shalt not eat.” Horrified I dropped the cup upon the floor, and whatever was the liquor which it contained, it was every drop shed upon the ground. The old man when this happened was still engaged in his deep potation, and did not perceive the accident, or if he did, he certainly did not pretend to do so. He wiped his mouth and rose from the table; he motioned me to be still, and kneeling upon the ground with his face toward the hidden part of the chamber, he continued apparently in long and earnest devotion, stretching his hands forth with many gestures of vehement entreaty. As he did so, the surface of the cloudy barrier became agitated, strange lights and shadows flitted over it; sometimes tracing in the eddying vapours wild ghastly features, which vanished almost as soon as they appeared, and sometimes dimly showing monstrous shapes, and now and then more faintly-traced forms of surpassing grace – all gliding and wheeling, appearing and melting away, separating and mingling like the endless shiftings of a wondrous dream. At length there came a low and marvellously sweet sound of far-off music, like holy choirs singing a wild requiem over the dead; the sound stole floating along, sometimes broken and disordered, as though the untutored wind swept at random through the chords of a thousand-stringed instrument, then again, coming with perfect harmony and unspeakable melody over the senses, until once more the music would lose itself in the wild burst of the wailing wind. Still, however, minute after minute these fitful wanderings of the melody grew less and less, and the music breathed on, louder and more clear, in sweet but unearthly order. As these wondrous sounds rose on the ear, I beheld in the cloudy curtain, at first so dimly traced that my eye lost it every moment, but gradually becoming more fixed and discernible, the shadowy semblance of a female form, wrapped in a thin mantle, and as it seemed of beauty more than human. This form, at first traced only in the faintest discernible shadow, grew gradually more and more clearly defined, until at length the outline became fixed, and the colours, and lights, and shadows, after some uncertain flittings to and fro, clearly developed themselves, and thus little by little, without my being able to remember at which point the transition had taken place, I beheld what had first been no more than the lightest shadow upon a fleeting vapour now stand before me in corporeal substance – a model of preternatural loveliness in limb and feature, but pale and bloodless as the dead. The old man arose, and stepping sadly and reverently to her, he took the small hand which hung languidly by her side, and led her slowly towards the table. The beautiful form moved lightly over the floor, but seemingly without more volition or purpose of its own than belongs to a mere automaton; the lips pale as marble, the eyes fixed and glittering, and every muscle of the perfect face still as death. He led her to a chair, and placing her in it, he took one of the large golden goblets, like that which he himself had just emptied, full of the dark red liquid, and putting its brim to her lips he poured every drop of its contents down her throat; he laid the vessel again in its place, and withdrawing to a little distance, he folded his arms, bowed his head downwards like one in deep dejection, and silently awaited the result. After two or three wild thrilling peals, the music gave place to utter silence, and at the same moment the glow of life spread it self gently over the face and limbs of the girl, and dyed her lips with the brightest crimson, the fixed glance gave place to the soft fire of animation, and I beheld before me the breathing archetype of the portrait whose beauty had so enchanted me. I approached her – I spoke with her, her voice was melody such as fills the ear with ever-varying sweetness, and floods the heart with mysterious joy; an embodied dream of divine beauty – unspeakable grace in every the slightest movement, and absolute fascination in every look; the very mystery of her being but heightened the wild interest which wrapped every faculty of my soul: delighted wonder, love and awe, fear and rapture, filled all my heart with a sweet and terrible delirium of worship. I saw revealed before me a divinity, clothed in the eternal majesty of ideal beauty – that glorious mystery after which the heart of man has panted and toiled, and yearned, even since the world was young. I know not how the time went by, many hours seemed but as the dream of a minute; the spell was broken by the old man her father, who taking me by the hand led me away through the dark part of the chamber; the chill and darkness of the cold cloudy medium through which we walked fell like death upon my heart – a revulsion of horror unutterable succeeded; sickness of heart and terror were upon me. The fearful transition was, however, of short duration; an unseen arm thrust me forward, and when I recovered my equilibrium I found myself in the aisle of a church, crowded with listeners, and lighted with many lamps. A preacher, too, was loudly haranguing them from the pulpit. How I had entered the place I knew not; I stood in the centre of the church; my movements, however, had undoubtedly been somewhat abrupt.

“Sir,” exclaimed a bull-necked, red-faced burgher, with an indignant scowl, “if you must make a row, you had better do it at the other side of the door. We came here to listen, not to be kicked and jostled.”

“What the devil ails the young gentleman?” cried another; “he bolts and butts like a mad bull.”

“You have broken my hat,” ejaculated a third.

“And my back,” groaned a fourth.

These and such like exclamations, accompanied with abundance of sour looks, were quite sufficient to assure me that my impetuous entrance at least was not an illusion. The church was that of – one which I had often visited, and with all whose usual approaches I was thoroughly acquainted. I was therefore but the more puzzled and confounded in attempting to account to myself for my suddenly assumed position in the very centre of the congregation this was, however, the least marvel in a day of wonders.

Henceforward life had lost for me all interest. I had beheld loveliness which was not of this earth, beside the remembrance of which all that I had ever seen of beauty, either in nature or in art, seemed gross, insipid, and charmless. The comeliness of this world was no more for me; day and night the same thought haunted me – day and night one dream, from which it was agony to awaken, overspread my soul. I was unsocial, changed, spirit-stricken, night and morning, moving and living in the irresistible fascination of the same absorbing, yearning vision. Day after day, aye, and night after night, I traced the streets and lanes of the city in the hope of finding again the scene of my strange adventures – my searches were all in vain. I described the street, all its peculiarities, but no one could direct me to it, no one had seen it. Still I wandered through the city with the almost hopeless object of meeting the old man – this hope was equally abortive – disappointment, still disappointment. I was miserable – my life was mere weariness. I wandered on, a stranger to the pleasures and to the interests of men; none knew of the unearthly passion which wasted me; I neither had nor wished to have a companion; mysteries had revealed themselves to me – mysteries which men could not behold and be happy. Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, wore on in one long, all-absorbing, unsatisfied wish. I knew that the beautiful being, the worship of whom was wearing me away, could not be of this world; but fear I had none respecting her; there was indeed awe, but no fear, no revulsion.

I seldom slept, but when I did, my slumbers were broken by a thousand fantastic dreams, but all more or less horrible. In these visions the foreground was ever occupied by the beautiful subject of my waking thoughts but darkly lurking in some obscure corner, or suddenly crossing my sight when I least remembered him, came the abhorred monk, scaring away the lovely illusion, and startling me into broad wakefulness again. After such dreams, troubled and chequered with terror though they were, the strange passion, which had now become the essence of my being, would return upon me with redoubled vehemence; existence had become to me one fevered, unsatisfied wish – a burthen too heavy for me to bear. One morning I started from one of those visions which continually broke my rest; as I opened my eyes, I distinctly saw some dark shapeless thing glide like a snake from my pillow down the side of the bed, where I lost sight of it. Hardly knowing why, I sprang upon the floor, and to my unutterable horror I beheld peering from under the bed, the face of the demon monk. With a yell of despairing terror I howled, “In God’s name avaunt;” and clasping my hands over my eyes I stood fixed and freezing in an agony of horror, not daring to expose myself to the terrors of a second gaze. I stood locked in this tremendous catalepsy, until my servant entering the chamber more than an hour after, recalled me to myself.

“I see it, I see it all,” thought I, as with the excitement of madness I paced up and down my chamber – “I know it, I am under the influence of Satan – in the power of the tormentor. Oh, God! is there no passage of escape? is there no refuge from this Satanic persecution? Must I waste away in strength of body and in the faculties of my mind, until body and soul perish forever?”

Almost as I uttered this agonized appeal, a thought struck me as suddenly as if it had been suggested by another speaker – “Go present yourself to a priest; confess your sins in a penitent spirit, and he will give you good counsel in your present strait, and if on earth there be deliverance for you, it is thus.” The thought had hardly presented itself, when I put it into execution. I went to an aged and holy man and made my shrift, and on the imposition of a certain penance, he gave me absolution. I told him all I had suffered, and asked his advice under the peculiar and horrible case. Having heard me attentively, the good old man told me to be of good cheer.

“My son,” said he, “thou hast experienced one of those assaults of the evil one which we, who sit in the confessional, are often told of – aye, while the giddy unconscious world is scouting the very possibility of such things. Strangely, too, it is, that as in thy case, my child, it generally happens that those who come hither for counsel under such terrors as those which have so long haunted thee, are from among the gay fashionable votaries of pleasure, whose chief characteristic it is to lead the way in ridiculing all belief in such influences, and too often in covert derision of religion itself. Watch and pray, my son – by no consent of thine own invite the adversary; purify thy conscience by frequent confession; trust in the mercy of Heaven; walk in the ways of life uprightly and humbly; mortify every foolish as well as every sinful desire; and if thou dost so, Satan will never possess thee, body or soul, in all time, hereafter forever.”

I returned much comforted and with singleness of heart; I endeavoured in all things to conform myself to the directions of the good priest, and thus day by day the delirium under which my rest, and strength, and faculties were declining, gradually melted away and almost disappeared.

A month had passed away, and I had become in health and spirits like other men, my mind being now thoroughly released from its former wanderings. I entered at nightfall the church of – . I knew not what feeling impelled me in the choice. There were but few worshippers in the church, and my thoughts, no doubt misled by the associations with which my last visit to this place was connected, wandered far away from the subject on which you will say they ought to have been fixed. My attention was, however, recalled to the scene before me by a circumstance which I shall hut soon forget. Two figures caught my eye, as it seemed to me, that of a male and of a female, but both wrapped in mantles so ample as effectually to conceal the limbs, and quite to overshadow the features of those who wore them; both had drawn the hoods of their cloaks over their heads. The instant my eye encountered these figures, a sudden conviction flashed upon my mind that they were those of the very objects of the search which had for so long absorbed me. Every moment served to confirm this conviction; and when I saw them rise and pass from the church it was with a fearful interest that I too arose and followed them. They passed into the street, now nearly dark, I still closely dogging their steps: when they had arrived there, after a short pause they separated, moving rapidly in opposite directions; without hesitation I followed the lighter of the two figures; inwardly convinced that it was in truth no other than that of the being whom most of all I should have shunned and dreaded Through many streets I followed the light gliding form, with a fascination too deep for words; with a blind obedience still I followed it, until it passed beyond the precincts of the city, and as the figure entered the broad fields, now sleeping under the misty light of the moon, I suffered the distance which separated us to increase, so far as to avoid the immediate likelihood of detection to which a near pursuit, though unremarked among the throng of the city streets, would in this sequestered and open place, have exposed me. Cautiously and at some distance then I followed, until I saw the object of my curiosity pause under the boughs of some tall trees; and, throwing back the hood from her face, and suffering the cloak to fall upon the ground, seat herself gently upon a large grey stone which stood there, and crossing her arms pensively on her lap, gaze fixedly upward at the broad bright disc of the beautiful moon.

I resolved now to ascertain the correctness of my suspicions; and resisting as well as I might the misgivings and fears which crossed my mind, I stole noiselessly along under the broad friendly shade of the majestic tree, beneath which she was seated. Under cover of some brushwood I crept noiselessly onward, until I had reached to within some ten or twelve steps of the mysterious figure. The countenance was raised a little; the dark silken hair, parted on the forehead, fell in luxuriant folds upon the white shoulders and heaving bosom of the beautiful being. I beheld the full lustrous eye beneath its long dark lashes, and the exquisite features all revealed in the pale light of the moon, and clothed in the witching tenderness of sadness. A single glance told me that I was not mistaken; the conviction smote upon my heart; for an instant its pulses were suspended, and a chill, like that of death, shot through my frame, and then through every artery the tingling life-blood sprang with a recoil as impetuous and sudden. It was she – the dreamed-of – the longed-for – the enchantress. I abandoned myself to the intoxication of the moment. With words of passionate madness I threw myself at her feet: she raised me up – her arms were around me.

~   ~   ~   ~

Beautiful betrayer – passionately-beloved phantom – unearthly lover! – what have I done? I am a fear and wonder to myself. Are all thy tears and blushes a mockery, and can hell borrow the beauty and modesty of angels? Sweet terrible illusion, I will not curse thee: ’twas I – I and not thou who wooed these strange horrors – thou didst warn me – aye! fallen, lost forever as thou wert, warn me in pity – with tears, and supplications, and shadowy threatenings implore and resist. Still night after night thy footsteps are my guide, thy smiles my life, thy bosom my pillow: the vital taper burns away – down, down, wasting in the fierce glare of fever. Where, where will end this agony of love and despair? Would to God that heart and brain were dust, so I might remember no more, and be at rest! But no, no, it may not be. Cruel, beautiful destroyer! thou wilt drink my life away sweetly, slowly, ever day by day. I am all thine own – heavier, heavier grows the dreary sleep. All men move around me strangers, and as far away from my world of existence as from the dimmest star that twinkles in the sky. I have but one companion, one interest, one object; ever within me dread and loathing wrestle against passionate love in eternal agony. Oh! God! whence art thou, beautiful destroyer? Thou wouldst not kill me forever. There is pity – infinite pity – in thy words and looks – tenderness and sorrow ever in thy dark, soft, deadly eyes: thy sweet words, too, ever warning – aye! thou hast truly said. The grieved and vainly-resisting slave of others art thou – the unwilling thrall of agencies hated and feared, but from which never – never in time or eternity canst thou escape.

~   ~   ~   ~

One evening, in the selfsame church, I saw the other figure stand with her again; I followed them forth, but vainly looked for her to separate from him when they had reached the street. Together the two figures walked quickly onward, I following. Twice or thrice she turned her head, and with hasty gestures stealthily warned me off. Still doggedly I pursued: they walked, I know not whither, through streets strange to me; and at length, like a dream, around me rose the objects which my memory had so carefully treasured – the dark, silent street whither the old man had led me months before – the long grass waving in the night breeze over the pavement – the dim, tall, mouldering palaces at both sides towering darkly against the deep blue sky of midnight, and all over-shone by the pale moon. The two shapes stopped by the selfsame stone porch which had given me entrance to the habitation so terribly remembered. Like one in a dream, without fear or purpose, I stepped lightly to the gate before they entered. The old man (it was he) moved to meet me – bade me welcome a thousand times, and made me promise to come in with him. This I did eagerly, though I saw the girl who stood behind him wring her hands as if in sorrow. Glaring lights of many colours were streaming from the windows, and mirthful music, mixed with wild uproar like the mad gusts of a tempest, resounded from the distant chambers. Shadows too flitted and bounded across the casements. We entered the hall as before, the old man leading the way. As we moved around the girl whispered softly in my ear – “You are in mortal peril. For your soul’s sake eat nothing – drink nothing; speak to no being whom you do not know, and say to me no word of love, or you have perished everlastingly. They will have you. He (pointing to the old man) and a worse than he will torment you forever. Guard against every look and word; trust not in your own strength, but elsewhere; be not terrified by their mockeries, and when you can escape, fly.”

Still with a dull recklessness I followed the old man, and mounted with him a broad marble staircase. As we ascended, the sounds became louder and fiercer. Loud barbaric music, mingled with fierce bursts of maniac laughter – Bacchanalian shouts, and long-drawn yells, as it seemed of agony, along with the continuous shuffling and pounding of feet upon the floors, produced a combination of noises which few could have heard without terror. I paused for a moment at the door, and then, summoning my utmost resolution, I entered. The spectacle before me was one which, while consciousness remains, I can never forget. A vast chamber, lighted dazzlingly with a thousand lamps, or rather stars, for they were not supported nor suspended by anything, but glowed, flickered, and sported, separate and self-sustained, rolling and eddying high in air – expanding, and contracting, and yielding in glorious succession all the most splendid colours which imagination can conceive. Beneath this gorgeous and ever-shifting illumination a vast throng of shapes were moving – all enacting, but with the courteous observations and jollity of a festive meeting. Some glided to and fro with courtly ease, but bearing upon their lifeless faces the fearful stamp of sin and eternal anguish; others sat looking on, their fixed features writhed into smiles which, but to dream of, would appal the fancy for days; others, with ghastly idiotic grimaces, made hideous music from strange instruments, which panted and quivered, and writhed like living things in agony; others leaped, and danced, and howled, and glared like the very fiends of madness; and all formed a crowd of such terrific and ghastly horror as words cannot even faintly shadow forth. I felt like one under the enchantment of opium: I feared nothing: I revelled in the horrors among which I was plunged: an intoxication too strong for body and mind was upon me. Among these appalling and tremendous sights I beheld close by me, with fierce rapture, the beautiful form of the mysterious being who had won my very soul. I spoke I know not what words of passion, and she, with grief and horror in her face, said softly to me—

“Speak to me no more of love, as you would save your soul alive. In sin and sorrow my lot is fixed forever. Beware how you court me here. I strive to save you. We are not all alike. I am not as these: I have mercy: I would deliver you: but these are stronger than I. The adversary has called me from my mournful dreams to work his will. They will have you – they will have you. Know you who they are?”

I spoke again, I know not what. “Beware – once more beware,” said she softly. “See you not that these are in torment and hatred? You know what they are. If you regard not my counsel you will be among them, and of them in eternity. You are in mortal peril – beware.”

Again, in wayward madness, I spoke.

“The time draws nigh,” said she, while death-paleness overspread her cheeks. “I foresaw this. I dreaded it. The time draws nigh – my mission will be ended. They will let me go to my quiet; but you they will possess and keep in the bondage of hell – in hatred and agony for ever and ever. It is too late now. You have spoken the word. I am going hence, where you will see me no more.”

As she thus spoke, a cloudy indistinctness overspread the pale beautiful vision, and she began slowly and mournfully to recede from me. Stung with horror and agony at the sight, I cast myself before the fading form.

“Stay, stay, beautiful, beloved illusion,” I said; “leave me not, oh, leave me not alone – I can love none other – I am your slave, your worshipper – I am yours forever – God be my witness.”

As I ended the sentence, a yelling crash like the roar of ten thousand gigantic bells stunned my ears – total darkness swallowed every object, and my senses forsook me.

~   ~   ~   ~

I was found in the morning by the sexton of ———, senseless, bruised, and covered with blood and foam, lying in the great aisles of that building. Since then I have been, you will say, mad – I say, the sport of other souls than my own – a blind, desperate instrument of hell, wending onward to an eternal doom which no imaginable power can avert. This consciousness of inevitable fate has been my companion ever since then, and it has taught me to despise opinion, virtue, vice – to trample on religion, and to laugh at punishment.

Satan, whose I am, had chosen me for himself, to do his work even from the first. I am one with him, and he with me; and when I die, will merge forever into that dark mind. Think you, then, I care whether death come today, or tomorrow, or the next day? It must arrive soon; and then—

Now, father, I have confessed enough, and you are welcome to tell my shrift to all the world. Absolve me now; and if you send me to heaven, I’ll give you credit for a wonder-worker when we meet.

~   ~   ~   ~

So saying, he laughed loud and bitterly.

He is to die tomorrow in the Place of St. Mark. They are building the scaffold. All are anxious to see the celebrated bravo and bandit.

They say that he has killed more than two hundred men in various broils and actions with his own hand. The caitiff mob of Venice admires the gigantic ruffian.

“Spalatro,” say they, “was a great man – a grand robber – a tremendous bravo. There will not soon again be such another dagger in Venice.”

~   ~   ~   ~

It is over – the axe has fallen – the wretched sinner has passed from the world he so much abused. He spoke to the people from the scaffold, and all in mockery and jibes. The giddy crowd applauded him. When he had done speaking, and before the executioner was ready, of a sudden, and for the last time, a fit seized him; he cried out with a loud voice. The devil cast him down, and tore him. While he lay struggling on the planks the signal was made, and at two blows the head was severed from the body.

~   ~   ~   ~

Thus ends the narrative of honest Giacamo. Whether or not he believed the tale I cannot tell: he certainly wrote it carefully out from end to end in his fair tall hand. For myself, I have little doubt that the story contains a pretty accurate detail of the successive attacks of delirium tremens which the drunken excesses of the wretch Spalatro were calculated to induce; for it is but giving the devil his due to admit, that it is not his usual practice to have young men to supper with a view to get off his daughters. I confess, too, that, under all the circumstances, I am strongly inclined to think that “the old man” who figures in the foregoing narrative, (and whom I take to be identical with the old boy) ought to have consummated his persecution of the poor highwayman by an action for breach of promise of marriage, which would certainly lie in such a case. Perhaps, however, the devil showed his good sense in preferring his own fireside to venturing into our courts of law for a remedy. However, my dear Harry, joke as we may, it is not easy, no nor possible, altogether to extract from the mind its inborn affection for the marvellous. Philosophy does but teach us the extent of our ignorance (I think I saw that somewhere or other before, but no matter). Do the dead return from the grave? Do strange influences reveal to mortal eye the shadowy vistas of futurity? Can demoniac agencies possess the body as of old, and blast the mind? What are these things that we call spectral illusions, dreams, madness? All around us is darkness and uncertainty. To what thing shall we say I understand thee? All is doubt – all is mystery; in short, in the words of our poetic countrymen – “It’s all botheration from bottom to top.”

Yours faithfully, though far away,

The Translator.

“Dublin University Magazine”, Mar.–Apr. 1843

THE EVIL GUEST

(1848)

“When Lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth Sin: and Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth Death.”

About sixty years ago, and somewhat more than twenty miles from the ancient town of Chester, in a southward direction, there stood a large, and, even then, an old-fashioned mansion-house. It lay in the midst of a demesne of considerable extent, and richly wooded with venerable timber; but, apart from the sombre majesty of these giant groups, and the varieties of the undulating ground on which they stood, there was little that could be deemed attractive in the place. A certain air of neglect and decay, and an indescribable gloom and melancholy, hung over it. In darkness, it seemed darker than any other tract; when the moonlight fell upon its glades and hollows, they looked spectral and awful, with a sort of churchyard loneliness; and even when the blush of the morning kissed its broad woodlands, there was a melancholy in the salute that saddened rather than cheered the heart of the beholder.

This antique, melancholy, and neglected place, we shall call, for distinctness sake, Gray Forest. It was then the property of the younger son of a nobleman, once celebrated for his ability and his daring, but who had long since passed to that land where human wisdom and courage avail naught. The representative of this noble house resided at the family mansion in Sussex, and the cadet, whose fortunes we mean to sketch in these pages, lived upon the narrow margin of an encumbered income, in a reserved and unsocial discontent, deep among the solemn shadows of the old woods of Gray Forest.

The Hon. Richard Marston was now somewhere between forty and fifty years of age – perhaps nearer the latter; he still, however, retained, in an eminent degree, the traits of manly beauty, not the less remarkable for its unquestionably haughty and passionate character. He had married a beautiful girl, of good family, but without much money, somewhere about eighteen years before; and two children, a son and a daughter, had been the fruit of this union. The boy, Harry Marston, was at this time at Cambridge; and his sister, scarcely fifteen, was at home with her parents, and under the training of an accomplished governess, who had been recommended to them by a noble relative of Mrs. Marston. She was a native of France, but thoroughly mistress of the English language, and, except for a foreign accent, which gave a certain prettiness to all she said, she spoke it as perfectly as any native Englishwoman. This young Frenchwoman was eminently handsome and attractive. Expressive, dark eyes, a clear olive complexion, small even teeth, and a beautifully-dimpling smile, more perhaps than a strictly classic regularity of features, were the secrets of her unquestionable influence, at first sight, upon the fancy of every man of taste who beheld her.

Mr. Marston’s fortune, never very large, had been shattered by early dissipation. Naturally of a proud and somewhat exacting temper, he actively felt the mortifying consequences of his poverty. The want of what he felt ought to have been his position and influence in the county in which he resided, fretted and galled him; and he cherished a resentful and bitter sense of every slight, imaginary or real, to which the same fruitful source of annoyance and humiliation had exposed him. He held, therefore, but little intercourse with the surrounding gentry, and that little not of the pleasantest possible kind; for, not being himself in a condition to entertain, in that style which accorded with his own ideas of his station, he declined, as far as was compatible with good breeding, all the proffered hospitalities of the neighbourhood; and, from his wild and neglected park, looked out upon the surrounding world in a spirit of moroseness and defiance, very unlike, indeed, to that of neighbourly goodwill.

In the midst, however, of many of the annoyances attendant upon crippled means, he enjoyed a few of those shadowy indications of hereditary importance, which are all the more dearly prized, as the substantial accessories of wealth have disappeared. The mansion in which he dwelt was, though old-fashioned, imposing in its aspect, and upon a scale unequivocally aristocratic; its walls were hung with ancestral portraits, and he managed to maintain about him a large and tolerably respectable staff of servants. In addition to these, he had his extensive demesne, his deer-park, and his unrivalled timber, wherewith to console himself; and, in the consciousness of these possessions, he found some imperfect assuagement of those bitter feelings of suppressed scorn and resentment, which a sense of lost station and slighted importance engendered. Mr. Marston’s early habits had, unhappily, been of a kind to aggravate, rather than alleviate, the annoyances incidental to reduced means. He had been a gay man, a voluptuary, and a gambler. His vicious tastes had survived the means of their gratification. His love for his wife had been nothing more than one of those vehement and headstrong fancies, which, in self-indulgent men, sometimes result in marriage, and which seldom outlive the first few months of that lifelong connection. Mrs. Marston was a gentle, noble-minded woman. After agonies or disappointment, which none ever suspected, she had at length learned to submit, in sad and gentle acquiescence, to her fate. Those feelings, which had been the charm of her young days, were gone, and, as she bitterly felt, forever. For them there was no recall they could not return; and, without complaint or reproach, she yielded to what she felt was inevitable. It was impossible to look at Mrs. Marston, and not to discern, at a glance, the ruin of a surpassingly beautiful woman; a good deal wasted, pale, and chastened with a deep, untold sorrow, but still possessing the outlines, both in face and form, of that noble beauty and matchless grace, which had made her, in happier days, the admired of all observers. But equally impossible was it to converse with her, for even a minute, without hearing, in the gentle and melancholy music of her voice, the sad echoes of those griefs to which her early beauty had been sacrificed, an undying sense of lost love, and happiness departed, never to come again.

One morning, Mr. Marston had walked, as was his custom when he expected the messenger who brought from the neighbouring post office his letters, some way down the broad, straight avenue, with its double rows of lofty trees at each side, when he encountered the nimble emissary on his return. He took the letter-bag in silence. It contained but two letters – one addressed to “Mademoiselle de Barras, chez M. Marston,” and the other to himself. He took them both, dismissed the messenger, and opening that addressed to himself, read as follows, while he slowly retraced his steps towards the house:

Dear Richard,

I am a whimsical fellow, as you doubtless remember, and have lately grown, they tell me, rather hippish besides. I do not know to which infirmity I am to attribute a sudden fancy that urges me to pay you a visit, if you will admit me. To say truth, my dear Dick, I wish to see a little of your part of the world, and, I will confess it, en passant, to see a little of you too. I really wish to make acquaintance with your family; and though they tell me my health is very much shaken, I must say, in self-defence, I am not a troublesome inmate. I can perfectly take care of myself, and need no nursing or caudling whatever. Will you present this, my petition, to Mrs. Marston, and report her decision thereon to me. Seriously, I know that your house may be full, or some other contretemps may make it impracticable for me just now to invade you. If it be so, tell me, my dear Richard, frankly, as my movements are perfectly free, and my time all my own, so that I can arrange my visit to suit your convenience.

– Yours, &c.,

Wynston E. Berkley

P.S. – Direct to me at ——— Hotel, in Chester, as I shall probably be there by the time this reaches you.

“Ill-bred and pushing as ever,” quoth Mr. Marston, angrily, as he thrust the unwelcome letter into his pocket. “This fellow, wallowing in wealth, without one nearer relative on earth than I, and associated more nearly still with me the – pshaw! not affection – the recollections of early and intimate companionship, leaves me unaided, for years of desertion and suffering, to the buffetings of the world, and the troubles of all but overwhelming pecuniary difficulties, and now, with the cool confidence of one entitled to respect and welcome, invites himself to my house. Coming here,” he continued, after a gloomy pause, and still pacing slowly towards the house, “to collect amusing materials for next season’s gossip – stories about the married Benedick – the bankrupt beau – the outcast tenant of a Cheshire wilderness”; and, as he said this, he looked at the neglected prospect before him with an eye almost of hatred. “Aye, to see the nakedness of the land is he coming, but he shall be disappointed. His money may buy him a cordial welcome at an inn, but curse me if it shall purchase him a reception here.”

He again opened and glanced through the letter.

“Aye, purposely put in such a way that I can’t decline it without affronting him,” he continued doggedly. “Well, then, he has no one to blame but himself – affronted he shall be; I shall effectually put an end to this humorous excursion. Egad, it is rather hard if a man cannot keep his poverty to himself.”

Sir Wynston Berkley was a baronet of large fortune – a selfish, fashionable man, and an inveterate bachelor. He and Marston had been schoolfellows, and the violent and implacable temper of the latter had as little impressed his companion with feelings of regard, as the frivolity and selfishness of the baronet had won the esteem of his relative. As boys, they had little in common upon which to rest the basis of a friendship, or even a mutual liking. Berkley was gay, cold, and satirical; his cousin – for cousins they were – was jealous, haughty, and relentless. Their negative disinclination to one another’s society, not unnaturally engendered by uncongenial and unamiable dispositions, had for a time given place to actual hostility, while the two young men were at Oxford. In some intrigue, Marston discovered in his cousin a too-successful rival; the consequence was a bitter and furious quarrel, which, but for the prompt and peremptory interference of friends, Marston would undoubtedly have pushed to a bloody issue. Time had, however, healed this rupture, and the young men came to regard one another with the same feelings, and eventually to re-establish the same sort of cold and indifferent intimacy which had subsisted between them before their angry collision.

Under these circumstances, whatever suspicion Marston might have felt on the receipt of the unexpected, and indeed unaccountable proposal, which had just reached him, he certainly had little reason to complain of any violation of early friendship in the neglect with which Sir Wynston had hitherto treated him. In deciding to decline his proposed visit, however, Marston had not consulted the impulses of spite or anger. He knew the baronet well; he knew that he cherished no good will towards him, and that in the project which he had thus unexpectedly broached, whatever indirect or selfish schemes might possibly be at the bottom of it, no friendly feeling had ever mingled. He was therefore resolved to avoid the trouble and the expense of a visit in all respects distasteful to him, and in a gentlemanlike way, but, at the same time, as the reader may suppose, with very little anxiety as to whether or not his gay correspondent should take offence at his reply, to decline, once for all, the proposed distinction.

With this resolution, he entered the spacious and somewhat dilapidated mansion which called him master; and entering a sitting room, appropriated to his daughter’s use, he found her there, in company with her beautiful French governess. He kissed his child, and saluted her young preceptress with formal courtesy.

“Mademoiselle,” said he, “I have got a letter for you; and, Rhoda,” he continued, addressing his pretty daughter, “bring this to your mother, and say, I request her to read it.”

He gave her the letter he himself had just received, and the girl tripped lightly away upon her mission.

Had he narrowly scrutinised the countenance of the fair Frenchwoman, as she glanced at the direction of that which he had just placed in her hand, he might have seen certain transient, but very unmistakable evidences of excitement and agitation. She quickly concealed the letter, however, and with a sigh, the momentary flush which it had called to her cheek subsided, and she was tranquil as usual.

Mr. Marston remained for some minutes – five, eight, or ten, we cannot say precisely – pretty much where he had stood on first entering the chamber, doubtless awaiting the return of his messenger, or the appearance of his wife. At length, however, he left the room himself to seek her; but, during his brief stay, his previous resolution had been removed. By what influence we cannot say; but removed completely it unquestionably was, and a final determination that Sir Wynston Berkley should become his guest had fixedly taken its place.

As Marston walked along the passages which led from this room, he encountered Mrs. Marston and his daughter.

“Well,” said he, “you have read Wynston’s letter?”

“Yes,” she replied, returning it to him; “and what answer, Richard, do you purpose giving him?”

She was about to hazard a conjecture, but checked herself, remembering that even so faint an evidence of a disposition to advise might possibly be resented by her cold and imperious lord.

“I have considered it, and decided to receive him,” he replied.

“Ah! I am afraid – that is, I hope – he may find our housekeeping such as he can enjoy,” she said, with an involuntary expression of surprise; for she had scarcely had a doubt that her husband would have preferred evading the visit of his fine friend, under his gloomy circumstances.

“If our modest fare does not suit him,” said Marston, with sullen bitterness, “he can depart as easily as he came. We, poor gentlemen, can but do our best. I have thought it over, and made up my mind.”

“And how soon, my dear Richard, do you intend fixing his arrival?” she inquired, with the natural uneasiness of one upon whom, in an establishment whose pretensions considerably exceeded its resources, the perplexing cares of housekeeping devolved.

“Why, as soon as he pleases,” replied he, “I suppose you can easily have his room prepared by tomorrow or next day. I shall write by this mail, and tell him to come down at once.”

Having said this in a cold, decisive way, he turned and left her, as it seemed, not caring to be teased with further questions. He took his solitary way to a distant part of his wild park, where, far from the likelihood of disturbance or intrusion, he was often wont to amuse himself for the livelong day, in the sedentary sport of shooting rabbits. And there we leave him for the present, signifying to the distant inmates of his house the industrious pursuit of his unsocial occupation, by the dropping fire that sullenly, from hour to hour, echoed from the remote woods.

Mrs. Marston issued her orders; and having set on foot all the necessary preparations for so unwonted an event as a stranger’s visit of some duration, she betook herself to her little boudoir – the scene of many an hour of patient but bitter suffering, unseen by human eye, and unknown, except to the just Searcher of hearts, to whom belongs mercy – and vengeance.

Mrs. Marston had but two friends to whom she had ever spoken upon the subject nearest her heart – the estrangement of her husband, a sorrow to which even time had failed to reconcile her. From her children this grief was carefully concealed. To them she never uttered the semblance of a complaint. Anything that could by possibility have reflected blame or dishonour upon their father, she would have perished rather than have allowed them so much as to suspect. The two friends who did understand her feelings, though in different degrees, were, one, a good and venerable clergyman, the Rev. Doctor Danvers, a frequent visitor and occasional guest at Gray Forest, where his simple manners and unaffected benignity and tenderness of heart had won the love of all, with the exception of its master, and commanded even his respect. The second was no other than the young French governess, Mademoiselle de Barras, in whose ready sympathy and consolatory counsels she found no small happiness. The society of this young lady had indeed become, next to that of her daughter, her greatest comfort and pleasure.

Mademoiselle de Barras was of a noble though ruined French family, and a certain nameless elegance and dignity attested, spite of her fallen condition, the purity of her descent. She was accomplished – possessed of that fine perception and sensitiveness, and that ready power of self-adaptation to the peculiarities and moods of others, which we term tact – and was, moreover, gifted with a certain natural grace, and manners the most winning imaginable. In short, she was a fascinating companion; and when the melancholy circumstances of her own situation, and the sad history of her once rich and noble family, were taken into account, with her striking attractions of person and air, the combination of all these associations and impressions rendered her one of the most interesting persons that could well be imagined. The circumstances of Mademoiselle de Barras’s history and descent seemed to warrant, on Mrs. Marston’s part, a closer intimacy and confidence than usually subsists between parties mutually occupying such a relation.

Mrs. Marston had hardly established herself in this little apartment, when a light foot approached, a gentle tap was given at the door, and Mademoiselle de Barras entered.

“Ah, mademoiselle, so kind – such pretty flowers. Pray sit down,” said the lady, with a sweet and grateful smile, as she took from the tapered fingers of the foreigner the little bouquet, which she had been at the pains to gather.

Mademoiselle sat down, and gently took the lady’s hand and kissed it. A small matter will overflow a heart charged with sorrow – a chance word, a look, some little office of kindness – and so it was with mademoiselle’s bouquet and gentle kiss. Mrs. Marston’s heart was touched; her eyes filled with bright tears; she smiled gratefully upon her fair and humble companion, and as she smiled, her tears overflowed, and she wept in silence for some minutes.

“My poor mademoiselle,” she said, at last, “you are so very, very kind.”

Mademoiselle said nothing; she lowered her eyes, and pressed the poor lady’s hand.

Apparently to interrupt an embarrassing silence, and to give a more cheerful tone to their little interview, the governess, in a gay tone, on a sudden said—

“And so, madame, we are to have a visitor, Miss Rhoda tells me – a baronet, is he not?”

“Yes, indeed, mademoiselle – Sir Wynston Berkley, a gay London gentleman, and a cousin of Mr. Marston’s,” she replied.

“Ha – a cousin!” exclaimed the young lady, with a little more surprise in her tone than seemed altogether called for – “a cousin? oh, then, that is the reason of his visit. Do, pray, madame, tell me all about him; I am so much afraid of strangers, and what you call men of the world. Oh, dear Mrs. Marston, I am not worthy to be here, and he will see all that in a moment; indeed, indeed, I am afraid. Pray tell me all about him.”

She said this with a simplicity which made the elder lady smile, and while mademoiselle readjusted the tiny flowers which formed the bouquet she had just presented to her, Mrs. Marston good-naturedly recounted to her all she knew of Sir Wynston Berkley, which, in substance, amounted to no more than we have already stated. When she concluded, the young Frenchwoman continued for some time silent, still busy with her flowers. But, suddenly, she heaved a deep sigh, and shook her head.

“You seem disquieted, mademoiselle,” said Mrs. Marston, in a tone of kindness.

“I am thinking, madame,” she said, still looking upon the flowers which she was adjusting, and again sighing profoundly, “I am thinking of what you said to me a week ago; alas!”

“I do not remember what it was, my good mademoiselle – nothing, I am sure, that ought to grieve you – at least nothing that was intended to have that effect,” replied the lady, in a tone of gentle encouragement.

“No, not intended, madame,” said the young Frenchwoman, sorrowfully.

“Well, what was it? Perhaps you misunderstood; perhaps I can explain what I said,” replied Mrs. Marston, affectionately.

“Ah, madame, you think – you think I am unlucky,” answered the young lady, slowly and faintly.

“Unlucky! Dear mademoiselle, you surprise me,” rejoined her companion.

“I mean – what I mean is this, madame; you date unhappiness – if not its beginning, at least its great aggravation and increase,” she answered, dejectedly, “from the time of my coming here, madame; and though I know you are too good to dislike me on that account, yet I must, in your eyes, be ever connected with calamity, and look like an ominous thing.”

“Dear mademoiselle, allow no such thought to enter your mind. You do me great wrong, indeed you do,” said Mrs. Marston, laying her hand upon the young lady’s, kindly.

There was a silence for a little time, and the elder lady resumed: – “I remember now what you allude to, dear mademoiselle – the increased estrangement, the widening separation which severs me from one unutterably dear to me – the first and bitter disappointment of my life, which seems to grow more hopelessly incurable day by day.”

Mrs. Marston paused, and, after a brief silence, the governess said:

“I am very superstitious myself, dear madame, and I thought I must have seemed to you an inauspicious inmate – in short, unlucky – as I have said; and the thought made me very unhappy – so unhappy, that I was going to leave you, madame – I may now tell you frankly – going away; but you have set my doubts at rest, and I am quite happy again.”

“Dear mademoiselle,” cried the lady, tenderly, and rising, as she spake, to kiss the cheek of her humble friend; “never – never speak of this again. God knows I have too few friends on earth, to spare the kindest and tenderest among them all. No, no. You little think what comfort I have found in your warm-hearted and ready sympathy, and how dearly I prize your affection, my poor mademoiselle.”

The young Frenchwoman rose, with downcast eyes, and a dimpling, happy smile; and, as Mrs. Marston drew her affectionately toward her, and kissed her, she timidly returned the embrace of her kind patroness. For a moment her graceful arms encircled her, and she whispered to her, “Dear madame, how happy – how very happy you make me.”

Had Ithuriel touched with his spear the beautiful young woman, thus for a moment, as it seemed, lost in a trance of gratitude and love, would that angelic form have stood the test unscathed? A spectator, marking the scene, might have observed a strange gleam in her eyes – a strange expression in her face – an influence for a moment not angelic, like a shadow of some passing spirit, cross her visibly, as she leaned over the gentle lady’s neck, and murmured, “Dear madame, how happy – how very happy you make me.” Such a spectator, as he looked at that gentle lady, might have seen, for one dreamy moment, a lithe and painted serpent, coiled round and round, and hissing in her ear.

A few minutes more, and mademoiselle was in the solitude of her own apartment. She shut and bolted the door, and taking from her desk the letter which she had that morning received, threw herself into an armchair, and studied the document profoundly. Her actual revision and scrutiny of the letter itself was interrupted by long intervals of profound abstraction; and, after a full hour thus spent, she locked it carefully up again, and with a clear brow, and a gay smile, rejoined her pretty pupil for a walk.

We must now pass over an interval of a few days, and come at once to the arrival of Sir Wynston Berkley, which duly occurred upon the evening of the day appointed. The baronet descended from his chaise but a short time before the hour at which the little party, which formed the family at Gray Forest were wont to assemble for the social meal of supper. A few minutes devoted to the mysteries of the toilet, with the aid of an accomplished valet, enabled him to appear, as he conceived, without disadvantage at this domestic reunion.

Sir Wynston Berkley was a particularly gentlemanlike person. He was rather tall, and elegantly made, with gay, easy manners, and something indefinably aristocratic in his face, which, however, was a little more worn than his years would have strictly accounted for. But Sir Wynston had been a roué, and, spite of the cleverest possible making up, the ravages of excess were very traceable in the lively beau of fifty. Perfectly well dressed, and with a manner that was ease and gaiety itself, he was at home from the moment he entered the room. Of course, anything like genuine cordiality was out of the question; but Mr. Marston embraced his relative with perfect good breeding, and the baronet appeared determined to like everybody, and be pleased with everything. He had not been five minutes in the parlour, chatting gaily with Mr. and Mrs. Marston and their pretty daughter, when Mademoiselle de Barras entered the room. As she moved towards Mrs. Marston, Sir Wynston rose, and, observing her with evident admiration, said in an undertone, inquiringly, to Marston, who was beside him—

“And this?”

“That is Mademoiselle de Barras, my daughter’s governess, and Mrs. Marston’s companion,” said Marston, drily.

“Ha!” said Sir Wynston; “I thought you were but three at home just now, and I was right. Your son is at Cambridge; I heard so from our old friend, Jack Manbury. Jack has his boy there too. Egad, Dick, it seems but last week that you and I were there together.”

“Yes,” said Marston, looking gloomily into the fire, as if he saw, in its smoke and flicker, the phantoms of murdered time and opportunity; “but I hate looking back, Wynston. The past is to me but a medley of ill-luck and worse management.”

“Why, what an ungrateful dog you are!” returned Sir Wynston, gaily, turning his back upon the fire, and glancing round the spacious and handsome, though somewhat faded apartment. “I was on the point of congratulating you on the possession of the finest park and noblest demesne in Cheshire, when you begin to grumble. Egad, Dick, all I can say to your complaint is, that I don’t pity you, and there are dozens who may honestly envy you – that is all.”

In spite of this cheering assurance, Marston remained sullenly silent. Supper, however, had now been served, and the little party assumed their places at the table.

“I am sorry, Wynston, I have no sport of any kind to offer you here,” said Marston, “except, indeed, some good trout-fishing, if you like it. I have three miles of excellent fishing at your command.”

“My dear fellow, I am a mere cockney,” rejoined Sir Wynston; “I am not a sportsman; I never tried it, and should not like to begin now. No, Dick, what I much prefer is, abundance of your fresh air, and the enjoyment of your scenery. When I was at Rouen three years ago—”

“Ha! – Rouen? Mademoiselle will feel an interest in that; it is her birthplace,” interrupted Marston, glancing at the Frenchwoman.

“Yes – Rouen – ah – yes!” said mademoiselle, with very evident embarrassment.

Sir Wynston appeared for a moment a little disconcerted too, but rallied speedily, and pursued his detail of his doings at that fair town of Normandy.

Marston knew Sir Wynston well; and he rightly calculated that whatever effect his experience of the world might have had in intensifying his selfishness or hardening his heart, it certainly could have had none in improving a character originally worthless and unfeeling. He knew, moreover, that his wealthy cousin was gifted with a great deal of that small cunning which is available for masking the little scheming of frivolous and worldly men; and that Sir Wynston never took trouble of any kind without a sufficient purpose, having its centre in his own personal gratification.

This visit greatly puzzled Marston; it gave him even a vague sense of uneasiness. Could there exist any flaw in his own title to the estate of Gray Forest? He had an unpleasant, doubtful sort of remembrance of some apprehensions of this kind, when he was but a child, having been whispered in the family. Could this really be so, and could the baronet have been led to make this unexpected visit merely for the purpose of personally examining into the condition or a property of which he was about to become the legal invader? The nature of this suspicion affords, at all events, a fair gauge of Marston’s estimate of his cousin’s character. And as he revolved these doubts from time to time, and as he thought of Mademoiselle de Barras’s transient, but unaccountable embarrassment at the mention of Rouen by Sir Wynston – an embarrassment which the baronet himself appeared for a moment to reciprocate – undefined, glimmering suspicions of another kind flickered through the darkness of his mind. He was effectually puzzled; his surmises and conjectures baffled; and he more than half repented that he had acceded to his cousin’s proposal, and admitted him as an inmate of his house.

Although Sir Wynston comported himself as if he were conscious of being the very most welcome visitor who could possibly have established himself at Gray Forest, he was, doubtless, fully aware of the real feelings with which he was regarded by his host. If he had in reality an object in prolonging his stay, and wished to make the postponement of his departure the direct interest of his entertainer, he unquestionably took effectual measures for that purpose.

The little party broke up every evening at about ten o’clock, and Sir Wynston retired to his chamber at the same hour. He found little difficulty in inducing Marston to amuse him there with a quiet game of piquet. In his own room, therefore, in the luxurious ease of dressing gown and slippers he sat at cards with his host, often until an hour or two past midnight. Sir Wynston was exorbitantly wealthy, and very reckless in expenditure. The stakes for which they played, although they gradually became in reality pretty heavy, were in his eyes a very unimportant consideration. Marston, on the other hand, was poor, and played with the eye of a lynx and the appetite of a shark. The ease and perfect good-humour with which Sir Wynston lost were not unimproved by his entertainer, who, as may readily be supposed, was not sorry to reap this golden harvest, provided without the slightest sacrifice, on his part, of pride or independence. If, indeed, he sometimes suspected that his guest was a little more anxious to lose than to win, he was also quite resolved not to perceive it, but calmly persisted in, night after night, giving Sir Wynston, as he termed it, his revenge; or, in other words, treating him to a repetition of his losses. All this was very agreeable to Marston, who began to treat his visitor with, at all events, more external cordiality and distinction than at first.

An incident, however, occurred, which disturbed these amicable relations in an unexpected way. It becomes necessary here to mention that Mademoiselle de Barras’s sleeping apartment opened from a long corridor. It was en suite with two dressing rooms, each opening also upon the corridor, but wholly unused and unfurnished. Some five or six other apartments also opened at either side, upon the same passage. These little local details being premised, it so happened that one day Marston, who had gone out with the intention of angling in the trout-stream which flowed through his park, though at a considerable distance from the house, having unexpectedly returned to procure some tackle which he had forgotten, was walking briskly through the corridor in question to his own apartment, when, to his surprise, the door of one of the deserted dressing-rooms, of which we have spoken, was cautiously pushed open, and Sir Wynston Berkley issued from it. Marston was almost beside him as he did so, and Sir Wynston made a motion as if about instinctively to draw back again, and at the same time the keen ear of his host distinctly caught the sound of rustling silks and a tiptoe tread hastily withdrawing from the deserted chamber. Sir Wynston looked nearly as much confused as a man of the world can look. Marston stopped short, and scanned his visitor for a moment with a very peculiar expression.

“You have caught me peeping, Dick. I am an inveterate explorer,” said the baronet, with an effectual effort to shake off his embarrassment. “An open door in a fine old house is a temptation which—”

“That door is usually closed, and ought to be kept so,” interrupted Marston, drily; “there is nothing whatever to be seen in the room but dust and cobwebs.”

“Pardon me,” said Sir Wynston, more easily, “you forget the view from the window.”

“Aye, the view, to be sure; there is a good view from it,” said Marston, with as much of his usual manner as he could resume so soon; and, at the same time, carelessly opening the door again, he walked in, accompanied by Sir Wynston, and both stood at the window together, looking out in silence upon a prospect which neither of them saw.

“Yes, I do think it is a good view,” said Marston; and as he turned carelessly away, he darted a swift glance round the chamber. The door opening toward the French lady’s apartment was closed, but not actually shut. This was enough; and as they left the room, Marston repeated his invitation to his guest to accompany him; but in a tone which showed that he scarcely followed the meaning of what he himself was saying.

He walked undecidedly toward his own room, then turned and went down stairs. In the hall he met his pretty child.

“Ha! Rhoda,” said he, “you have not been out today?”

“No, papa; but it is so very fine, I think I shall go now.”

“Yes; go, and mademoiselle can accompany you. Do you hear, Rhoda, mademoiselle goes with you, and you had better go at once.”

A few minutes more, and Marston, from the parlour-window, beheld Rhoda and the elegant French girl walking together towards the woodlands. He watched them gloomily, himself unseen, until the crowding underbrush concealed their receding figures. Then, with a sigh, he turned, and reascended the great staircase.

“I shall sift this mystery to the bottom,” thought he. “I shall foil the conspirators, if so they be, with their own weapons; art with art; chicane with chicane; duplicity with duplicity.”

He was now in the long passage, which we have just spoken of, and glancing back and before him, to ascertain that no chance eye discerned him, he boldly entered mademoiselle’s chamber. Her writing desk lay upon the table. It was locked; and coolly taking it in his hands, Marston carried it into his own room, bolted his chamber door, and taking two or three bunches of keys, he carefully tried nearly a dozen in succession, and when almost despairing of success, at last found one which fitted the lock, turned, and opened the desk.

Sustained throughout his dishonourable task by some strong and angry passion, the sight of the open escritoire checked and startled him for a moment. Violated privilege, invaded secrecy, base, perfidious espionage upbraided and stigmatized him, as the intricacies of the outraged sanctuary opened upon his intrusive gaze. He felt for a moment shocked and humbled. He was impelled to lock and replace the desk where he had originally found it, without having effected his meditated treason; but this hesitation was transient; the fiery and reckless impulse which had urged him to the act returned to enforce its consummation. With a guilty eye and eager hands, he searched the contents of this tiny repository of the fair Norman’s written secrets.

“Ha! the very thing,” he muttered, as he detected the identical letter which he himself had handed to Mademoiselle de Barras but a few days before. “The handwriting struck me, ill-disguised; I thought I knew it; we shall see.”

He had opened the letter; it contained but a few lines: he held his breath while he read it. First he grew pale, then a shadow came over his face, and then another, and another, darker and darker, shade upon shade, as if an exhalation from the pit was momentarily blackening the air about him. He said nothing; there was but one long, gentle sigh, and in his face a mortal sternness, as he folded the letter again, replaced it, and locked the desk.

Of course, when Mademoiselle de Barras returned from her accustomed walk, she found everything in her room, to all appearances, undisturbed, and just as when she left it. While this young lady was making her toilet for the evening, and while Sir Wynston Berkley was worrying himself with conjectures as to whether Marston’s evil looks, when he encountered him that morning in the passage, existed only in his own fancy, or were, in good truth, very grim and significant realities, Marston himself was striding alone through the wildest and darkest solitudes of his park, haunted by his own unholy thoughts, and, it may be, by those other evil and unearthly influences which wander, as we know, “in desert places.” Darkness overtook him, and the chill of night, in these lonely tracts. In his solitary walk, what fearful company had he been keeping! As the shades of night deepened round him, the sense of the neighbourhood of ill, the consciousness of the foul fancies or which, where he was now treading, he had been for hours the sport, oppressed him with a vague and unknown terror; a certain horror of the thoughts which had been his comrades through the day, which he could not now shake off, and which haunted him with a ghastly and defiant pertinacity, scared, while they half enraged him. He stalked swiftly homewards, like a guilty man pursued.

Marston was not perfectly satisfied, though very nearly, with the evidence now in his possession. The letter, the stolen perusal of which had so agitated him that day, bore no signature; but, independently of the handwriting, which seemed, spite of the constraint of an attempted disguise, to be familiar to his eye, there existed, in the matter of the letter, short as it was, certain internal evidences, which, although not actually conclusive, raised, in conjunction with all the other circumstances, a powerful presumption in aid of his suspicions. He resolved, however, to sift the matter further, and to bide his time. Meanwhile his manner must indicate no trace of his dark surmises and bitter thoughts. Deception, in its two great branches, simulation and dissimulation, was easy to him. His habitual reserve and gloom would divest any accidental and momentary disclosure of his inward trouble of everything suspicious or unaccountable, which would have characterized such displays and eccentricities in another man.

His rapid and reckless ramble, a kind of physical vent for the paroxysm which had so agitated him throughout the greater part of the day, had soiled and disordered his dress, and thus had helped to give to his whole appearance a certain air of haggard wildness, which, in the privacy of his chamber, he hastened carefully and entirely to remove.

At supper, Marston was apparently in unusually good spirits. Sir Wynston and he chatted gaily and fluently upon many subjects, grave and gay. Among them the inexhaustible topic of popular superstition happened to turn up, and especially the subject of strange prophecies of the fates and fortunes of individuals, singularly fulfilled in the events of their afterlife.

“By-the-by, Dick, this is rather a nervous topic for me to discuss,” said Sir Wynston.

“How so?” asked his host.

“Why, don’t you remember?” urged the baronet.

“No, I don’t recollect what you allude to,” replied Marston, in all sincerity.

“Why, don’t you remember Eton?” pursued Sir Wynston.

“Yes, to be sure,” said Marston.

“Well?” continued his visitor.

“Well, I really don’t recollect the prophecy,” replied Marston.

“What! do you forget the gypsy who predicted that you were to murder me, Dick – eh?”

“Ah-ha, ha!” laughed Marston, with a start.

“Don’t you remember it now?” urged his companion.

“Ah, why yes, I believe I do,” said Marston; “but another prophecy was running in my mind; a gypsy prediction, too. At Ascot, do you recollect the girl told me I was to be Lord Chancellor of England, and a duke besides?”

“Well, Dick,” rejoined Sir Wynston, merrily, “if both are to be fulfilled, or neither, I trust you may never sit upon the woolsack of England.”

The party soon after broke up: Sir Wynston and his host, as usual, to pass some hours at piquet; and Mrs. Marston, as was her wont, to, spend some time in her own boudoir, over notes and accounts, and the worrying details of housekeeping.

While thus engaged, she was disturbed by a respectful tap at her door, and an elderly servant, who had been for many years in the employment of Mr. Marston, presented himself.

“Well, Merton, do you want anything?” asked the lady.

“Yes, ma’am, please, I want to give warning; I wish to leave the service, ma’am;” replied he, respectfully, but doggedly.

“To leave us, Merton!” echoed his mistress, both surprised and sorry for the man had been long her servant, and had been much liked and trusted.

“Yes, ma’am,” he repeated.

“And why do you wish to do so, Merton? Has anything occurred to make the place unpleasant to you?” urged the lady.

“No, ma’am – no, indeed,” said he, earnestly, “I have nothing to complain of – nothing, indeed, ma’am.”

“Perhaps, you think you can do better, if you leave us?” suggested his mistress.

“No, indeed, ma’am, I have no such thought,” he said, and seemed on the point of bursting into tears; “but – but, somehow – ma’am, there is something come over me, lately, and I can’t help, but think, if I stay here, ma’am – some – some – misfortune will happen to us all – and that is the truth, ma’am.”

“This is very foolish, Merton – a mere childish fancy,” replied Mrs. Marston; “you like your place, and have no better prospect before you; and now, for a mere superstitious fancy, you propose giving it up, and leaving us. No, no, Merton, you had better think the matter over – and if you still, upon reflection, prefer going away, you can then speak to your master.”

“Thank you ma’am – God bless you,” said the man, withdrawing.

Mrs. Marston rang the bell for her maid, and retired to her room. “Has anything occurred lately,” she asked, “to annoy Merton?”

“No, ma’am, I don’t know of anything; but he is very changed, indeed, of late,” replied the maid.

“He has not been quarrelling?” inquired she.

“Oh, no, ma’am, he never quarrels; he is very quiet, and keeps to himself always; he thinks a wonderful deal of himself,” replied the servant.

“But, you said that he is much changed – did you not?” continued the lady; for there was something strangely excited and unpleasant in the man’s manner, in this little interview, which struck Mrs. Marston, and alarmed her curiosity. He had seemed like one charged with some horrible secret – intolerable, and which he yet dared not reveal.

“What,” proceeded Mrs. Marston, “is the nature of the change of which you speak?”

“Why, ma’am, he is like one frightened, and in sorrow,” she replied; “he will sit silent, and now and then shaking his head, as if he wanted to get rid of something that is teasing him, for an hour together.”

“Poor man!” said she.

“And, then, when we are at meals, he will, all on a sudden, get up, and leave the table; and Jem Boulter, that sleeps in the next room to him, says, that, almost as often as he looks through the little window between the two rooms, no matter what hour in the night, he sees Mr. Merton on his knees by the bedside, praying or crying, he don’t know which; but, any way, he is not happy – poor man! – and that is plain enough.”

“It is very strange,” said the lady, after a pause; “but, I think, and hope, after all, it will prove to have been no more than a little nervousness.”

“Well, ma’am, I do hope it is not his conscience that is coming against him, now,” said the maid.

“We have no reason to suspect anything of the kind,” said Mrs. Marston, gravely, “quite the reverse; he has been always a particularly proper man.”

“Oh, indeed,” responded the attendant, “goodness forbid I should say or think anything against him; but I could not help telling you my mind, ma’am, meaning no harm.”

“And, how long is it since you observed this sad change in poor Merton?” persisted the lady.

“Not, indeed, to say very long, ma’am,” replied the girl; “somewhere about a week, or very little more – at least, as we remarked, ma’am.”

Mrs. Marston pursued her inquiries no further that night. But, although she affected to treat the matter thus lightly, it had, somehow, taken a painful hold upon her imagination, and left in her mind those undefinable and ominous sensations, which, in certain mental temperaments, seem to foreshadow the approach of unknown misfortune.

For two or three days, everything went on smoothly, and pretty much as usual. At the end of this brief interval, however, the attention of Mrs. Marston was recalled to the subject of her servant’s mysterious anxiety to leave, and give up his situation. Merton again stood before her, and repeated the intimation he had already given.

“Really, Merton, this is very odd,” said the lady. “You like your situation, and yet you persist in desiring to leave it. What am I to think?”

“Oh, ma’am,” said he, “I am unhappy; I am tormented, ma’am. I can’t tell you, ma’am; I can’t indeed ma’am!”

“If anything weighs upon your mind, Merton, I would advise you to consult our good clergyman, Dr. Danvers,” urged the lady.

The servant hung his head, and mused for a time gloomily; and then said decisively – “No, ma’am; no use.”

“And pray, Merton, how long is it since you first entertained this desire?” asked Mrs. Marston.

“Since Sir Wynston Berkley came, ma’am,” answered he.

“Has Sir Wynston annoyed you in any way?” continued she.

“Far from it, ma’am,” he replied; “he is a very kind gentleman.”

“Well, his man, then; is he a respectable, inoffensive person?” she inquired.

“I never met one more so,” said the man, promptly, and raising his head.

“What I wish to know is, whether your desire to go is connected with Sir Wynston and his servant?” said Mrs. Marston.

The man hesitated, and shifted his position uneasily.

“You need not answer, Merton, if you don’t wish it,” she said kindly.

“Why, ma’am, yes, it has something to say to them both,” he replied, with some agitation.

“I really cannot understand this,” said she.

Merton hesitated for some time, and appeared much troubled. “It was something, ma’am – something that Sir Wynston’s man said to me; and there it is out,” he said at last, with an effort.

“Well, Merton,” said she, “I won’t press you further; but I must say, that as this communication, whatever it may be, has caused you, unquestionably, very great uneasiness, it seems to me but probable that it affects the safety or the interests of some person – I cannot say of whom; and, if so, there can be no doubt that it is your duty to acquaint those who are so involved in the disclosure, with its purport.”

“No, ma’am, there is nothing in what I heard that could touch anybody but myself. It was nothing but what others heard, without remarking it, or thinking about it. I can’t tell you any more, ma’am; but I am very unhappy, and uneasy in my mind.”

As the man said this, he began to weep bitterly.

The idea that his mind was affected now seriously occurred to Mrs. Marston, and she resolved to convey her suspicions to her husband, and to leave him to deal with the case as to him should seem good.

“Don’t agitate yourself so, Merton; I shall speak to your master upon what you have said; and you may rely upon it, that no surmise to the prejudice of your character has entered my mind,” said Mrs. Marston, very kindly.

“Oh, ma’am, you are too good,” sobbed the poor man, vehemently. “You don’t know me, ma’am; I never knew myself till lately. I am a miserable man. I am frightened at myself, ma’am – frightened terribly. Christ knows, it would be well for me I was dead this minute.”

“I am very sorry for your unhappiness, Merton,” said Mrs. Marston; “and, especially, that I can do nothing to alleviate it; I can but speak, as I have said, to your master, and he will give you your discharge, and arrange whatever else remains to be done.”

“God bless you, ma’am,” said the servant, still much agitated, and left her.

Mr. Marston usually passed the early part of the day in active exercise, and she, supposing that he was, in all probability, at that moment far from home, went to “mademoiselle’s” chamber, which was at the other end of the spacious house, to confer with her in the interval upon the strange application thus urged by poor Merton.

Just as she reached the door of Mademoiselle de Barras’s chamber, she heard voices within exerted in evident excitement. She stopped in amazement. They were those of her husband and mademoiselle. Startled, confounded, and amazed, she pushed open the door, and entered. Her husband was sitting, one hand clutched upon the arm of the chair he occupied, and the other extended, and clenched, as it seemed, with the emphasis of rage, upon the desk that stood upon the table. His face was darkened with the stormiest passions, and his gaze was fixed upon the Frenchwoman, who was standing with a look half-guilty, half-imploring, at a little distance.

There was something, to Mrs. Marston, so utterly unexpected, and even so shocking, in this tableau, that she stood for some seconds pale and breathless, and gazing with a vacant stare of fear and horror from her husband to the French girl, and from her to her husband again. The three figures in this strange group remained fixed, silent, and aghast, for several seconds. Mrs. Marston endeavoured to speak; but, though her lips moved, no sound escaped her; and, from very weakness, she sank, half-fainting, into a chair.

Marston rose, throwing, as he did so, a guilty and furious glance at the young Frenchwoman, and walked a step or two toward the door; he hesitated, however, and turned, just as mademoiselle, bursting into tears, threw her arms round Mrs. Marston’s neck, and passionately exclaimed, “Protect me, madame, I implore, from the insults and suspicions of your husband.”

Marston stood a little behind his wife, and he and the governess exchanged a glance of keen significance, as the latter sank, sobbing, like an injured child into its mother’s embrace, upon the poor lady’s tortured bosom.

“Madame, madame! he says – Mr. Marston says – I have presumed to give you advice, and to meddle, and to interfere; that I am endeavouring to make you despise his authority. Madame, speak for me. Say, madame, have I ever done so? – say, madame, am I the cause of bitterness and contumacy? Ah, mon Dieu! c’est trop – it is too much, madame. I shall go – I must go, madame. Why, ah! why, did I stay for this?”

As she thus spoke, mademoiselle again burst into a paroxysm of weeping, and again the same significant glance was interchanged.

“Go; yes, you shall go,” said Marston, striding toward the window. “I will have no whispering or conspiring in my house: I have heard of your confidences and consultations. Mrs. Marston, I meant to have done this quietly,” he continued, addressing his wife; “I meant to have given Mademoiselle de Barras my opinion and her dismissal without your assistance; but it seems you wish to interpose. You are sworn friends, and never fail one another, of course, at a pinch. I take it for granted that I owe your presence at our interview which I am resolved shall be, as respects mademoiselle, a final one, to a message from that intriguing young lady – eh?”

“I have had no message, Richard,” said Mrs. Marston; “I don’t know – do tell me, for God’s sake, what is all this about?” And as the poor lady thus spoke, her overwrought feelings found vent in a violent flood of tears.

“Yes, madame, that is the question. I have asked him frequently what is all this anger, all these reproaches about; what have I done?” interposed mademoiselle, with indignant vehemence, standing erect, and viewing Marston with a flashing eye and a flushed cheek. “Yes, I am called conspirator, meddler, intrigant. Ah, madame, it is intolerable.”

“But what have I done, Richard?” urged the poor lady, stunned and bewildered; “how have I offended you?”

“Yes, yes,” continued the Frenchwoman, with angry volubility, “what has she done that you call contumacy and disrespect? Yes, dear madame, there is the question; and if he cannot answer, is it not most cruel to call me conspirator, and spy, and intrigant, because I talk to my dear madame, who is my only friend in this place?”

“Mademoiselle de Barras, I need no declamation from you; and, pardon me, Mrs. Marston, nor from you either,” retorted he; “I have my information from one on whom I can rely; let that suffice. Of course you are both agreed in a story. I dare say you are ready to swear you never so much as canvassed my conduct, and my coldness and estrangement – eh? These are the words, are not they?”

“I have done you no wrong, sir; madame can tell you. I am no mischief-maker; no, I never was such a thing. Was I, madame?” persisted the governess – “bear witness for me?”

“I have told you my mind, Mademoiselle de Barras,” interrupted Marston; “I will have no altercation, if you please. I think, Mrs. Marston, we have had enough of this; may I accompany you hence?”

So saying, he took the poor lady’s passive hand, and led her from the room. Mademoiselle stood in the centre of the apartment, alone, erect, with heaving breast and burning cheek – beautiful, thoughtful, guilty – the very type of the fallen angelic. There for a time, her heart all confusion, her mind darkened, we must leave her; various courses before her, and as yet without resolution to choose among them; a lost spirit, borne on the eddies of the storm; fearless and self-reliant, but with no star to guide her on her dark, malign, and forlorn way.

Mrs. Marston, in her own room, reviewed the agitating scene through which she had just been so unexpectedly carried. The tremendous suspicion which, at the first disclosure of the tableau we have described, smote the heart and brain of the poor lady with the stun of a thunderbolt, had been, indeed, subsequently disturbed, and afterwards contradicted; but the shock of her first impression remained still upon her mind and heart. She felt still through every nerve the vibrations of that maddening terror and despair which had overcome her senses for a moment. The surprise, the shock, the horror, outlived the obliterating influence of what followed. She was in this agitation when Mademoiselle de Barras entered her chamber, resolved with all her art to second and support the success of her prompt measures in the recent critical emergency. She had come, she said, to bid her dear madame farewell, for she was resolved to go. Her own room had been invaded, that insult and reproach might be heaped upon her; how utterly unmerited Mrs. Marston knew. She had been called by every foul name which applied to the spy and the maligner; she could not bear it. Someone had evidently been endeavouring to procure her removal, and had but too effectually succeeded. Mademoiselle was determined to go early the next morning; nothing should prevent or retard her departure; her resolution was taken. In this strain did mademoiselle run on, but in a subdued and melancholy tone, and weeping profusely.

The wild and ghastly suspicions which had for a moment flashed terribly upon the mind of Mrs. Marston, had faded away under the influences of reason and reflection, although, indeed, much painful excitement still remained, before Mademoiselle de Barras had visited her room. Marston’s temper she knew but too well; it was violent, bitter, and impetuous; and though he cared little, if at all, for her, she had ever perceived that he was angrily jealous of the slightest intimacy or confidence by which any other than himself might establish an influence over her mind. That he had learned the subject of some of her most interesting conversations with mademoiselle she could not doubt, for he had violently upbraided that young lady in her presence with having discussed it, and here now was mademoiselle herself taking refuge with her from galling affront and unjust reproach, incensed, wounded, and weeping. The whole thing was consistent; all the circumstances bore plainly in the same direction; the evidence was conclusive; and Mrs. Marston’s thoughts and feelings respecting her fair young confidante quickly found their old level, and flowed on tranquilly and sadly in their accustomed channel.

While Mademoiselle de Barras was thus, with the persevering industry of the spider, repairing the meshes which a chance breath had shattered, she would, perhaps, have been in her turn shocked and startled, could she have glanced into Marston’s mind, and seen, in what was passing there, the real extent of her danger.

Marston was walking, as usual, alone, and in the most solitary region of his lonely park. One hand grasped his walking stick, not to lean upon it, but as if it were the handle of a battleaxe; the other was buried in his bosom; his dark face looked upon the ground, and he strode onward with a slow but energetic step, which had the air of deep resolution. He found himself at last in a little churchyard, lying far among the wild forest of his demesne, and in the midst of which, covered with ivy and tufted plants, now ruddy with autumnal tints, stood the ruined walls of a little chapel. In the dilapidated vault close by lay buried many of his ancestors, and under the little wavy hillocks of fern and nettles, slept many an humble villager. He sat down upon a worn tombstone in this lowly ruin, and with his eyes fixed upon the ground, he surrendered his spirit to the stormy and evil thoughts which he had invited. Long and motionless he sat there, while his foul fancies and schemes began to assume shape and order. The wind rushing through the ivy roused him for a moment, and as he raised his gloomy eye it alighted accidentally upon a skull, which some wanton hand had fixed in a crevice of the wall. He averted his glance quickly, but almost as quickly re-fixed his gaze upon the impassive symbol of death, with an expression glowering and contemptuous, and with an angry gesture struck it down among the weeds with his stick. He left the place, and wandered on through the woods.

“Men can’t control the thoughts that flit across their minds,” he muttered, as he went along, “any more than they can direct the shadows of the clouds that sail above them. They come and pass, and leave no stain behind. What, then, of omens, and that wretched effigy of death? Stuff – pshaw! Murder, indeed! I’m incapable of murder. I have drawn my sword upon a man in fair duel; but murder! Out upon the thought, out upon it.”

He stamped upon the ground with a pang at once of fury and horror. He walked on a little, stopped again, and folding his arms, leaned against an ancient tree.

“Mademoiselle de Barras, vous êtes une traîtresse, and you shall go. Yes, go you shall; you have deceived me, and we must part.”

He said this with melancholy bitterness; and, after a pause, continued:

“I will have no other revenge. No; though, I dare say, she will care but little for this; very little, if at all.”

“And then, as to the other person,” he resumed, after a pause, “it is not the first time he has acted like a trickster. He has crossed me before, and I will choose an opportunity to tell him my mind. I won’t mince matters with him either, and will not spare him one insulting syllable that he deserves. He wears a sword, and so do I; if he pleases, he may draw it; he shall have the opportunity; but, at all events, I will make it impossible for him to prolong his disgraceful visit at my house.”

On reaching home and his own study, the servant, Merton, presented himself, and his master, too deeply excited to hear him then, appointed the next day for the purpose. There was no contending against Marston’s peremptory will, and the man reluctantly withdrew. Here was, apparently, a matter of no imaginable moment; whether this menial should be discharged on that day, or on the morrow; and yet mighty things were involved in the alternative.

There was a deeper gloom than usual over the house. The servants seemed to know that something had gone wrong, and looked grave and mysterious. Marston was more than ever dark and moody. Mrs. Marston’s dimmed and swollen eyes showed that she had been weeping. Mademoiselle absented herself from supper, on the plea of a bad headache. Rhoda saw that something, she knew not what, had occurred to agitate her elders, and was depressed and anxious. The old clergyman, whom we have already mentioned, had called, and stayed to supper. Dr. Danvers was a man of considerable learning, strong sense, and remarkable simplicity of character. His thoughtful blue eye, and well-marked countenance, were full of gentleness and benevolence, and elevated by a certain natural dignity, of which purity and goodness, without one debasing shade of self-esteem and arrogance, were the animating spirit. Mrs. Marston loved and respected this good minister of God; and many a time had sought and found, in his gentle and earnest counsels, and in the overflowing tenderness of his sympathy, much comfort and support in the progress of her sore and protracted earthly trial. Most especially at one critical period in her history had he endeared himself to her, by interposing, and successfully, to prevent a formal separation which (as ending forever the one hope that cheered her on, even in the front of despair) she would probably not long have survived.

With Mr. Marston, however, he was far from being a favourite. There was that in his lofty and simple purity which abashed and silently reproached the sensual, bitter, disappointed man of the world. The angry pride of the scornful man felt its own meanness in the grand presence of a simple and humble Christian minister. And the very fact that all his habits had led him to hold such a character in contempt, made him but the more unreasonably resent the involuntary homage which its exhibition in Dr. Danvers’s person invariably extorted from him. He felt in this good man’s presence under a kind of irritating restraint; that he was in the presence of one with whom he had, and could have, no sympathy whatever, and yet one whom he could not help both admiring and respecting; and in these conflicting feelings were involved certain gloomy and humbling inferences about himself, which he hated, and almost feared to contemplate.

It was well, however, for the indulgence of Sir Wynston’s conversational propensities, that Dr. Danvers had happened to drop in; for Marston was doggedly silent and sullen, and Mrs. Marston was herself scarcely more disposed than he to maintain her part in a conversation; so that, had it not been for the opportune arrival of the good clergyman, the supper must have been dispatched with a very awkward and unsocial taciturnity.

Marston thought, and, perhaps, not erroneously, that Sir Wynston suspected something of the real state of affairs, and he was, therefore, incensed to perceive, as he thought, in his manner, very evident indications of his being in unusually good spirits. Thus disposed, the party sat down to supper.

“One of our number is missing,” said Sir Wynston, affecting a slight surprise, which, perhaps, he did not feel.

“Mademoiselle de Barras – I trust she is well?” said Doctor Danvers, looking towards Marston.

“I suppose she is; I don’t know,” said Marston, drily.

“Why! how should he know,” said the baronet, gaily, but with something almost imperceptibly sarcastic in his tone. “Our friend, Marston, is privileged to be as ungallant as he pleases, except where he has the happy privilege to owe allegiance; but I, a gay young bachelor of fifty, am naturally curious. I really do trust that our charming French friend is not unwell.”

He addressed his inquiry to Mrs. Marston, who, with some slight confusion, replied:

“No; nothing, at least, serious; merely a slight headache. I am sure she will be quite well enough to come down to breakfast.”

“She is, indeed, a very charming and interesting young person,” said Doctor Danvers. “There is a certain simplicity about her which argues a good and kind heart, and an open nature.”

“Very true, indeed, doctor,” observed Berkley, with the same faint, but, to Marston, exquisitely provoking approximation to sarcasm. “There is, as you say, a very charming simplicity. Don’t you think so, Marston?”

Marston looked at him for a moment, but continued silent.

“Poor mademoiselle! – she is, indeed, a most affectionate creature,” said Mrs. Marston, who felt called upon to say something.

“Come, Marston, will you contribute nothing to the general fund of approbation?” said Sir Wynston, who was gifted by nature with an amiable talent for teasing, which he was fond of exercising in a quiet way. “We have all, but you, said something handsome of our absent young friend.”

“I never praise anybody, Wynston; not even you,” said Marston, with an obvious sneer.

“Well, well, I must comfort myself with the belief that your silence covers a great deal of goodwill, and, perhaps, a little admiration, too,” answered his cousin, significantly.

“Comfort yourself in any honest way you will, my dear Wynston,” retorted Marston, with a degree of asperity, which, to all but the baronet himself, was unaccountable. “You may be right, you may be wrong; on a subject so unimportant it matters very little which; you are at perfect liberty to practice delusions, if you will, upon yourself.”

“By-the-by, Mr. Marston, is not your son about to come down here?” asked Doctor Danvers, who perceived that the altercation was becoming, on Marston’s part, somewhat testy, if not positively rude.

“Yes; I expect him in a few days,” replied he, with a sudden gloom.

“You have not seen him, Sir Wynston?” asked the clergyman.

“I have that pleasure yet to come,” said the baronet.

“A pleasure it is, I do assure you,” said Doctor Danvers, heartily. “He is a handsome lad, with the heart of a hero – a fine, frank, generous lad, and as merry as a lark.”

“Yes, yes,” interrupted Marston; “he is well enough, and has done pretty well at Cambridge. Doctor Danvers, take some wine.”

It was strange, but yet mournfully true, that the praises which the good Doctor Danvers thus bestowed upon his son were bitter to the soul of the unhappy Marston. They jarred upon his ear, and stung his heart; for his conscience converted them into so many latent insults and humiliations to himself.

“Your wine is very good, Marston. I think your clarets are many degrees better than any I can get,” said Sir Wynston, sipping a glass of his favourite wine. “You country gentlemen are sad selfish dogs; and, with all your grumbling, manage to collect the best of whatever is worth having about you.”

“We sometimes succeed in collecting a pleasant party,” retorted Marston, with ironical courtesy, “though we do not always command the means of entertaining them quite as we would wish.”

It was the habit of Doctor Danvers, without respect of persons or places, to propose, before taking his departure from whatever domestic party he chanced to be thrown among for the evening, to read some verses from that holy Book, on which his own hopes and peace were founded, and to offer up a prayer for all to the throne of grace. Marston, although he usually absented himself from such exercises, did not otherwise discourage them; but upon the present occasion, starting from his gloomy reverie, he himself was the first to remind the clergyman of his customary observance. Evil thoughts loomed upon the mind of Marston, like measureless black mists upon a cold, smooth sea. They rested, grew, and darkened there; and no heaven-sent breath came silently to steal them away. Under this dread shadow his mind lay waiting, like the DEEP, before the Spirit of God moved upon its waters, passive and awful. Why for the first time now did religion interest him? The unseen, intangible, was even now at work within him. A dreadful power shook his very heart and soul. There was some strange, ghastly wrestling going on in his own immortal spirit, a struggle that made him faint, which he had no power to determine. He looked upon the holy influence of the good man’s prayer – a prayer in which he could not join – with a dull, superstitious hope that the words, inviting better influence, though uttered by another, and with other objects, would, like a spell, chase away the foul fiend that was busy with his soul. Marston sat, looking into the fire, with a countenance of stern gloom, upon which the wayward lights of the flickering hearth sported fitfully; while at a distant table Doctor Danvers sat down, and, taking his well-worn Bible from his pocket, turned over its leaves, and began, in gentle but impressive tones, to read.

Sir Wynston was much too well bred to evince the slightest disposition to aught but the most proper and profound attention. The faintest imaginable gleam of ridicule might, perhaps, have been discerned in his features, as he leaned back in his chair, and, closing his eyes, composed himself to at least an attitude of attention. No man could submit with more cheerfulness to an inevitable bore.

In these things, then, thou hast no concern; the judgment troubles thee not; thou hast no fear of death, Sir Wynston Berkley; yet there is a heart beating near thee, the mysteries of which, could they glide out and stand before thy face, would perchance appal thee, cold, easy man of the world. Aye, couldst thou but see with those cunning eyes of thine, but twelve brief hours into futurity, each syllable that falls from that good man’s lips unheeded would peal through thy heart and brain like maddening thunder. Hearken, hearken, Sir Wynston Berkley, perchance these are the farewell words of thy better angel – the last pleadings of despised mercy!

The party broke up. Doctor Danvers took his leave, and rode homeward, down the broad avenue, between the gigantic ranks of elm that closed it in. The full moon was rising above the distant hills; the mists lay like sleeping lakes in the laps of the hollows; and the broad demesne looked tranquil and sad under this chastened and silvery glory. The good old clergyman thought, as he pursued his way, that here at least, in a spot so beautiful and sequestered, the stormy passions and fell contentions of the outer world could scarcely penetrate. Yet, in that calm secluded spot, and under the cold, pure light which fell so holily, what a hell was weltering and glaring! – what a spectacle was that moon to go down upon! As Sir Wynston was leaving the parlour for his own room, Marston accompanied him to the hall, and said – “I shan’t play tonight, Sir Wynston.”

“Ah, ha! very particularly engaged?” suggested the baronet, with a faint, mocking smile. “Well, my dear fellow, we must endeavour to make up for it tomorrow – eh?”

“I don’t know that,” said Marston, “and – in a word, there is no use, sir, in our masquerading with one another. Each knows the other; each understands the other. I wish to have a word or two with you in your room tonight, when we shan’t be interrupted.”

Marston spoke in a fierce and grating whisper, and his countenance, more even than his accents, betrayed the intensity of his bridled fury. Sir Wynston, however, smiled upon his cousin as if his voice had been melody, and his looks all sunshine.

“Very good, Marston, just as you please,” he said; “only don’t be later than one, as I shall be getting into bed about that hour.”

“Perhaps, upon second thoughts, it is as well to defer what I have to say,” said Marston, musingly. “Tomorrow will do as well; so, perhaps, Sir Wynston, I may not trouble you tonight.”

“Just as suits you best, my dear Marston,” replied the baronet, with a tranquil smile; “only don’t come after the hour I have stipulated.”

So saying, the baronet mounted the stairs, and made his way to his chamber. He was in excellent spirits, and in high good-humour with himself: the object of his visit to Gray Forest had been, as he now flattered himself, attained. He had conducted an affair requiring the profoundest mystery in its prosecution, and the nicest tactic in its management, almost to a triumphant issue. He had perfectly masked his design, and completely outwitted Marston; and to a person who piqued himself upon his clever diplomacy, and vaunted that he had never yet sustained a defeat in any object which he had seriously proposed to himself, such a combination of successes was for the moment quite intoxicating.

Sir Wynston not only enjoyed his own superiority with all the vanity of a selfish nature, but he no less enjoyed, with a keen and malicious relish, the intense mortification which, he was well assured, Marston must experience; and all the more acutely, because of the utter impossibility, circumstanced as he was, of his taking any steps to manifest his vexation, without compromising himself in a most unpleasant way.

Animated by these amiable feelings, Sir Wynston Berkley sat down, and wrote the following short letter, addressed to Mrs. Gray, Wynston Hall:

Mrs. Gray,

On receipt of this have the sitting rooms and several bedrooms put in order, and thoroughly aired. Prepare for my use the suite of three rooms over the library and drawing room; and have the two great wardrobes, and the cabinet in the state bedroom, removed into the large dressing room which opens upon the bedroom I have named. Make everything as comfortable as possible. If anything is wanted in the way of furniture, drapery, ornament, &c., you need only write to John Skelton, Esq., Spring-garden, London, stating what is required, and he will order and send them down. You must be expeditious, as I shall probably go down to Wynston, with two or three friends, at the beginning of next month.

Wynston Berkley

P.S. – I have written to direct Arkins and two or three of the other servants to go down at once. Set them all to work immediately.”

He then applied himself to another letter of considerably greater length, and from which, therefore, we shall only offer a few extracts. It was addressed to John Skelton, Esq., and began as follows:

My Dear Skelton,

You are, doubtless, surprised at my long silence, but I have had nothing very particular to say. My visit to this dull and uncomfortable place was (as you rightly surmise) not without its object – a little bit of wicked romance; the pretty demoiselle of Rouen, whom I mentioned to you more than once – la belle de Barras – was, in truth, the attraction that drew me hither; and I think (for, as yet, she affects hesitation), I shall have no further trouble with her. She is a fine creature, and you will admit, when you have seen her, well worth taking some trouble about. She is, however, a very knowing little minx, and evidently suspects me of being a sad, fickle dog – and, as I surmise, has some plans, moreover, respecting my morose cousin, Marston, a kind of wicked Penruddock, who has carried all his London tastes into his savage retreat, a paradise of bogs and bushes. There is, I am very confident, a liaison in that quarter. The young lady is evidently a good deal afraid of him, and insists upon such precautions in our interviews, that they have been very few, and far between, indeed. Today, there has been a fracas of some kind. I have no doubt that Marston, poor devil, is jealous. His situation is really pitiably comic – with an intriguing mistress, a saintly wife, and a devil of a jealous temper of his own. I shall meet Mary on reaching town. Has Clavering (shabby dog!) paid his I.O.U. yet? Tell the little opera woman she had better be quiet. She ought to know me by this time; I shall do what is right, but won’t submit to be bullied. If she is troublesome, snap your fingers at her, on my behalf, and leave her to her remedy. I have written to Gray, to get things at Wynston in order. She will draw upon you for what money she requires. Send down two or three of the servants, if they have not already gone. The place is very dusty and dingy, and needs a great deal of brushing and scouring. I shall see you in town very soon. By the way, has the claret I ordered from the Dublin house arrived yet? It is consigned to you, and goes by the ‘Lizard’; pay the freightage, and get Edwards to pack it; ten dozen or so may as well go down to Wynston, and send other wines in proportion. I leave details to you….”

Some further directions upon other subjects followed; and having subscribed the dispatch, and addressed it to the gentlemanlike scoundrel who filled the onerous office of factotum to this profligate and exacting man of the world, Sir Wynston Berkley rang his bell, and gave the two letters into the hand of his man, with special directions to carry them himself in person, to the post office in the neighbouring village, early next morning. These little matters completed, Sir Wynston stirred his fire, leaned back in his easy chair, and smiled blandly over the sunny prospect of his imaginary triumphs.

It here becomes necessary to describe, in a few words, some of the local relations of Sir Wynston’s apartments. The bedchamber which he occupied opened from the long passage of which we have already spoken – and there were two other smaller apartments opening from it in train. In the further of these, which was entered from a lobby, communicating by a back stair with the kitchen and servants’ apartments, lay Sir Wynston’s valet, and the intermediate chamber was fitted up as a dressing room for the baronet himself. These circumstances it is necessary to mention, that what follows may be clearly intelligible.

While the baronet was penning these records of vicious schemes – dire waste of wealth and time – irrevocable time! – Marston paced his study in a very different frame of mind. There were a gloom and disorder in the room accordant with those of his own mind. Shelves of ancient tomes, darkened by time, and upon which the dust of years lay sleeping – dark oaken cabinets, filled with piles of deeds and papers, among which the nimble spiders were crawling – and, from the dusky walls, several stark, pale ancestors, looking down coldly from their tarnished frames. An hour, and another hour passed – and still Marston paced this melancholy chamber, a prey to his own fell passions and dark thoughts. He was not a superstitious man, but, in the visions which haunted him, perhaps, was something which made him unusually excitable – for, he experienced a chill of absolute horror, as, standing at the farther end of the room, with his face turned towards the entrance, he beheld the door noiselessly and slowly pushed open, by a pale, thin hand, and a figure dressed in a loose white robe, glide softly in. He stood for some seconds gazing upon this apparition, as it moved hesitatingly towards him from the dusky extremity of the large apartment, before he perceived that the form was that of Mrs. Marston.

“Hey, ha! – Mrs. Marston – what on earth has called you hither?” he asked, sternly. “You ought to have been at rest an hour ago; get to your chamber, and leave me, I have business to attend to.”

“Now, dear Richard, you must forgive me,” she said, drawing near, and looking up into his haggard face with a sweet and touching look of timidity and love; “I could not rest until I saw you again; your looks have been all this night so unlike yourself; so strange and terrible, that I am afraid some great misfortune threatens you, which you fear to tell me of.”

“My looks! Why, curse it, must I give an account of my looks?” replied Marston, at once disconcerted and wrathful. “Misfortune! What misfortune can befall us more? No, there is nothing, nothing, I say, but your own foolish fancy; go to your room – go to sleep – my looks, indeed; pshaw!”

“I came to tell you, dear Richard, that I will do, in all respects, just as you desire. If you continue to wish it, I will part with poor mademoiselle; though, indeed, Richard, I shall miss her more than you can imagine; and all your suspicions have wronged her deeply,” said Mrs. Marston. Her husband darted a sudden flashing glance of suspicious scrutiny upon her face; but its expression was frank, earnest, noble. He was disarmed; he hung his head gloomily upon his breast, and was silent for a time. She came nearer, and laid her hand upon his arm. He looked darkly into her upturned eyes, and a feeling which had not touched his heart for many a day – an emotion of pity, transient, indeed, but vivid, revisited him. He took her hand in his, and said, in gentler terms than she had heard him use for a long time—

“No, indeed, Gertrude, you have deceived yourself; no misfortune has happened, and if I am gloomy, the source of all my troubles is within. Leave me, Gertrude, for the present. As to the other matter, the departure of Mademoiselle de Barras, we can talk of that tomorrow – now I cannot; so let us part. Go to your room; good night.”

She was withdrawing, and he added, in a subdued tone – “Gertrude, I am very glad you came – very glad. Pray for me tonight.”

He had followed her a few steps toward the door, and now stopped short, turned about, and walked dejectedly back again.

“I am right glad she came,” he muttered, as soon as he was once more alone. “Wynston is provoking and fiery, too. Were I, in my present mood, to seek a tête-à-tête with him, who knows what might come of it? Blood; my own heart whispers – blood! I’ll not trust myself.”

He strode to the study door, locked it, and taking out the key, shut it in the drawer of one of the cabinets.

“Now it will need more than accident or impulse to lead me to him. I cannot go, at least, without reflection, without premeditation. Avaunt, fiend. I have baffled you.”

He stood in the centre of the room, cowering and scowling as he said this, and looked round with a glance half-defiant, half-fearful, as if he expected to see some dreadful form in the dusky recesses of the desolate chamber. He sat himself by the smouldering fire, in sombre and agitated rumination. He was restless; he rose again, unbuckled his sword, which he had not loosed since evening, and threw it hastily into a corner. He looked at his watch, it was half-past twelve; he glanced at the door, and thence at the cabinet in which he had placed the key; then he turned hastily, and sat down again. He leaned his elbows on his knees, and his chin upon his clenched hand; still he was restless and excited. Once more he arose, and paced up and down. He consulted his watch again; it was now but a quarter to one.

~   ~   ~   ~

Sir Wynston’s man having received the letters, and his master’s permission to retire to rest, got into his bed, and was soon beginning to doze. We have already mentioned that his and Sir Wynston’s apartments were separated by a small dressing room, so that any ordinary noise or conversation could be heard but imperfectly from one to the other. The servant, however, was startled by a sound of something falling on the floor of his master’s apartment, and broken to pieces by the violence of the shock. He sat up in his bed, listened, and heard some sentences spoken vehemently, and gabbled very fast. He thought he distinguished the words “wretch” and “God”; and there was something so strange in the tone in which they were spoken, that the man got up and stole noiselessly through the dressing room, and listened at the door.

He heard him, as he thought, walking in his slippers through the room, and making his customary arrangements previously to getting into bed. He knew that his master had a habit of speaking when alone, and concluded that the accidental breakage of some glass or chimney-ornament had elicited the volley of words he had heard. Well knowing that, except at the usual hours, or in obedience to Sir Wynston’s bell, nothing more displeased his master than his presuming to enter his sleeping-apartment while he was there, the servant quietly retreated, and, perfectly satisfied that all was right, composed himself to slumber, and was soon beginning to dose again.

The adventures of the night, however, were not yet over. Waking, as men sometimes do, without any ascertainable cause; without a start or an uneasy sensation; without even a disturbance of the attitude of repose, he opened his eyes and beheld Merton, the servant of whom we have spoken, standing at a little distance from his bed. The moonlight fell in a clear flood upon this figure: the man was ghastly pale; there was a blotch of blood on his face; his hands were clasped upon something which they nearly concealed; and his eyes, fixed on the servant who had just awakened, shone in the cold light with a wild and lifeless glitter. This spectre drew close to the side of the bed, and stood for a few moments there with a look of agony and menace, which startled the newly-awakened man, who rose upright, and said—

“Mr. Merton, Mr. Merton – in God’s name, what is the matter?”

Merton recoiled at the sound of his voice; and, as he did so, dropped something on the floor, which rolled away to a distance; and he stood gazing silently and horribly upon his interrogator.

“Mr. Merton, I say, what is it?” urged the man. “Are you hurt? Your face is bloody.”

Merton raised his hand to his face mechanically, and Sir Wynston’s man observed that it, too, was covered with blood.

“Why, man,” he said, vehemently, and actually freezing with horror, “you are all bloody; hands and face; all over blood.”

“My hand is cut to the bone,” said Merton, in a harsh whisper; and speaking to himself, rather than addressing the servant – “I wish it was my neck; I wish to God I bled to death.”

“You have hurt your hand, Mr. Merton,” repeated the man, scarce knowing what he said.

“Aye,” whispered Merton, wildly drawing toward the bedside again; “who told you I hurt my hand? It is cut to the bone, sure enough.”

He stooped for a moment over the bed, and then cowered down toward the floor to search for what he had dropped.

“Why, Mr. Merton, what brings you here at this hour?” urged the man, after a pause of a few seconds. “It is drawing toward morning.”

“Aye, aye,” said Merton, doubtfully, and starting upright again, while he concealed in his bosom what he had been in search of. “Near morning, is it? Night and morning, it is all one to me. I believe I am going mad, by—”

“But what do you want? What did you come here for at this hour?” persisted the man.

“What! Aye, that is it; why, his boots and spurs, to be sure. I forgot them. His – his – Sir Wynston’s boots and spurs; I forgot to take them, I say,” said Merton, looking toward the dressing room, as if about to enter it.

“Don’t mind them tonight, I say, don’t go in there,” said the man, peremptorily, and getting out upon the floor. “I say, Mr. Merton, this is no hour to be going about searching in the dark for boots and spurs. You’ll waken the master. I can’t have it, I say; go down, and let it be for tonight.”

Thus speaking, in a resolute and somewhat angry under-key, the valet stood between Merton and the entrance of the dressing-room; and, signing with his hand toward the other door of the apartment, continued—

“Go down, I say, Mr. Merton, go down; you may as well quietly, for, I tell you plainly, you shall neither go a step further, nor stay here a moment longer.”

The man drew his shoulders up, and made a sort of shivering moan, and clasping his hands together, shook them, as it seemed, in great agony. He then turned abruptly, and hurried from the room by the door leading to the kitchen.

“By my faith,” said the servant, “I am glad he is gone. The poor chap is turning crazy, as sure as I am a living man. I’ll not have him prowling about here any more, however; that I am resolved on.”

In pursuance of this determination, by no means an imprudent one, as it seemed, he fastened the door communicating with the lower apartments upon the inside. He had hardly done this, when he heard a step traversing the stable-yard, which lay under the window of his apartment. He looked out, and saw Merton walking hurriedly across, and into a stable at the farther end.

Feeling no very particular curiosity about his movements, the man hurried back to his bed. Merton’s eccentric conduct of late had become so generally remarked and discussed among the servants, that Sir Wynston’s man was by no means surprised at the oddity of the visit he had just had; nor, after the first few moments of doubt, before the appearance of blood had been accounted for, had he entertained any suspicions whatever connected with the man’s unexpected presence in the room. Merton was in the habit of coming up every night to take down Sir Wynston’s boots, whenever the baronet had ridden in the course of the day; and this attention had been civilly undertaken as a proof of goodwill toward the valet, whose duty this somewhat soiling and ungentlemanlike process would otherwise have been. So far, the nature of the visit was explained; and the remembrance of the friendly feeling and good offices which had been mutually interchanged, as well as of the inoffensive habits for which Merton had earned a character for himself, speedily calmed the uneasiness, for a moment amounting to actual alarm, with which the servant had regarded his appearance.

We must now pass on to the morrow, and ask the reader’s attention for a few moments to a different scene.

In contact with Gray Forest upon the northern side, and divided by a common boundary, lay a demesne, in many respects presenting a very striking contrast to its grander neighbour. It was a comparatively modern place. It could not boast the towering timber which enriched and overshadowed the vast and varied expanse of its aristocratic rival; but, if it was inferior in the advantages of antiquity, and, perhaps, also in some of those of nature, its superiority in other respects was striking, and important. Gray Forest was not more remarkable for its wild and neglected condition, than was Newton Park for the care and elegance with which it was kept. No one could observe the contrast, without, at the same time, divining its cause. The proprietor of the one was a man of wealth, fully commensurate with the extent and pretensions of the residence he had chosen; the owner of the other was a man of broken fortunes.

Under a green shade, which nearly met above, a very young man, scarcely one-and-twenty, of a frank and sensible, rather than a strictly handsome countenance, was walking, followed by half a dozen dogs of as many breeds and sizes. This young man was George Mervyn, the only son of the present proprietor of the place. As he approached the great gate, the clank of a horse’s hoofs in quick motion upon the sequestered road which ran outside it, reached him; and hardly had he heard these sounds, when a young gentleman rode briskly by, directing his look into the demesne as he passed. He had no sooner seen him, than wheeling his horse about, he rode up to the iron gate, and dismounting, threw it open, and let his horse in.

“Ha! Charles Marston, I protest!” said the young man, quickening his pace to meet his friend. “Marston, my dear fellow,” he called aloud, “how glad I am to see you.”

There was another entrance into Newton Park, opening from the same road, about half a mile further on; and Charles Marston made his way lie through this. Thus the young people walked on, talking of a hundred things as they proceeded, in the mirth of their hearts.

Between the fathers of the two young men, who thus walked so affectionately together, there subsisted, unhappily, no friendly feelings. There had been several slight disagreements between them, touching their proprietary rights, and one of these had ripened into a formal and somewhat expensive litigation, respecting a certain right of fishing claimed by each. This legal encounter had terminated in the defeat of Marston. Mervyn, however, promptly wrote to his opponent, offering him the free use of the waters for which they had thus sharply contested, and received a curt and scarcely civil reply, declining the proposed courtesy. This exhibition of resentment on Marston’s part had been followed by some rather angry collisions, where chance or duty happened to throw them together. It is but justice to say that, upon all such occasions, Marston was the aggressor. But Mervyn was a somewhat testy old gentleman, and had a certain pride of his own, which was not to be trifled with. Thus, though near neighbours, the parents of the young friends were more than strangers to each other. On Mervyn’s side, however, this estrangement was unalloyed with bitterness, and simply of that kind which the great moralist would have referred to “defensive pride.” It did not include any member of Marston’s family, and Charles, as often as he desired it, which was, in truth, as often as his visits could escape the special notice of his father, was a welcome guest at Newton Park.

These details respecting the mutual relation in which the two families stood, it was necessary to state, for the purpose of making what follows perfectly clear. The young people had now reached the further gate, at which they were to part. Charles Marston, with a heart beating happily in the anticipation of many a pleasant meeting, bid him farewell for the present, and in a few minutes more was riding up the broad, straight avenue, towards the gloomy mansion which closed in the hazy and sombre perspective. As he moved onward, he passed a labourer, with whose face, from his childhood, he had been familiar.

“How do you do, Tom?” he cried.

“At your service, sir,” replied the man, uncovering, “and welcome home, sir.”

There was something dark and anxious in the man’s looks, which ill-accorded with the welcome he spoke, and which suggested some undefined alarm.

“The master, and mistress, and Miss Rhoda – are all well?” he asked eagerly.

“All well, sir, thank God,” replied the man.

Young Marston spurred on, filled with vague apprehensions, and observing the man still leaning upon his spade, and watching his progress with the same gloomy and curious eye.

At the hall door he met with one of the servants, booted and spurred.

“Well, Daly,” he said, as he dismounted, “how are all at home?”

This man, like the former, met his smile with a troubled countenance, and stammered—

“All, sir – that is, the master, and mistress, and Miss Rhoda – quite well, sir; but—”

“Well, well,” said Charles, eagerly, “speak on – what is it?”

“Bad work, sir,” replied the man, lowering his voice. “I am going off this minute for—”

“For what?” urged the young gentleman.

“Why, sir, for the coroner,” replied he.

“The coroner – the coroner! Why, good God, what has happened?” cried Charles, aghast with horror.

“Sir Wynston,” commenced the man, and hesitated.

“Well?” pursued Charles, pale and breathless.

“Sir Wynston – he – it is he,” said the man.

“He? Sir Wynston? Is he dead, or who is? – Who is dead?” demanded the young man, almost fiercely.

“Sir Wynston, sir; it is he that is dead. There is bad work, sir – very bad, I’m afraid,” replied the man.

Charles did not wait to inquire further, but, with a feeling of mingled horror and curiosity, entered the house.

He hurried up the stairs, and entered his mother’s sitting room. She was there, perfectly alone, and so deadly pale, that she scarcely looked like a living being. In an instant they were locked in one another’s arms.

“Mother – my dear mother, you are ill,” said the young man, anxiously.

“Oh, no, no, dear Charles, but frightened, horrified;” and as she said this, the poor lady burst into tears.

“What is this horrible affair? Something about Sir Wynston. He is dead, I know, but is it – is it suicide?” he asked.

“Oh, no, not suicide,” said Mrs. Marston, greatly agitated.

“Good God! Then he is murdered,” whispered the young man, growing very pale.

“Yes, Charles – horrible – dreadful! I can scarcely believe it,” replied she, shuddering while she wept.

“Where is my father?” inquired the young man, after a pause.

“Why, why, Charles, darling – why do you ask for him?” she said, wildly, grasping him by the arm, as she looked into his face with a terrified expression.

“Why – why, he could tell me the particulars of this horrible tragedy,” answered he, meeting her agonized look with one of alarm and surprise, “as far as they have been as yet collected. How is he, mother – is he well?”

“Oh, yes, quite well, thank God,” she answered, more collectedly – “quite well, but, of course, greatly, dreadfully shocked.”

“I will go to him, mother; I will see him,” said he, turning towards the door.

“He has been wretchedly depressed and excited for some days,” said Mrs. Marston, dejectedly, “and this dreadful occurrence will, I fear, affect him most deplorably.”

The young man kissed her tenderly and affectionately, and hurried down to the library, where his father usually sat when he desired to be alone, or was engaged in business. He opened the door softly. His father was standing at one of the windows, his face haggard as from a night’s watching, unkempt and unshorn, and with his hands thrust into his pockets. At the sound of the revolving door he started, and seeing his son, first recoiled a little, with a strange, doubtful expression, and then rallying, walked quickly towards him with a smile, which had in it something still more painful.

“Charles, I am glad to see you,” he said, shaking him with an agitated pressure by both hands, “Charles, this is a great calamity, and what makes it still worse, is that the murderer has escaped; it looks badly, you know.”

He fixed his gaze for a few moments upon his son, turned abruptly, and walked a little way into the room then, in a disconcerted manner, he added, hastily turning back—

“Not that it signifies to us, of course – but I would fain have justice satisfied.”

“And who is the wretch – the murderer?” inquired Charles.

“Who? Why, everyone knows! – that scoundrel, Merton,” answered Marston, in an irritated tone – “Merton murdered him in his bed, and fled last night; he is gone – escaped – and I suspect Sir Wynston’s man of being an accessory.”

“Which was Sir Wynston’s bedroom?” asked the young man.

“The room that old Lady Mostyn had – the room with the portrait of Grace Hamilton in it.”

“I know – I know,” said the young man, much excited. “I should wish to see it.”

“Stay,” said Marston; “the door from the passage is bolted on the inside, and I have locked the other; here is the key, if you choose to go, but you must bring Hughes with you, and do not disturb anything; leave all as it is; the jury ought to see, and examine for themselves.”

Charles took the key, and, accompanied by the awestruck servant, he made his way by the back stairs to the door opening from the dressing-room, which, as we have said, intervened between the valet’s chamber and Sir Wynston’s. After a momentary hesitation, Charles turned the key in the door, and stood.

“In the dark chamber of white death.”

The shutters lay partly open, as the valet had left them some hours before, on making the astounding discovery, which the partially admitted light revealed. The corpse lay in the silk-embroidered dressing gown, and other habiliments, which Sir Wynston had worn, while taking his ease in his chamber, on the preceding night. The coverlet was partially dragged over it. The mouth was gaping, and filled with clotted blood; a wide gash was also visible in the neck, under the ear; and there was a thickening pool of blood at the bedside, and quantities of blood, doubtless from other wounds, had saturated the bedclothes under the body. There lay Sir Wynston, stiffened in the attitude in which the struggle of death had left him, with his stern, stony face, and dim, terrible gaze turned up.

Charles looked breathlessly for more than a minute upon this mute and unchanging spectacle, and then silently suffered the curtain to fall back again, and stepped, with the light tread of awe, again to the door. There he turned back, and pausing for a minute, said, in a whisper, to the attendant—

“And Merton did this?”

“Troth, I’m afeard he did, sir,” answered the man, gloomily.

“And has made his escape?” continued Charles.

“Yes, sir; he stole away in the night-time,” replied the servant, “after the murder was done” (and he glanced fearfully toward the bed); “God knows where he’s gone.”

“The villain!” muttered Charles; “but what was his motive? why did he do all this – what does it mean?”

“I don’t know exactly, sir, but he was very queer for a week and more before it,” replied the man; “there was something bad over him for a long time.”

“It is a terrible thing,” said Charles, with a profound sigh; “a terrible and shocking occurrence.”

He hesitated again at the door, but his feelings had sustained a terrible revulsion at sight of the corpse, and he was no longer disposed to prosecute his purposed examination of the chamber and its contents; with a view to conjecturing the probable circumstances of the murder.

“Observe, Hughes, that I have moved nothing in the chamber from the place it occupied when we entered,” he said to the servant, as they withdrew.

He locked the door, and as he passed through the hall, on his return, he encountered his father, and, restoring the key, said—

“I could not stay there; I am almost sorry I have seen it; I am overpowered; what a determined, ferocious murder it was; the place is all in a pool of gore; he must have received many wounds.”

“I can’t say; the particulars will be elicited soon enough; those details are for the inquest; as for me, I hate such spectacles,” said Marston, gloomily; “go now, and see your sister; you will find her there.”

He pointed to the small room where we have first seen her and her fair governess; Charles obeyed the direction, and Marston proceeded himself to his wife’s sitting room.

The young man, dispirited and horrified by the awful spectacle he had just contemplated, hurried to the little study occupied by his sister. Marston himself ascended, as we have said, the great staircase leading to his wife’s private sitting room.

“Mrs. Marston,” he said, entering, “this is a hateful occurrence, a dreadful thing to have taken place here; I don’t mean to affect grief which I don’t feel; but the thing is very shocking, and particularly so, as having occurred under my roof; but that cannot now be helped. I have resolved to spare no exertions, and no influence, to bring the assassin to justice; and a coroner’s jury will, within a few hours, sift the evidence which we have succeeded in collecting. But my purpose in seeking you now is, to recur to the conversation we yesterday had, respecting a member of this establishment.”

“Mademoiselle de Barras?” suggested the lady.

“Yes, Mademoiselle de Barras,” echoed Marston; “I wish to say, that, having reconsidered the circumstances affecting her, I am absolutely resolved that she shall not continue to be an inmate of this house.”

He paused, and Mrs. Marston said—

“Well, Richard, I am sorry, very sorry for it; but your decision shall never be disputed by me.”

“Of course,” said Marston, drily; “and, therefore, the sooner you acquaint her with it, and let her know that she must go, the better.”

Having said this, he left her, and went to his own chamber, where he proceeded to make his toilet with elaborate propriety, in preparation for the scene which was about to take place under his roof.

Mrs. Marston, meanwhile, suffered from a horrible uncertainty. She never harboured, it is true, one doubt as to her husband’s perfect innocence of the ghastly crime which filled their house with fear and gloom; but at the same time that she thoroughly and indignantly scouted the possibility of his, under any circumstances, being accessory to such a crime, she experienced a nervous and agonizing anxiety lest anyone else should possibly suspect him, however obliquely and faintly, of any participation whatever in the foul deed. This vague fear tortured her; it had taken possession of her mind; and it was the more acutely painful, because it was of a kind which precluded the possibility of her dispelling it, as morbid fears so often are dispelled, by taking counsel upon its suggestions with a friend.

The day wore on, and strange faces began to fill the great parlour. The coroner, accompanied by a physician, had arrived. Several of the gentry in the immediate vicinity had been summoned as jurors, and now began to arrive in succession. Marston, in a handsome and sober suit, received these visitors with a stately and melancholy courtesy, befitting the occasion. Mervyn and his son had both been summoned, and, of course, were in attendance. There being now a sufficient number to form a jury, they were sworn, and immediately proceeded to the chamber where the body of the murdered man was lying.

Marston accompanied them, and with a pale and stern countenance, and in a clear and subdued tone, called their attention successively to every particular detail which he conceived important to be noted. Having thus employed some minutes, the jury again returned to the parlour, and the examination of the witnesses commenced.

Marston, at his own request, was first sworn and examined. He deposed merely to the circumstance of his parting, on the night previous, with Sir Wynston, and to the state in which he had seen the room and the body in the morning. He mentioned also the fact, that on hearing the alarm in the morning, he had hastened from his own chamber to Sir Wynston’s, and found, on trying to enter, that the door opening upon the passage was secured on the inside. This circumstance showed that the murderer must have made his egress at least through the valet’s chamber, and by the backstairs. Marston’s evidence went no further.

The next witness sworn was Edward Smith, the servant of the late Sir Wynston Berkley. His evidence was a narrative of the occurrences we have already stated. He described the sounds which he had overheard from his master’s room, the subsequent appearance of Merton, and the conversation which had passed between them. He then proceeded to mention, that it was his master’s custom to have himself called at seven o’clock, at which hour he usually took some medicine, which it was the valet’s duty to bring to him; after which he either settled again to rest, or rose in a short time, if unable to sleep. Having measured and prepared the dose in the dressing room, the servant went on to say, he had knocked at his master’s door, and receiving no answer, had entered the room, and partly unclosed the shutters. He perceived the blood on the carpet, and on opening the curtains, saw his master lying with his mouth and eyes open, perfectly dead, and weltering in gore. He had stretched out his hand, and seized that of the dead man, which was quite stiff and cold; then, losing heart, he had run to the door communicating with the passage, but found it locked, and turned to the other entrance, and ran down the backstairs, crying “murder.” Mr. Hughes, the butler, and James Carney, another servant, came immediately, and they all three went back into the room. The key was in the outer door, upon the inside, but they did not unlock it until they had viewed the body. There was a great pool of blood in the bed, and in it was lying a red-handled case knife, which was produced, and identified by the witness. Just then they heard Mr. Marston calling for admission, and they opened the door with some difficulty, for the lock was rusty. Mr. Marston had ordered them to leave the things as they were, and had used very stern language to the witness. They had then left the room, securing both doors.

This witness underwent a severe and searching examination, but his evidence was clear and consistent.

In conclusion, Marston produced a dagger, which was stained with blood, and asked the man whether he recognized it.

Smith at once stated this to have been the property of his late master, who, when travelling, carried it, together with his pistols, along with him. Since his arrival at Gray Forest, it had lain upon the chimney-piece in his bedroom, where he believed it to have been upon the previous night.

James Carney, one of Marston’s servants, was next sworn and examined. He had, he said, observed a strange and unaccountable agitation and depression in Merton’s manner for some days past; he had also been several times disturbed at night by his talking aloud to himself, and walking to and fro in his room. Their bedrooms were separated by a thin partition, in which was a window, through which Carney had, on the night of the murder, observed a light in Merton’s room, and, on looking in, had seen him dressing hastily. He also saw him twice take up, and again lay down, the red-hafted knife which had been found in the bed of the murdered man. He knew it by the handle being broken near the end. He had no suspicion of Merton having any mischievous intentions, and lay down again to rest. He afterwards heard him pass out of his room, and go slowly up the backstairs leading to the upper story. Shortly after this he had fallen asleep, and did not hear or see him return. He then described, as Smith had already done, the scene which presented itself in the morning, on his accompanying him into Sir Wynston’s bedchamber.

The next witness examined was a little Irish boy, who described himself as “a poor scholar.” His testimony was somewhat singular. He deposed that he had come to the house on the preceding evening, and had been given some supper, and was afterwards permitted to sleep among the hay in one of the lofts. He had, however, discovered what he considered a snugger berth. This was an unused stable, in the further end of which lay a quantity of hay. Among this he had lain down, and gone to sleep. He was, however, awakened in the course of the night by the entrance of a man, whom he saw with perfect distinctness in the moonlight, and his description of his dress and appearance tallied exactly with those of Merton. This man occupied himself for sometime in washing his hands and face in a stable bucket, which happened to stand by the door; and, during the whole of this process, he continued to moan and mutter, like one in woeful perturbation. He said, distinctly, twice or thrice, “by God, I am done for;” and every now and then he muttered, “and nothing for it, after all.” When he had done washing his hands, he took something from his coat-pocket, and looked at it, shaking his head; at this time he was standing with his back turned toward the boy, so that he could not see what this object might be. The man, however, put it into his breast, and then began to search hurriedly, as it seemed, for some hiding place for it. After looking at the pavement, and poking at the chinks of the wall, he suddenly went to the window, and forced up the stone which formed the sill. Under this he threw the object which the boy had seen him examine with so much perplexity, and then he readjusted the stone, and removed the evidences of its having been recently stirred. The boy was a little frightened, but very curious about all that he saw; and when the man left the stable in which he lay, he got up, and following to the door, peeped after him. He saw him putting on an outside-coat and hat, near the yard gate; and then, with great caution, unbolt the wicket, constantly looking back towards the house, and so let himself out. The boy was uneasy, and sat in the hay, wide awake, until morning. He then told the servants what he had seen, and one of the men having raised the stone, which he had not strength to lift, they found the dagger, which Smith had identified as belonging to his master. This weapon was stained with blood; and some hair, which was found to correspond in colour with Sir Wynston’s, was sticking in the crevice between the blade and the handle.

“It appears very strange that one man should have employed two distinct instruments of this kind,” observed Mervyn, after a pause. A silence followed.

“Yes, strange; it does seem strange,” said Marston, clearing his voice.

“Yet, it is clear,” said another of the jury, “that the same hand did employ them. It is proved that the knife was in Merton’s possession just as he left his chamber; and proved, also, that the dagger was secreted by him after he quitted the house.”

“Yes,” said Marston, with a grisly sort of smile, and glancing sarcastically at Mervyn, while he addressed the last speaker – “I thank you for recalling my attention to the facts. It certainly is not a very pleasant suggestion, that there still remains within my household an undetected murderer.”

Mervyn ruminated for a time, and said he should wish to put a few more questions to Smith and Carney. They were accordingly recalled, and examined in great detail, with a view to ascertain whether any indication of the presence of a second person having visited the chamber with Merton was discoverable. Nothing, however, appeared, except that the valet mentioned the noise and the exclamations which he had indistinctly heard.

“You did not mention that before, sir,” said Marston, sharply.

“I did not think of it, sir,” replied the man, “the gentlemen were asking me so many questions; but I told you, sir, about it in the morning.”

“Oh, ah – yes, yes – I believe you did,” said Marston; “but you then said that Sir Wynston often talked when he was alone; eh, sir?”

“Yes, sir, and so he used, which was the reason I did not go into the room when I heard it,” replied the man.

“How long afterwards was it when you saw Merton in your own room?” asked Mervyn.

“I could not say, sir,” answered Smith; “I was soon asleep, and can’t say how long I slept before he came.”

“Was it an hour?” pursued Mervyn.

“I can’t say,” said the man, doubtfully.

“Was it five hours?” asked Marston.

“No, Sir; I am sure it was not five.”

“Could you swear it was more than half an hour?” persisted Marston.

“No, I could not swear that,” answered he.

“I am afraid, Mr. Mervyn; you have found a mare’s nest,” said Marston, contemptuously.

“I have done my duty, sir,” retorted Mervyn, cynically; “which plainly requires that I shall have no doubt, which the evidence of the witness can clear up, unsifted and unsatisfied. I happened to think it of some moment to ascertain, if possible, whether more persons than one were engaged in this atrocious murder. You don’t seem to think the question so important a one; different men, sir, take different views.”

“Views, sir, in matters of this sort, especially where they tend to multiply suspicions, and to implicate others, ought to be supported by something more substantial than mere fancies,” retorted Marston.

“I don’t know what you call fancies,” replied Mervyn, testily; “but here are two deadly weapons, a knife and a dagger, each, it would seem, employed in doing this murder; if you see nothing odd in that, I can’t enable you to do so.”

“Well, sir,” said Marston, grimly, “the whole thing is, as you term it, odd; and I can see no object in your picking out this particular singularity for long-winded criticism, except to cast scandal upon my household, by leaving a hideous and vague imputation floating among the members of it. Sir, sir, this is a foul way,” he cried, sternly, “to gratify a paltry spite.”

“Mr. Marston,” said Mervyn, rising, and thrusting his hands into his pockets, while he confronted him to the full as sternly, “the country knows in which of our hearts the spite, if any there be between us, is harboured. I owe you no friendship, but, sir, I cherish no malice, either; and against the worst enemy I have on earth I am incapable of perverting an opportunity like this, and inflicting pain, under the pretence of discharging a duty.”

Marston was on the point of retorting, but the coroner interposed, and besought them to confine their attention strictly to the solemn inquiry which they were summoned together to prosecute.

There remained still to be examined the surgeon who had accompanied the coroner, for the purpose of reporting upon the extent and nature of the injuries discoverable upon the person of the deceased. He, accordingly, deposed, that having examined the body, he found no less than three deep wounds, inflicted with some sharp instrument; two of them had actually penetrated the heart, and were, of course, supposed to cause instant death. Besides these, there were two contusions, one upon the back of the head, the other upon the forehead, with a slight abrasion of the eyebrow. There was a large lock of hair torn out by the roots at the front of the head, and the palm and fingers of the right hand were cut. This evidence having been taken, the jury once more repaired to the chamber where the body lay, and proceeded with much minuteness to examine the room, with a view to ascertain, if possible, more particularly the exact circumstances of the murder.

The result of this elaborate scrutiny was as follows: – The deceased, they conjectured, had fallen asleep in his easy chair, and, while he was unconscious, the murderer had stolen into the room, and, before attacking his victim, had secured the bedroom door upon the inside. This was argued from the non-discovery of blood upon the handle, or any other part of the door. It was supposed that he had then approached Sir Wynston, with the view either of robbing, or of murdering him while he slept, and that the deceased had awakened just after he had reached him; that a brief and desperate struggle had ensued, in which the assailant had struck his victim with his fist upon the forehead, and having stunned him, had hurriedly clutched him by the hair, and stabbed him with the dagger, which lay close by upon the chimney-piece, forcing his head violently against the back of the chair. This part of the conjecture was supported by the circumstance of there being discovered a lock of hair upon the ground at the spot, and a good deal of blood. The carpet, too, was tumbled, and a water-decanter, which had stood upon the table close by, was lying in fragments upon the floor. It was supposed that the murderer had then dragged the half-lifeless body to the bed, where, having substituted the knife, which he had probably brought to the room in the same pocket from which the boy afterwards saw him take the dagger, he dispatched him; and either hearing some alarm – perhaps the movement of the valet in the adjoining room, or from some other cause – he dropped the knife in the bed, and was not able to find it again. The wounds upon the hand of the dead man indicated his having caught and struggled to hold the blade of the weapon with which he was assailed. The impression of a bloody hand thrust under the bolster, where it was Sir Wynston’s habit to place his purse and watch, when making his arrangements for the night, supplied the motive of this otherwise unaccountable atrocity.

After some brief consultation, the jury agreed upon a verdict of wilful murder against John Merton, a finding of which the coroner expressed his entire approbation.

Marston, as a justice of the peace, had informations, embodying the principal part of the evidence given before the coroner, sworn against Merton, and transmitted a copy of them to the Home Office. A reward for the apprehension of the culprit was forthwith offered, but for some months without effect.

Marston had, in the interval, written to several of Sir Wynston’s many relations, announcing the catastrophe, and requesting that steps might immediately be taken to have the body removed. Meanwhile undertakers were busy in the chamber of death. The corpse was enclosed in lead, and that again in cedar, and a great oak shell, covered with crimson cloth and gold-headed nails, and with a gilt plate, recording the age, title, &c. &c., of the deceased, was screwed down firmly over all.

Nearly a fortnight elapsed before any reply to Marston’s letters was received. A short epistle at last arrived from Lord H———, the late Sir Wynston’s uncle, deeply regretting the “sad and inexplicable occurrence,” and adding, that the will, which, on receipt of the “distressing intelligence,” was immediately opened and read, contained no direction whatever respecting the sepulture of the deceased, which had therefore better be completed as modestly and expeditiously as possible, in the neighbourhood; and, in conclusion, he directed that the accounts of the undertakers, etc., employed upon the melancholy occasion, might be sent in to Mr. Skelton, who had kindly undertaken to leave London without any delay, for the purpose of completing these last arrangements, and who would, in any matter of business connected with the deceased, represent him, Lord H———, as executor of the late baronet.

This letter was followed, in a day or two, by the arrival of Skelton, a well-dressed, languid, impertinent London tuft-hunter, a good deal faded, with a somewhat sallow and puffy face, charged with a pleasant combination at once of meanness, insolence, and sensuality – just such a person as Sir Wynston’s parasite might have been expected to prove.

However well disposed to impress the natives with high notions of his extraordinary refinement and importance, he very soon discovered that, in Marston, he had stumbled upon a man of the world, and one thoroughly versed in the ways and characters of London life. After some ineffectual attempts, therefore, to overawe and astonish his host, Mr. Skelton became aware of the fruitlessness of the effort, and condescended to abate somewhat of his pretensions. Marston could not avoid inviting this person to pass the night at his house, an invitation which was accepted, of course; and next morning, after a late breakfast, Mr. Skelton observed, with a yawn – “And now, about this body – poor Berkley! – what do you propose to do with him?”

“I have no proposition to make,” said Marston, drily. “It is no affair of mine, except that the body may be removed without more delay. I have no suggestion to offer.”

“H – – ‘s notion was to have him buried as near the spot as may be,” said Skelton.

Marston nodded.

“There is a kind of vault, is not there, in the demesne, a family burial-place?” inquired the visitor.

“Yes, sir,” replied Marston, curtly.

“Well?” drawled Skelton.

“Well, sir, what then?” responded Marston.

“Why, as the wish of the parties is to have him buried – poor fellow! – as quietly as possible, I think he might just as well be laid there as anywhere else!”

“Had I desired it, Mr. Skelton, I should myself have made the offer,” said Marston, abruptly.

“Then you don’t wish it?” said Skelton.

“No, sir; certainly not – most peremptorily not,” answered Marston, with more sharpness than, in his early days, he would have thought quite consistent with politeness.

“Perhaps,” replied Skelton, for want of something better to say, and with a callous sort of levity; “perhaps you hold the idea – some people do – that murdered men can’t rest in their graves until their murderers have expiated their guilt?”

Marston made no reply, but shot two or three lurid glances from under his brow at the speaker.

“Well, then, at all events,” continued Skelton, indolently resuming his theme, “if you decline your assistance, may I, at least, hope for your advice? Knowing nothing of this country, I would ask you whither you would recommend me to have the body conveyed?”

“I don’t care to advise in the matter,” said Marston; “but if I were directing, I should have the remains buried in Chester. It is not more than twenty miles from this; and if, at any future time, his family should desire to remove the body, it could be effected more easily from thence. But you can decide.”

“Egad! I believe you are right,” said Skelton, glad to be relieved of the trouble of thinking about the matter; “and I shall take your advice.”

In accordance with this declaration the body was, within four-and-twenty hours, removed to Chester, and buried there, Mr. Skelton attending on behalf of Sir Wynston’s numerous and afflicted friends and relatives.

There are certain heartaches for which time brings no healing; nay, which grow but the sorer and fiercer as days and years roll on; of this kind, perhaps, were the stern and bitter feelings which now darkened the face of Marston with an almost perpetual gloom. His habits became even more unsocial than before. The society of his son he no longer seemed to enjoy. Long and solitary rambles in his wild and extensive demesne consumed the listless hours or his waking existence; and when the weather prevented this, he shut himself up, upon pretence of business, in his study.

He had not, since the occasion we have already mentioned, referred to the intended departure of Mademoiselle de Barras. Truth to say, his feelings with respect to that young lady were of a conflicting and mysterious kind; and as often as his dark thoughts wandered to her (which, indeed, was frequently enough), his muttered exclamation seemed to imply some painful and horrible suspicions respecting her.

“Yes,” he would mutter, “I thought I heard your light foot upon the lobby, on that accursed night. Fancy! Well, it may have been, but assuredly a strange fancy. I cannot comprehend that woman. She baffles my scrutiny. I have looked into her face with an eye she might well understand, were it indeed as I sometimes suspect, and she has been calm and unmoved. I have watched and studied her; still – doubt, doubt, hideous doubt! – is she what she seems, or – a tigress?”

Mrs. Marston, on the other hand, procrastinated from day to day the painful task of announcing to Mademoiselle de Barras the stern message with which she had been charged by her husband. And thus several weeks had passed, and she began to think that his silence upon the subject, notwithstanding his seeing the young French lady at breakfast every morning, amounted to a kind of tacit intimation that the sentence of banishment was not to be carried into immediate execution, but to be kept suspended over the unconscious offender.

It was now six or eight weeks since the hearse carrying away the remains of the illfated Sir Wynston Berkley had driven down the dusky avenue; the autumn was deepening into winter, and as Marston gloomily trod the woods of Gray Forest, the withered leaves whirled drearily along his pathway, and the gusts that swayed the mighty branches above him were rude and ungenial. It was a bleak and sombre day, and as he broke into a long and picturesque vista, deep among the most sequestered woods, he suddenly saw before him, and scarcely twenty paces from the spot on which he stood, an apparition, which for some moments absolutely froze him to the earth.

Travel-soiled, tattered, pale, and wasted, John Merton, the murderer, stood before him. He did not exhibit the smallest disposition to turn about and make his escape. On the contrary, he remained perfectly motionless, looking upon his former master with a wild and sorrowful gaze. Marston twice or thrice essayed to speak; his face was white as death, and had he beheld the spectre of the murdered baronet himself, he could not have met the sight with a countenance of ghastlier horror.

“Take me, sir,” said Merton, doggedly.

Still Marston did not stir.

“Arrest me, sir, in God’s name! here I am,” he repeated, dropping his arms by his side; “I’ll go with you wherever you tell me.”

“Murderer!” cried Marston, with a sudden burst of furious horror, “murderer – assassin – miscreant – take that!”

And, as he spoke, he discharged one of the pistols he always carried about him full at the wretched man. The shot did not take effect, and Merton made no other gesture but to clasp his hands together, with an agonized pressure, while his head sunk upon his breast.

“Shoot me; shoot me,” he said hoarsely; “kill me like a dog: better for me to be dead than what I am.”

The report of Marston’s pistol had, however, reached another ear; and its ringing echoes had hardly ceased to vibrate among the trees, when a stern shout was heard not fifty yards away, and, breathless and amazed, Charles Marston sprang to the place. His father looked from Merton to him, and from him again to Merton, with a guilty and stupefied scowl, still holding the smoking pistol in his hand.

“What – how! Good God – Merton!” ejaculated Charles.

“Aye, sir, Merton; ready to go to gaol, or wherever you will,” said the man, recklessly.

“A murderer; a madman; don’t believe him,” muttered Marston, scarce audibly, with lips as white as wax.

“Do you surrender yourself, Merton?” demanded the young man, sternly, advancing toward him.

“Yes, sir; I desire nothing more; God knows I wish to die,” responded he, despairingly, and advancing slowly to meet Charles.

“Come, then,” said young Marston, seizing him by the collar, “come quietly to the house. Guilty and unhappy man, you are now my prisoner, and, depend upon it, I shall not let you go.”

“I don’t want to go, I tell you, sir. I have travelled fifteen miles today, to come here and give myself up to the master.”

“Accursed madman,” said Marston unconsciously, gazing at the prisoner; and then suddenly rousing himself, he said, “Well, miscreant, you wish to die, and, by God, you are in a fair way to have your wish.”

“So best,” said the man, doggedly. “I don’t want to live; I wish I was in my grave; I wish I was dead a year ago.”

Some fifteen minutes afterwards, Merton, accompanied by Marston and his son Charles, entered the hall of the mansion which, not ten weeks before, he had quitted under circumstances so guilty and terrible. When they reached the house, Merton seemed much agitated, and wept bitterly on seeing two or three of his former fellow servants, who looked on him in silence as they passed, with a gloomy and fearful curiosity. These, too, were succeeded by others, peeping and whispering, and upon one pretence or another crossing and recrossing the hall, and stealing hurried glances at the criminal. Merton sat with his face buried in his hands, sobbing, and taking no note of the humiliating scrutiny of which he was the subject. Meanwhile Marston, pale and agitated, made out his committal, and having sworn in several of his labourers and servants as special constables, dispatched the prisoner in their charge to the county gaol, where, under lock and key, we leave him in safe custody for the present.

After this event Marston became excited and restless. He scarcely ate or slept, and his health seemed now as much scattered as his spirits had been before. One day he glided into the room in which, as we have said, it was Mrs. Marston’s habit frequently to sit alone. His wife was there, and, as he entered, she uttered an exclamation of doubtful joy and surprise. He sat down near her in silence, and for some time looked gloomily on the ground. She did not care to question him, and anxiously waited until he should open the conversation. At length he raised his eyes, and, looking full at her, asked abruptly – “Well, what about mademoiselle?”

Mrs. Marston was embarrassed, and hesitated.

“I told you what I wished with respect to that young lady some time ago, and commissioned you to acquaint her with my pleasure; and yet I find her still here, and apparently as much established as ever.”

Again Mrs. Marston hesitated. She scarcely knew how to confess to him that she had not conveyed his message.

“Don’t suppose, Gertrude, that I wish to find fault. I merely wanted to know whether you had told Mademoiselle de Barras that we were agreed as to the necessity or expediency, or what you please, of dispensing henceforward with her services, I perceive by your manner that you have not done so. I have no doubt your motive was a kind one, but my decision remains unaltered; and I now assure you again that I wish you to speak to her; I wish you explicitly to let her know my wishes and yours.”

“Not mine, Richard,” she answered faintly.

“Well, mine, then,” he replied, roughly; “we shan’t quarrel about that.”

“And when – how soon – do you wish me to speak to her on this, to both of us, most painful subject?” asked she, with a sigh.

“Today – this hour – this minute, if you can; in short the sooner the better,” he replied, rising. “I see no reason for holding it back any longer. I am sorry my wishes were not complied with immediately. Pray, let there be no further hesitation or delay. I shall expect to learn this evening that all is arranged.”

Marston having thus spoken, left her abruptly, went down to his study with a swift step, shut himself in, and throwing himself into a great chair, gave a loose to his agitation, which was extreme.

Meanwhile Mrs. Marston had sent for Mademoiselle de Barras, anxious to get through her painful task as speedily as possible. The fair French girl quickly presented herself.

“Sit down, mademoiselle,” said Mrs. Marston, taking her hand kindly, and drawing her to the prie-dieu chair beside herself.

Mademoiselle de Barras sat down, and, as she did so, read the countenance of her patroness with one rapid glance of her flashing eyes. These eyes, however, when Mrs. Marston looked at her the next moment, were sunk softly and sadly upon the floor. There was a heightened colour, however, in her cheek, and a quicker heaving of her bosom, which indicated the excitement of an anticipated and painful disclosure. The outward contrast of the two women, whose hands were so lovingly locked together, was almost as striking as the moral contrast of their hearts. The one, so chastened, sad, and gentle; the other, so capable of pride and passion; so darkly excitable, and yet so mysteriously beautiful. The one, like a Niobe seen in the softest moonshine; the other, a Venus, lighted in the glare of distant conflagration.

“Mademoiselle, dear mademoiselle, I am so much grieved at what I have to say, that I hardly know how to speak to you,” said poor Mrs. Marston, pressing her hand; “but Mr. Marston has twice desired me to tell you, what you will hear with far less pain than it costs me to say it.”

Mademoiselle de Barras stole another flashing glance at her companion, but did not speak.

“Mr. Marston still persists, mademoiselle, in desiring that we shall part.”

“Est-il possible?” cried the Frenchwoman, with a genuine start.

“Indeed, mademoiselle, you may well be surprised,” said Mrs. Marston, encountering her full and dilated gaze, which, however, dropped again in a moment to the ground. “You may, indeed, naturally be surprised and shocked at this, to me, most severe decision.”

“When did he speak last of it?” said she, rapidly.

“But a few moments since,” answered Mrs. Marston.

“Ha,” said mademoiselle, and remained silent and motionless for more than a minute.

“Madame,” she cried at last, mournfully, “I suppose, then, I must go; but it tears my heart to leave you and dear Miss Rhoda. I would be very happy if, before departing, you would permit me, dear madame, once more to assure Mr. Marston of my innocence, and, in his presence, to call heaven to witness how unjust are all his suspicions.”

“Do so, mademoiselle, and I will add my earnest assurances again; though, heaven knows,” she said, despondingly, “I anticipate little success; but it is well to leave no chance untried.”

Marston was sitting, as we have said, in his library. His agitation had given place to a listless gloom, and he leaned back in his chair, his head supported by his hand, and undisturbed, except by the occasional fall of the embers upon the hearth. There was a knock at the chamber door. His back was towards it, and, without turning or moving, he called to the applicant to enter. The door opened – closed again: a light tread was audible – a tall shadow darkened the wall: Marston looked round, and Mademoiselle de Barras was standing before him. Without knowing how or why, he rose, and stood gazing upon her in silence.

“Mademoiselle de Barras!” he said, at last, in a tone of cold surprise.

“Yes, poor Mademoiselle de Barras,” replied the sweet voice of the young Frenchwoman, while her lips hardly moved as the melancholy tones passed them.

“Well, mademoiselle, what do you desire?” he asked, in the same cold accents, and averting his eyes.

“Ah, monsieur, do you ask? – can you pretend to be ignorant? Have you not sent me a message, a cruel, cruel message?”

She spoke so low and gently, that a person at the other end of the room could hardly have heard her words.

“Yes, Mademoiselle de Barras, I did send you a message,” he replied, doggedly. “A cruel one you will scarcely presume to call it, when you reflect upon your own conduct, and the circumstances which have provoked the measures I have taken.”

“What have I done, Monsieur? – what circumstances do you mean?” asked she, plaintively.

“What have you done! A pretty question, truly. Ha, ha!” he repeated, bitterly, and then added, with suppressed vehemence, “ask your own heart, mademoiselle.”

“I have asked, I do ask, and my heart answers – – nothing,” she replied, raising her fine melancholy eyes for a moment to his face.

“It lies, then,” he retorted, with a fierce scoff.

“Monsieur, before heaven I swear, you wrong me foully,” she said, earnestly, clasping her hands together.

“Did ever woman say she was accused rightly, mademoiselle?” retorted Marston, with a sneer.

“I don’t know – I don’t care. I only know that I am innocent,” continued she, piteously. “I call heaven to witness you have wronged me.”

“Wronged you! – why, after all, with what have I charged you?” said he, scoffingly; “but let that pass. I have formed my opinions, arrived at my conclusions. If I have not named them broadly, you at least seem to understand their nature thoroughly. I know the world. I am no novice in the arts of women, mademoiselle. Reserve your vows and attestations for schoolboys and simpletons; they are sadly thrown away upon me.”

Marston paced to and fro, with his hands thrust into his pockets, as he thus spoke.

“Then you don’t, or rather you will not believe what I tell you?” said she, imploringly. “No,” he answered, drily and slowly, as he passed her. “I don’t, and I won’t (as you say) believe one word of it; so, pray spare yourself further trouble about the matter.”

She raised her head, and darted after him a glance that seemed absolutely to blaze, and at the same time smote her little hand fast clenched upon her breast. The words, however, that trembled on her pale lips were not uttered; her eyes were again cast down, and her fingers played with the little locket that hung round her neck.

“I must make, before I go,” she said, with a deep sigh and a melancholy voice, “one confidence – one last confidence: judge me by it. You cannot choose but believe me now: it is a secret, and it must even here be whispered, whispered, whispered!”

As she spoke, the colour fled from her face, and her tones became so strange and resolute, that Marston turned short upon his heel, and stopped before her. She looked in his face; he frowned, but lowered his eyes. She drew nearer, laid her hand upon his shoulder, and whispered for a few moments in his ear. He raised his face suddenly: its features were sharp and fixed; its hue was changed; it was livid and moveless, like a face cut in grey stone. He staggered back a little and a little more, and then a little more, and fell backward. Fortunately, the chair in which he had been sitting received him, and he lay there insensible as a corpse. When at last his eyes opened, there was no gleam of triumph, no shade of anger, nothing perceptible of guilt or menace, in the young woman’s countenance. The flush had returned to her cheeks; her dimpled chin had sunk upon her full white throat; sorrow, shame, and pride seemed struggling in her handsome face, and she stood before him like a beautiful penitent, who has just made a strange and humbling shrift to her father confessor.

Next day, Marston was mounting his horse for a solitary ride through his park, when Doctor Danvers rode abruptly into the courtyard from the back entrance. Marston touched his hat, and said—

“I don’t stand on forms with you, doctor, and you, I know, will waive ceremony with me. You will find Mrs. Marston at home.”

“Nay, my dear sir,” interrupted the clergyman, sitting firm in his saddle, “my business lies with you today.”

“The devil it does!” said Marston, with discontented surprise.

“Truly it does, sir,” repeated he, with a look of gentle reproof, for the profanity of Marston’s ejaculation, far more than the rudeness of his manner, offended him; “and I grieve that your surprise should have somewhat carried you away—”

“Well, then, Doctor Danvers,” interrupted Marston, drily, and without heeding his concluding remark, “if you really have business with me, it is, at all events, of no very pressing kind, and may be as well told after supper as now. So, pray, go into the house and rest yourself: we can talk together in the evening.”

“My horse is not tired,” said the clergyman, patting his steed’s neck; “and if you do not object, I will ride by your side for a short time, and as we go, I can say out what I have to tell.”

“Well, well, be it so,” said Marston, with suppressed impatience, and without more ceremony, he rode slowly along the avenue, and turned off upon the soft sward in the direction of the wildest portion of his wooded demesne, the clergyman keeping close beside him. They proceeded some little way at a walk before Doctor Danvers spoke.

“I have been twice or thrice with that unhappy man,” at length he said.

“What unhappy man? Unhappiness is no distinguishing singularity, is it?” said Marston, sharply.

“No, truly, you have well said,” replied Doctor Danvers. “True it is that man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward. I speak, however, of your servant, Merton – a most unhappy wretch.”

“Ha! you have been with him, you say?” replied Marston, with evident interest and anxiety.

“Yes, several times, and conversed with him long and gravely,” continued the clergyman.

“Humph! I thought that had been the chaplain’s business, not yours, my good friend,” observed Marston.

“He has been unwell,” replied Dr. Danvers; “and thus, for a day or two, I took his duty, and this poor man, Merton, having known something of me, preferred seeing me rather than a stranger; and so, at the chaplain’s desire and his, I continued my visits.”

“Well, and you have taught him to pray and sing psalms, I suppose; and what has come of it all?” demanded Marston, testily.

“He does pray, indeed, poor man! and I trust his prayers are heard with mercy at the throne of grace,” said his companion, in his earnestness disregarding the sneering tone of his companion. “He is full of compunction, and admits his guilt.”

“Ho! that is well – well for himself – well for his soul, at least; you are sure of it; he confesses; confesses his guilt?”

Marston put his question so rapidly and excitedly, that the clergyman looked with a slight expression of surprise; and recovering himself, he added, in an unconcerned tone—

“Well, well – it was just as well he did so; the evidence is too clear for doubt or mystification; he knew he had no chance, and has taken the seemliest course; and, doubtless, the best for his hopes hereafter.”

“I did not question him upon the subject,” said Doctor Danvers; “I even declined to hear him speak upon it at first; but he told me he was resolved to offer no defence, and that he saw the finger of God in the fate which had overtaken him.”

“He will plead guilty, then, I suppose?” suggested Marston, watching the countenance of his companion with an anxious and somewhat sinister eye.

“His words seem to imply so much,” answered he; “and having thus frankly owned his guilt, and avowed his resolution to let the law take its due course in his case, without obstruction or evasion, I urged him to complete the grand work he had begun, and to confess to you, or to some other magistrate fully, and in detail, every circumstance connected with the perpetration of the dreadful deed.”

Marston knit his brows, and rode on for some minutes in silence. At length he said, abruptly—

“In this, it seems to me, sir, you a little exceeded your commission.”

“How so, my dear sir?” asked the clergyman.

“Why, sir,” answered Marston, “the man may possibly change his mind before the day of trial, and it is the hangman’s office, not yours, my good sir, to fasten the halter about his neck. You will pardon my freedom; but, were this deposition made as you suggest, it would undoubtedly hang him.”

“God forbid, Mr. Marston,” rejoined Danvers, “that I should induce the unhappy man to forfeit his last chances of escape, and to shut the door of human mercy against himself, but on this he seems already resolved; he says so; he has solemnly declared his resolution to me; and even against my warning, again and again reiterated the same declaration.”

“That I should have thought quite enough, were I in your place, without inviting a detailed description of the whole process by which this detestable butchery was consummated. What more than the simple knowledge of the man’s guilt does any mortal desire; guilty, or not guilty, is the plain question which the law asks, and no more; take my advice, sir, as a poor Protestant layman, and leave the acts of the confessional and inquisition to Popish priests.”

“Nay, Mr. Marston, you greatly misconceive me; as matters stand, there exists among the coroner’s jury, and thus among the public, some faint and unfounded suspicion of the possibility of Merton’s having had an accessory or accomplice in the perpetration of this foul murder.”

“It is a lie, sir – a malignant, damned lie – the jury believe no such thing, nor the public neither,” said Marston, starting in his saddle, and speaking in a voice of thunder; “you have been crammed with lies, sir; malicious, unmeaning, vindictive lies; lies invented to asperse my family, and torture my feelings; suggested in my presence by that scoundrel Mervyn, and scouted by the common sense of the jury.”

“I do assure you,” replied Doctor Danvers, in a voice which seemed scarcely audible, after the stunning and passionate explosion of Marston’s wrath, “I did not imagine that you could feel thus sorely upon the point; nay, I thought that you yourself were not without such painful doubts.”

“Again, I tell you, sir,” said Marston, in a tone somewhat calmer, but no less stern, “such doubts as you describe have no existence; your unsuspecting ear has been alarmed by a vindictive wretch, an old scoundrel who has scarce a passion left but spite towards me; few such there are, thank God; few such villains as would, from a man’s very calamities, distil poison to kill the peace and character of his family.”

“I am sorry, Mr. Marston,” said the clergyman, “you have formed so ill an opinion of a neighbour, and I am very sure that Mr. Mervyn meant you no ill in frankly expressing whatever doubts still rested on his mind, after the evidence was taken.”

“He did – the scoundrel!” said Marston, furiously striking his hand, in which his whip was clutched, upon his thigh; “he did mean to wound and torture me; and with the same object he persists in circulating what he calls his doubts. Meant me no ill, forsooth! why, my great God, sir, could any man be so stupid as not to perceive that the suggestion of such suspicions – absurd, contradictory, incredible as they were – was precisely the thing to exasperate feelings sufficiently troubled already, and not content with raising the question, where it was scouted, as I said, as soon as named, the vindictive slanderer proceeds to propagate and publish his pretended surmises – damn him.”

“Mr. Marston, you will pardon me when I say that, as a Christian minister, I cannot suffer a spirit so ill as that you manifest, and language so unseemly as that you have just uttered, to pass unreproved,” said Danvers, solemnly. “If you will cherish those bitter and unchristian feelings, at least for the brief space that I am with you, command your fierce, unbecoming words.”

Marston was about to make a sneering retort, but restrained himself, and turned his head away.

“The wretched man himself appears now very anxious to make some further disclosures,” resumed Doctor Danvers, after a pause, “and I recommended him to make them to you, Mr. Marston, as the most natural depository of such a statement.”

“Well, Mr. Danvers, to cut the matter short, as it appears that a confession of some sort is to be made, be it so. I will attend and receive it. The judges will not be here for eight or ten weeks to come, so there is no great hurry about it. I shall ride down to the town, and see him in the jail some time in the next week.”

With this assurance Marston parted from the old clergyman, and rode on alone through the furze and fern of his wild and sombre park.

After supper that evening Marston found himself alone in the parlour with his wife. Mrs. Marston availed herself of the opportunity to redeem her pledge to Mademoiselle de Barras. She was not aware of the strange interview which had taken place between him and the lady for whom she pleaded. The result of her renewed entreaties perhaps the reader has anticipated. Marston listened, doubted, listened, hesitated again, put questions, pondered the answers; debated the matter inwardly, and at last gruffly consented to give the young lady another trial, and permit her to remain some time longer. Poor Mrs. Marston, little suspecting the dreadful future, overwhelmed her husband with gratitude for granting to her entreaties (as he had predetermined to do) this fatal boon. Not caring to protract this scene – either from a disinclination to listen to expressions of affection, which had long lost their charm for him, and had become even positively distasteful, or perhaps from some instinctive recoil from the warm expression of gratitude from lips which, were the truth revealed, might justly have trembled with execration and reproach – he abruptly left the room, and Mrs. Marston, full of her good news, hastened, in the kindness of her heart, to communicate the fancied result of her advocacy to Mademoiselle de Barras.

It was about a week after this, that Marston was one evening surprised in his study by the receipt of the following letter from Dr. Danvers:

My Dear Sir,

You will be shocked to hear that Merton is most dangerously ill, and at this moment in imminent peril. He is thoroughly conscious of his situation, and himself regards it as a merciful interposition of Providence to spare him the disgrace and terror of the dreadful fate, which he anticipated. The unhappy man has twice repeated his anxious desire, this day, to state some facts connected with the murder of the late Sir Wynston Berkley, which, he says, it is of the utmost moment that you should hear. He says that he could not leave the world in peace without having made this disclosure, which he especially desires to make to yourself, and entreats that you will come to receive his communication as early as you can in the morning. This is indeed needful, as the physician says that he is fast sinking. I offer no apology for adding my earnest solicitations to those or the dying man; and am, dear sir, your very obedient servant,

J. Danvers

“He regards it as a merciful interposition of Providence,” muttered Marston, as he closed the letter, with a sneer. “Well, some men have odd notions of mercy and providence, to be sure; but if it pleases him, certainly I shall not complain for one.”

Marston was all this evening in better spirits than he had enjoyed for months, or even years. A mountain seemed to have been lifted from his heart. He joined in the conversation during and after supper, listened with apparent interest, talked with animation, and even laughed and jested. It is needless to say all this flowed not from the healthy cheer of a heart at ease, but from the excited and almost feverish sense of sudden relief.

Next morning, Marston rode into the old-fashioned town, at the further end of which the dingy and grated front of the jail looked warningly out upon the rustic passengers. He passed the sentries and made his inquiries of the official at the hatch. He was relieved from the necessity of pushing these into detail, however, by the appearance of the physician, who at that moment passed from the interior of the prison.

“Dr. Danvers told me he expected to see you here this morning,” said the medical man, after the customary salutation had been interchanged. “Your call, I believe, is connected with the prisoner, John Merton?”

“Yes, sir, so it is,” said Marston. “Is he in a condition, pray, to make a statement of considerable length?”

“Far from it, Mr. Marston; he has but a few hours to live,” answered the physician, “and is now insensible; but I believe he last night saw Dr. Danvers, and told him whatever was weighing upon his mind.”

“Ha! – And can you say where Dr. Danvers now is?” inquired Marston, anxiously and hurriedly. “Not here, is he?”

“No; but I saw him, as I came here, not ten minutes since, ride into the town. It is market-day, and you will probably find him somewhere in the high street for an hour or two to come,” answered he.

Marston thanked him, and, lost in abstraction, rode down to the little inn, entered a sitting room, and wrote a hurried line to Dr. Danvers, entreating his attendance there, as a place where they might converse less interruptedly than in the street; and committing this note to the waiter, with the injunction to deliver it at once, and an intimation of where Dr. Danvers was probably to be found, he awaited, with intense and agitating anxiety, the arrival of the clergyman.

It was not for nearly ten minutes, however, which his impatience magnified into an eternity, that the well-known voice of Dr. Danvers reached him from the little hall. It was in vain that Marston strove to curb his violent agitation: his heart swelled as if it would smother him; he felt, as it were, the chill of death pervade his frame, and he could scarcely see the door through which he momentarily expected the entrance of the clergyman.

A few minutes more, and Dr. Danvers entered the little apartment.

“My dear sir,” said he, gravely and earnestly, as he grasped the cold hand of Marston, “I am rejoiced to see you. I have matters of great moment and the strangest mystery to lay before you.”

“I dare say – I was sure – that is, I suspected so much,” answered Marston, breathing fast, and looking very pale. “I heard at the prison that the murderer, Merton, was fast dying, and now is in an unconscious state; and from the physician, that you had seen him, at his urgent entreaty, last night. My mind misgives me, sir, I fear I know not what. I long, yet dread, to hear the wretched man’s confession. For God’s sake tell me, does it implicate anybody else in the guilt?”

“No; no one specifically; but it has thrown a hideous additional mystery over the occurrence. Listen to me, my dear sir, and the whole narrative, as he stated it to me, shall be related now to you,” said Dr. Danvers.

Marston had closed the door carefully, and they sat down together at the further end of the apartment. Marston, breathless and ghastly pale; his lips compressed – his brows knit – and his dark, dilated gaze fixed immovably upon the speaker. Dr. Danvers, on the other hand, tranquil and solemn, and with, perhaps, some shade of awe overcasting the habitual sweetness of his countenance.

“His confession was a strange one,” renewed Dr. Danvers, shaking his head gravely. “He said that the first idea of the crime was suggested by Sir Wynston’s man accidentally mentioning, a few days after their arrival, that his master slept with his banknotes, to the amount of some hundreds of pounds, in a pocketbook under his pillow. He declared that as the man mentioned this circumstance, something muttered the infernal suggestion in his ear, and from that moment he was the slave of that one idea; it was ever present with him. He contended against it in vain; he dreaded and abhorred it; but still it possessed him; he felt his power of resistance yielding. This horrible stranger which had stolen into his heart, waxed in power and importunity, and tormented him day and night. He resolved to fly from the house. He gave notice to you and Mrs. Marston of his intended departure; but accident protracted his stay until that fatal night which sealed his doom. The influence which had mastered him forced him to rise from his bed, and take the knife – the discovery of which afterwards helped to convict him – and led him to Sir Wynston’s chamber; he entered; it was a moonlight night.”

Here the clergyman, glancing round the room, lowered his voice, and advanced his lips so near to Marston, that their heads nearly touched. In this tone and attitude he continued his narrative for a few minutes. At the end of this brief space, Marston rose up slowly, and with a movement backward, every feature strung with horror, and saying, in a long whisper, the one word, “yes,” which seemed like the hiss of a snake before he makes his last deadly spring. Both were silent for a time. At last Marston broke out with hoarse vehemence.

“Dreadful – horrible – oh, God! God! – My God! How frightful!”

And throwing himself into a chair, he clasped his hands across his eyes and forehead, while the sweat of agony literally poured down his pale face.

“Truly it is so,” said the clergyman, scarcely above his breath; and, after a long interval – “horrible indeed!”

“Well,” said Marston, rising suddenly to his feet, wiping the dews of horror from his face, and looking wildly round, like one newly awoke from a nightmare, “I must make the most of this momentous and startling disclosure. I shall spare no pains to come at the truth,” said he, energetically. “Meanwhile, my dear sir, for the sake of justice and of mercy, observe secrecy. Leave me to sift this matter; give no note anywhere that we suspect. Observe this reserve and security, and with it detection will follow. Breathe but one word, and you arm the guilty with double caution, and turn licentious gossip loose upon the fame of an innocent and troubled family. Once more I entreat – I expect – I implore silence – silence, at least, for the present – silence!”

“I quite agree with you, my dear Mr. Marston,” answered Dr. Danvers. “I have not divulged one syllable of that poor wretch’s confession, save to yourself alone. You, as a magistrate, a relative of the murdered gentleman, and the head of that establishment among whom the guilt rests, are invested with an interest in detecting, and powers of sifting the truth in this matter, such as none other possesses. I clearly see, with you, too, the inexpediency and folly of talking, for talking’s sake, of this affair. I mean to keep my counsel, and shall most assuredly, irrespectively even of your request – which should, however, of course, have weight with me – maintain a strict and cautious silence upon this subject.”

Some little time longer they remained together, and Marston, buried in strange thoughts, took his leave, and rode slowly back to Gray Forest.

Months passed away – a year, and more – and though no new character appeared upon the stage, the relations which had subsisted among the old ones became, in some respects, very materially altered. A gradual and disagreeable change came over Mademoiselle de Barras’s manner; her affectionate attentions to Mrs. Marston became less and less frequent; nor was the change merely confined to this growing coldness; there was something of a positive and still more unpleasant kind in the alteration we have noted. There was a certain independence and carelessness, conveyed in a hundred intangible but significant little incidents and looks – a something which, without being open to formal rebuke or remonstrance, yet bordered, in effect, upon impertinence, and even insolence. This indescribable and provoking self-assertion, implied in glances, tones, emphasis, and general bearing, surprised Mrs. Marston far more than it irritated her. As often as she experienced one of these studied slights or insinuated impertinences, she revolved in her own mind all the incidents of their past intercourse, in the vain endeavour to recollect someone among them which could possibly account for the offensive change so manifest in the conduct of the young Frenchwoman.

Mrs. Marston, although she sometimes rebuked these artful affronts by a grave look, a cold tone, or a distant manner, yet had too much dignity to engage in a petty warfare of annoyance, and had, in reality, no substantial and well-defined ground of complaint against her, such as would have warranted her either in taking the young lady herself to task, or in bringing her conduct under the censure of Marston.

One evening, it happened that Mrs. Marston and Mademoiselle de Barras had been left alone together. After the supper-party had dispersed, they had been for a long time silent. Mrs. Marston resolved to improve the tête-à-tête, for the purpose of eliciting from mademoiselle an explanation of her strange behaviour.

“Mademoiselle,” said she, “I have lately observed a very marked change in your conduct to me.”

“Indeed!” said the Frenchwoman.

“Yes, mademoiselle; you must be yourself perfectly aware of that change; it is a studied and intentional one,” continued Mrs. Marston, in a gentle but dignified tone. “Although I have felt some doubt as to whether it were advisable, so long as you observe toward me the forms of external respect, and punctually discharge the duties you have undertaken, to open any discussion whatever upon the subject; yet I have thought it better to give you a fair opportunity of explaining frankly, should you desire to do so, the feelings and impressions under which you are acting.”

“Ah, you are very obliging, madame,” said she, coolly.

“It is quite clear, mademoiselle, that you have either misunderstood me, or that you are dissatisfied with your situation among us: your conduct cannot otherwise be accounted for,” said Mrs. Marston, gravely.

“My conduct – ma foi! what conduct?” retorted the handsome Frenchwoman, confidently, and with a disdainful glance.

“If you question the fact, mademoiselle,” said the elder lady, “it is enough. Your ungracious manner and ungentle looks, I presume, arise from what appears to you a sufficient and well-defined cause, of which, however, I know nothing.”

“I really was not aware,” said Mademoiselle de Barras, with a supercilious smile, “that my looks and my manner were subjected to so strict a criticism, or that it was my duty to regulate both according to so nice and difficult a standard.”

“Well, mademoiselle,” continued Mrs. Marston, “it is plain that whatever may be the cause of your dissatisfaction, you are resolved against confiding it to me. I only wish to know frankly from your own lips, whether you have formed a wish to leave this situation. If so, I entreat you to declare it freely.”

“You are very obliging, indeed, madame,” said the pretty foreigner, drily, “but I have no such wish, at least at present.”

“Very well, mademoiselle,” replied Mrs. Marston, with gentle dignity; “I regret your want of candour, on your own account. You would, I am sure, be much happier, were you to deal frankly with me.”

“May I now have your permission, madame, to retire to my room?” asked the French girl, rising, and making a low courtesy – “that is, if madame has nothing further to censure.”

“Certainly, mademoiselle; I have nothing further to say,” replied the elder lady.

The Frenchwoman made another and a deeper courtesy, and withdrew. Mrs. Marston, however, heard, as she was designed to do, the young lady tittering and whispering to herself, as she lighted her candle in the hall. This scene mortified and grieved poor Mrs. Marston inexpressibly. She was little, if at all, accessible to emotions of anger and certainly, none such mingled in the feelings with which she regarded Mademoiselle de Barras. But she had found in this girl a companion, and even a confidante in her melancholy solitude; she had believed her affectionate, sympathetic, tender, and the disappointment was as bitter as unimagined.

The annoyances which she was fated to receive from Mademoiselle de Barras were destined, however, to grow in number and in magnitude. The Frenchwoman sometimes took a fancy, for some unrevealed purpose, to talk a good deal to Mrs. Marston, and on such occasions would persist, notwithstanding that lady’s marked reserve and discouragement, in chatting away, as if she were conscious that her conversation was the most welcome entertainment possible to her really unwilling auditor. No one of their interviews did she ever suffer to close without in some way or other suggesting or insinuating something mysterious and untold to the prejudice of Mr. Marston. Those vague and intangible hints, the meaning of which, for an instant legible and terrific, seemed in another moment to dissolve and disappear, tortured Mrs. Marston like the intrusion of a spectre; and this, along with the portentous change, rather felt than visible, in mademoiselle’s conduct toward her, invested the beautiful Frenchwoman, in the eyes of her former friend and patroness, with an indefinable character that was not only repulsive but formidable.

Mrs. Marston’s feelings with respect to this person were still further disturbed by the half-conveyed hints and innuendoes of her own maid, who never lost an opportunity of insinuating her intense dislike of the Frenchwoman, and appeared perpetually to be upon the very verge of making some explicit charges, or some shocking revelations, respecting her, which, however, she as invariably evaded; and even when Mrs. Marston once or twice insisted upon her explaining her meaning distinctly, she eluded her mistress’s desire, and left her still in the same uneasy uncertainty.

Marston, on his part, however much his conduct might tend to confirm suspicion, certainly did nothing to dissipate the painful and undefined apprehension respecting himself, which Mademoiselle de Barras, with such malign and mysterious industry, laboured to raise. His spirits and temper were liable to strange fluctuations. In the midst of that excited gaiety, to which, until lately, he had been so long a stranger, would sometimes intervene paroxysms of the blackest despair, all the ghastlier for the contrast, and with a suddenness so abrupt and overwhelming, that one might have fancied him crossed by the shadow of some terrific apparition. Sometimes for a whole day, or even more, he would withdraw himself from the society of his family, and, in morose and moody solitude, take his meals alone in his library, and steal out unattended to wander among the thickets and glades of his park. Sometimes, again, he would sit for hours in the room which had been Sir Wynston’s, and, with a kind of horrible resolution, often loiter there till after nightfall. In such hours, the servants would listen with curious awe, as they heard his step, pacing to and fro, in that deserted and inauspicious chamber, while his voice, in broken sentences, was also imperfectly audible, as if maintaining a muttered dialogue. These eccentric practices gradually invested him, in the eyes of his domestics, with a certain preternatural mystery, which enhanced the fear with which they habitually regarded him, and was subsequently confirmed by his giving orders to have the furniture taken out of the ominous suite of rooms, and the doors nailed up and secured. He gave no reason for this odd and abrupt measure, and gossip of course reported that the direction had originated in his having encountered the spectre of the murdered baronet, in one of these strange and unseasonable visits to the scene of the fearful catastrophe.

In addition to all this, Marston’s conduct towards his wife became strangely capricious. He avoided her society more than ever; and when he did happen to exchange a few words with her, they were sometimes harsh and violent, and at others remorsefully gentle and sad, and this without any changes of conduct upon her part to warrant the wayward uncertainty of his treatment. Under all these circumstances, Mrs. Marston’s unhappiness and uneasiness greatly increased. Mademoiselle de Barras, too, upon several late occasions, had begun to assume a tone of authority and dictation, which justly offended the mistress of the establishment. Meanwhile Charles Marston had returned to Cambridge; and Rhoda, no longer enjoying happy walks with her brother, pursued her light and easy studies with Mademoiselle de Barras, and devoted her leisure hours to the loved society of her mother.

One day Mrs. Marston, sitting in her room with Rhoda, had happened to call her own maid, to take down and carefully dust some richly bound volumes which filled a bookcase in the little chamber.

“You have been crying, Willett,” said Mrs. Marston, observing that the young woman’s eyes were red and swollen.

“Indeed, and I was, ma’am,” she replied, reluctantly, “and I could not help it, so I could not.”

“Why, what has happened to vex you? Has anyone ill-treated you?” said Mrs. Marston, who had an esteem for the poor girl. “Come, come, you must not fret about it; only tell me what has vexed you.”

“Oh! Ma’am, no one has illused me, ma’am; but I can’t but be vexed sometimes, ma’am, and fretted to see how things is going on. I have one wish, just one wish, ma’am, and if I got that, I’d ask no more,” said the girl.

“And what is it?” asked Mrs. Marston; “what do you wish for? Speak plainly, Willett; what is it?”

“Ah! Ma’am, if I said it, maybe you might not be pleased. Don’t ask me, ma’am,” said the girl dusting the books very hard, and tossing them down again with angry emphasis. “I don’t desire anybody’s harm, God knows; but, for all that, I wish what I wish, and that is the truth.”

“Why, Willett, I really cannot account for your strange habit of lately hinting, and insinuating, and always speaking riddles, and refusing to explain your meaning. What do you mean? Speak plainly. If there are any dishonest practices going on, it is your duty to say so distinctly.”

“Oh! Ma’am, it is just a wish I have. I wish—; but it’s no matter. If I could once see the house clear of that Frenchwoman—”

“If you mean Mademoiselle de Barras, she is a lady,” interrupted Mrs. Marston.

“Well, ma’am, I beg pardon,” continued the woman; “lady or no lady, it is all one to me; for I am very sure, ma’am, she’ll never leave the house till there is something bad comes about; and – and—. I can’t bring myself to talk to you about her, ma’am. I can’t say what I want to tell you: but – but – . Oh, ma’am, for God’s sake, try and get her out, any way, no matter how; try and get rid of her.”

As she said this, the poor girl burst into a passionate agony of tears, and Mrs. Marston and Rhoda looked on in silent amazement, while she for some minutes continued to sob and weep.

The party were suddenly recalled from their various reveries by a knock at the chamber door. It opened, and the subject of the girl’s deprecatory entreaty entered. There was something unusually excited and assured in Mademoiselle de Barras’s air and countenance; perhaps she had a suspicion that she had been the topic of their conversation. At all events, she looked round upon them with a smile, in which there was something supercilious, and even defiant; and, without waiting to be invited, sat herself down, with a haughty air.

“I was about to ask you to sit down, mademoiselle, but you have anticipated me,” said Mrs. Marston, gravely. “You have something to say to me, I suppose; I am quite at leisure, so pray let me hear it now.”

“Thank you, thank you, madame,” replied she, with a sharp, and even scornful glance; “I ought to have asked your permission to sit; I forgot; but you have condescended to give it without my doing so; that was very kind, very kind, indeed.”

“But I wish to know, mademoiselle, whether you have anything very particular to say to me?” said Mrs. Marston.

“You wish to know! – and why, pray madame?” asked Mademoiselle de Barras, sharply.

“Because, unless it is something very urgent, I should prefer your talking to me some other time; as, at present, I desire to be alone with my daughter.”

“Oh, ho! I ought to ask pardon again,” said mademoiselle, with the same glance, and the same smile. “I find I am de trop – quite in the way. Hélas! I am very unfortunate today.”

Mademoiselle de Barras made not the slightest movement, and it was evident that she was resolved to prolong her stay, in sheer defiance of Mrs. Marston’s wishes.

“Mademoiselle, I conclude from your silence that you have nothing very pressing to say, and, therefore, must request that you will have the goodness to leave me for the present,” said Mrs. Marston, who felt that the spirit of the French girl’s conduct was too apparent not to have been understood by Rhoda and the servant, and that it was of a kind, for example sake, impossible to be submitted to, or tolerated.

Mademoiselle de Barras darted a fiery and insolent glance at Mrs. Marston, and was, doubtless, upon the point of precipitating the open quarrel which was impending, by setting her authority at defiance; but she checked herself, and changed her line of operations.

“We are not alone madame,” she said, with a heightened colour, and a slight toss of the head. “I was about to speak of Mr. Marston. I had something, not much, I confess, to say; but before servants I shan’t speak; nor, indeed, now at all. So, madame, as you desire it, I shall no further interrupt you. Come, Miss Rhoda, come to the music-room, if you please, and finish your practice for today.”

“You forget, mademoiselle, that I wish to have my daughter with me at present,” said Mrs. Marston.

“I am very sorry, madame,” said the French lady, with the same heightened colour and unpleasant smile, and her finely-penciled brows just discernibly knit, so as to give a novel and menacing expression to her beautiful face – “I am very sorry, madame, but she must, so long as I remain accountable for her education, complete her allotted exercises at the appointed hours; and nothing shall, I assure you, with my consent, interfere with these duties. Come, Miss Rhoda, precede me, if you please, to the music-room. Come, come.”

“Stay where you are, Rhoda,” said Mrs. Marston, firmly and gently, and betraying no symptom of excitement, except in a slight tremor of her voice, and a faint flush upon her cheek – “Stay where you are, my dear child. I am your mother, and, next to your father, have the first claim upon your obedience. Mademoiselle,” she continued, addressing the Frenchwoman, calmly but firmly, “my daughter will remain here for some time longer, and you will have the goodness to withdraw. I insist upon it, Mademoiselle de Barras.”

“I will not leave the room, I assure you, madame, without my pupil,” retorted mademoiselle, with resolute insolence. “Your husband, madame, has invested me with this authority, and she shall obey me. Miss Rhoda, I say again, go down to the music-room.”

“Remain where you are, Rhoda,” said Mrs. Marston again. “Mademoiselle; you have long been acting as if your object were to provoke me to part with you. I find it impossible any longer to overlook this grossly disrespectful conduct; conduct of which I had, indeed, believed you absolutely incapable. Willett,” she continued, addressing the maid, who was evidently bursting with rage at the scene she had just witnessed, “your master is, I believe, in the library; go down, and tell him that I entreat him to come here immediately.”

The maid started on her mission with angry alacrity, darting a venomous glance at the handsome Frenchwoman as she passed.

Mademoiselle de Barras, meanwhile, sat, listless and defiant, in her chair, and tapping her little foot with angry excitement upon the floor. Rhoda sat close by her mother, holding her hand fast, and looking frightened, perplexed, and as if she were on the point of weeping. Mrs. Marston, though flushed and excited, yet maintained her dignified and grave demeanor. And thus, in silence, did they all three await the arrival of the arbiter to whom Mrs. Marston had so promptly appealed.

A few minutes more, and Marston entered the room. Mademoiselle’s expression changed as he did so to one of dejected and sorrowful submission; and, as Marston’s eye lighted upon her, his brow darkened and his face grew pale.

“Well, well – what is it? – What is all this?” he said, glancing with a troubled eye from one to the other. “Speak, someone. Mrs. Marston, you sent for me; what is it?”

“I want to know, Mr. Marston, from your own lips,” said the lady, in reply, “whether Rhoda is to obey me or Mademoiselle de Barras?”

“Bah! – A question of women’s prerogative,” said Marston, with muttered vehemence.

“Of a wife’s and a mother’s prerogative, Richard,” said Mrs. Marston, with gentle emphasis. “A very simple question, and one I should have thought needing no deliberation to decide it.”

“Well, child,” sad he, turning to Rhoda, with angry irony, “pray what is all this fuss about? You are a very ill used young lady, I dare aver. Pray what cruelties does Mademoiselle de Barras propose inflicting upon you, that you need to appeal thus to your mother for protection?”

“You quite mistake me, Richard,” interposed Mrs. Marston; “Rhoda is perfectly passive in the matter. I simply wish to learn from you, in mademoiselle’s presence, whether I or she is to command my daughter?”

“Command!” said Marston, evading the direct appeal; “and pray what is all this commanding about? – What do you want the girl to do?”

“I wish her to remain here with me for a little time, and mademoiselle, knowing this, desires her instantly to go to the music-room, and leave me. That is all,” said Mrs. Marston.

“And pray, is there nothing to make her going to the music-room advisable or necessary? Has she no music to learn, or studies to pursue? Pshaw! Mrs. Marston, what needs all this noise about nothing? Go, miss,” he added, sharply and peremptorily, addressing Rhoda, “go this moment to the music-room.”

The girl glided from the room, and mademoiselle, as she followed, shot a glance at Mrs. Marston which wounded and humbled her in the dust.

“Oh! Richard, Richard, if you knew all, you would not have subjected me to this indignity,” she said; and throwing her arms about his neck, she wept, for the first time for many a long year, upon his breast.

Marston was embarrassed and agitated. He disengaged her arms from his neck, and placed her gently in a chair. She sobbed on for some time in silence – a silence which Marston himself did not essay to break. He walked to the door, apparently with the intention of leaving her. He hesitated however, and returned; took a hurried turn through the room; hesitated again; sat down; then returned to the door, not to depart, but to close it carefully, and walked gloomily to the window, whence he looked forth, buried in agitating and absorbing thoughts.

“Richard, to you this seems a trifling thing; but, indeed it is not so,” said Mrs. Marston, sadly.

“You are very right, Gertrude,” he said, quickly, and almost with a start; “it is very far from a trifling thing; it is very important.”

“You don’t blame me, Richard?” said she.

“I blame nobody,” said he.

“Indeed, I never meant to offend you, Richard,” she urged.

“Of course not; no, no; I never said so,” he interrupted, sarcastically; “what could you gain by that?”

“Oh! Richard, better feelings have governed me,” she said, in a melancholy and reproachful tone.

“Well, well, I suppose so,” he said; and after an interval, he added abstractedly, “This cannot, however, go on; no, no – it cannot. Sooner or later it must have come; better at once – better now.”

“What do you mean, Richard?” she said, greatly alarmed, she knew not why. “What are you resolving upon? Dear Richard, in mercy tell me. I implore of you, tell me.”

“Why, Gertrude, you seem to me to fancy that, because I don’t talk about what is passing, that I don’t see it either. Now this is quite a mistake,” said Marston, calmly and resolutely – “I have long observed your growing dislike of Mademoiselle de Barras. I have thought it over; this fracas of today has determined me; it is decisive. I suppose you now wish her to go, as earnestly as you once wished her to stay. You need not answer. I know it. I neither ask nor care to whose fault I am to attribute these changed feelings – female caprice accounts sufficiently for it; but whatever the cause, the effect is undeniable; and the only way to deal satisfactorily with it is, to dismiss mademoiselle at once. You need take no part in the matter; I take it upon myself. Tomorrow morning she shall have left this house. I have said it, and am perfectly resolved.”

As he thus spoke, as if to avoid the possibility of any further discussion, he turned abruptly from her, and left the room.

The extreme agitation which she had just undergone combined with her physical delicacy to bring on an hysterical attack; and poor Mrs. Marston, with an aching head and a heavy heart, lay down upon her bed. She had swallowed an opiate, and before ten o’clock upon that night, an eventful one as it proved, she had sunk into a profound slumber.

Some hours after this, she became in a confused way conscious of her husband’s presence in the room. He was walking, with an agitated mien, up and down the chamber, and casting from time to time looks of great trouble toward the bed where she lay. Though the presence of her husband was a strange and long unwonted occurrence there, at such an hour, and though she felt the strangeness of the visit, the power of the opiate overwhelmed her so, that she could only see this apparition gliding slowly back and forward before her, with the passive wonder and curiosity with which one awaits the issue of an interesting dream.

For a time she lay once more in an uneasy sleep; but still, throughout even this, she was conscious of his presence; and when, a little while after, she again saw him, he was not walking to and fro before the foot of the bed, but sitting beside her, with one hand laid upon the pillow on which her head was resting, the other supporting his chin. He was looking steadfastly upon her, with a changed face, an expression of bitter sorrow, compunction, and tenderness. There was not one trace of sternness; all was softened. The look was what she fancied he might have turned upon her had she lain there dead, ere yet the love of their early and illfated union had grown cold in his heart. There was something in it which reminded her of days and feelings gone, never to return. And while she looked in his face with a sweet and mournful fascination, tears unconsciously wet the pillow on which her poor head was resting. Unable to speak, unable to move, she heard him say—

“It was not your fault, Gertrude – it was not yours, nor mine. There is a destiny in these things too strong for us. Past is past – what is done, is done forever; and even were it all to do over again, what power have I to mend it? No, no; how could I contend against the combined power of passions, circumstances, influences – in a word, of fate? You have been good and patient, while I – ; but no matter. Your lot, Gertrude, is a happier one than mine.”

Mrs. Marston heard him and saw him, but she had not the power, nor even the will, to speak or move. He appeared before her passive sense like the phantasm of a dream. He stood up at the bedside, and looked on her steadfastly, with the same melancholy expression. For a moment he stooped over her, as if about to kiss her face, but checked himself, stood erect again at the bedside, then suddenly turned; the curtain fell back into its place, and she saw him no more.

With a strange mixture of sweet and bitter feelings this vision rested upon the memory of Mrs. Marston, until, gradually, deep slumber again overcame her senses, and the incident and all its attendant circumstances faded into oblivion.

It was past eight o’clock when Mrs. Marston awoke next morning. The sun was shining richly and cheerily in at the windows; and as the remembrance of Marston’s visit to her chamber, and the unwonted manifestations of tenderness and compunction which accompanied it, returned, she felt something like hope and happiness, to which she had long been a stranger, flutter her heart. The pleasing reverie to which she was yielding was, however, interrupted. The sound of stifled sobbing in the room reached her ear, and, pushing back the bed-curtains, and leaning forward to look, she saw her maid, Willett, sitting with her back to the wall, crying bitterly, and striving, as it seemed, to stifle her sobs with her apron, which was wrapped about her face.

“Willett, Willett, is it you who are sobbing? What is the matter with you, child?” said Mrs. Marston, anxiously.

The girl checked herself, dried her eyes hastily, and walking briskly to a little distance, as if engaged in arranging the chamber, she said, with an affectation of carelessness—

“Oh, ma’am, it is nothing; nothing at all, indeed, ma’am.”

Mrs. Marston remained silent for a time, while all her vague apprehensions returned. Meantime the girl continued to shove the chairs hither and thither, and to arrange and disarrange everything in the room with a fidgety industry, intended to cover her agitation. A few minutes, however, served to weary her of this, for she abruptly stopped, stood by the bedside, and, looking at her mistress, burst into tears.

“Good God! What is it?” said Mrs. Marston, shocked and even terrified, while new alarms displaced her old ones. “Is Miss Rhoda – can it be – is she – is my darling well?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am,” answered the maid, “very well, ma’am; she is up, and out walking and knows nothing of all this.”

“All what?” urged Mrs. Marston. “Tell me, tell me, Willett, what has happened. What is it? Speak, child; say what it is?”

“Oh, ma’am! Oh my poor dear mistress!” continued the girl, and stopped, almost stifled with sobs.

“Willett, you must speak; you must say what is the matter. I implore of you – desire you!” urged the distracted lady. Still the girl, having made one or two ineffectual efforts to speak, continued to sob.

“Willett, you will drive me mad. For mercy’s sake, for God’s sake, speak – tell me what it is!” cried the unhappy lady.

“Oh, ma’am, it is – it is about the master,” sobbed the girl.

“Why, he can’t – he has not – oh, merciful God! He has not hurt himself,” she almost screamed.

“No, ma’am, no; not himself; no, no, but—” and again she hesitated.

“But what? Speak out, Willett; dear Willett have mercy on me, and speak out!” cried her wretched mistress.

“Oh, ma’am, don’t be fretted; don’t take it to heart, ma’am,” said the maid, clasping her hands together in anguish.

“Anything, anything, Willett; only speak at once,” she answered.

“Well, ma’am, it is soon said – it is easy told. The master, ma’am – the master is gone with the Frenchwoman; they went in the travelling coach last night, ma’am; he is gone away with her, ma’am; that is all.”

Mrs. Marston looked at the girl with a gaze of stupefied, stony terror; not a muscle of her face moved; not one heaving respiration showed that she was living. Motionless, with this fearful look fixed upon the girl, and her thin hands stretched towards her, she remained, second after second. At last her outstretched hands began to tremble more and more violently; and as if for the first time the knowledge of this calamity had reached her, with a cry, as though body and soul were parting, she fell back motionless in her bed.

Several hours had passed before Mrs. Marston was restored to consciousness. To this state of utter insensibility, one of silent, terrified stupor succeeded; and it was not until she saw her daughter Rhoda standing at her bedside, weeping, that she found voice and recollection to speak.

“My child; my darling, my poor child,” she cried, sobbing piteously, as she drew her to her heart and looked in her face alternately – “my darling, my darling child!”

Rhoda could only weep, and return her poor mother’s caresses in silence. Too young and inexperienced to understand the full extent and nature of this direful calamity, the strange occurrence, the general and apparent consternation of the whole household, and the spectacle of her mother’s agony, had filled her with fear, perplexity, and anguish. Scared and stunned with a vague sense of danger, like a young bird that, for the first time, cowers under a thunderstorm, she nestled in her mother’s bosom; there, with a sense of protection, and of boundless love and tenderness, she lay frightened, wondering, and weeping.

Two or three days passed, and Dr. Danvers came and sat for several hours with poor Mrs. Marston. To comfort and console were, of course, out of his power. The nature of the bereavement, far more terrible than death – its recent occurrence – the distracting consciousness of all its complicated consequences – rendered this a hopeless task. She bowed herself under the blow with the submission of a broken heart. The hope to which she had clung for years had vanished; the worst that ever her imagination feared had come in earnest.

One idea was now constantly present in her mind. She felt a sad, but immovable assurance, that she should not live long, and the thought, “what will become of my darling when I am gone; who will guard and love my child when I am in my grave; to whom is she to look for tenderness and protection then?” perpetually haunted her, and superadded the pangs of a still wilder despair to the desolation of a broken heart.

It was not for more than a week after this event, that one day Willett, with a certain air of anxious mystery, entered the silent and darkened chamber where Mrs. Marston lay. She had a letter in her hand; the seal and handwriting were Mr. Marston’s. It was long before the injured wife was able to open it; when she did so, the following sentences met her eye:

Gertrude,

You can be ignorant neither of the nature nor of the consequences of the decisive step I have taken: I do not seek to excuse it. For the censure of the world, its meddling and mouthing hypocrisy, I care absolutely nothing; I have long set it at defiance. And you yourself, Gertrude, when you deliberately reconsider the circumstances of estrangement and coldness under which, though beneath the same roof, we have lived for years, without either sympathy or confidence, can scarcely, if at all, regret the rupture of a tie which had long ceased to be anything better than an irksome and galling formality. I do not desire to attribute to you the smallest blame. There was an incompatibility, not of temper but of feelings, which made us strangers though calling one another man and wife. Upon this fact I rest my own justification; our living together under these circumstances was, I dare say, equally undesired by us both. It was, in fact, but a deference to the formal hypocrisy of the world. At all events, the irrevocable act which separates us forever is done, and I have now merely to state so much of my intentions as may relate in anywise to your future arrangements. I have written to your cousin, and former guardian, Mr. Latimer, telling him how matters stand between us. You, I told him, shall have, without opposition from me, the whole of your own fortune to your own separate use, together with whatever shall be mutually agreed upon as reasonable, from my income, for your support and that of my daughter. It will be necessary to complete your arrangements with expedition, as I purpose returning to Gray Forest in about three weeks; and as, of course, a meeting between you and those by whom I shall be accompanied is wholly out of the question, you will see the expediency of losing no time in adjusting everything for yours and my daughter’s departure. In the details, of course, I shall not interfere. I think I have made myself clearly intelligible, and would recommend your communicating at once with Mr. Latimer, with a view to completing temporary arrangements, until your final plans shall have been decided upon.

Richard Marston

The reader can easily conceive the feelings with which this letter was perused. We shall not attempt to describe them; nor shall we weary his patience by a detail of all the circumstances attending Mrs. Marston’s departure. Suffice it to mention that, in less than a fortnight after the receipt of the letter which we have just copied, she had forever left the mansion of Gray Forest.

In a small house, in a sequestered part of the rich county of Warwick, the residence of Mrs. Marston and her daughter was for the present fixed. And there, for a time, the heartbroken and desolate lady enjoyed, at least, the privilege of an immunity from the intrusions of all external trouble. But the blow, under which the feeble remains of her health and strength were gradually to sink, had struck too surely home; and, from month to month – almost from week to week – the progress of decay was perceptible.

Meanwhile, though grieved and humbled, and longing to comfort his unhappy mother Charles Marston, for the present absolutely dependant upon his father, had no choice but to remain at Cambridge, and to pursue his studies there.

At Gray Forest Marston and the partner of his guilt continued to live. The old servants were all gradually dismissed, and new ones hired by Mademoiselle de Barras. There they dwelt, shunned by everybody, in a stricter and more desolate seclusion than ever. The novelty of the unrestraint and licence of their new mode of life speedily passed away, and with it the excited and guilty sense of relief which had for a time produced a false and hollow gaiety. The sense of security prompted in mademoiselle a hundred indulgences which, in her former precarious position, she would not have dreamed of. Outbreaks of temper, sharp and sometimes violent, began to manifest themselves on her part, and renewed disappointment and blacker remorse to darken the soul of Marston himself. Often, in the dead of the night, the servants would overhear their bitter and fierce altercations ringing through the melancholy mansion, and often the reckless use of terrible and mysterious epithets of crime. Their quarrels increased in violence and in frequency, and, before two years had passed, feelings of bitterness, hatred, and dread, alone seemed to subsist between them. Yet upon Marston she continued to exercise a powerful and mysterious influence. There was a dogged, apathetic submission on his part, and a growing insolence on hers, constantly more and more strikingly visible. Neglect, disorder, and decay, too, were more than ever apparent in the dreary air of the place.

Doctor Danvers, save by rumour and conjecture, knew nothing of Marston and his abandoned companion. He had, more than once, felt a strong disposition to visit Gray Forest, and expostulate, face to face, with its guilty proprietor. This idea, however, he had, upon consideration, dismissed; not on account of any shrinking from the possible repulses and affronts to which the attempt might subject him, but from a thorough conviction that the endeavour would be utterly fruitless for good, while it might, very obviously, expose him to painful misinterpretation and suspicion, and leave it to be imagined that he had been influenced, if by no meaner motive, at least by the promptings of a coarse curiosity.

Meanwhile he maintained a correspondence with Mrs. Marston, and had even once or twice since her departure visited her. Latterly, however, this correspondence had been a good deal interrupted, and its intervals had been supplied occasionally by Rhoda, whose letters, although she herself appeared unconscious of the mournful event the approach of which they too plainly indicated, were painful records of the rapid progress of mortal decay.

He had just received one of those ominous letters, at the little post office in the town we have already mentioned, and, full of the melancholy news it contained, Dr. Danvers was returning slowly towards his home. As he rode into a lonely road, traversing an undulating tract of some three miles in length, the singularity, it may be, of his costume attracted the eye of another passenger, who was, as it turned out, no other than Marston himself. For two or three miles of this desolate road, their ways happened to lie together. Marston’s first impulse was to avoid the clergyman; his second, which he obeyed, was to join company, and ride along with him, at all events, for so long as would show that he shrank from no encounter which fortune or accident presented. There was a spirit of bitter defiance in this, which cost him a painful effort.

“How do you do, Parson Danvers?” said Marston, touching his hat with the handle of his whip.

Danvers thought he had seldom seen a man so changed in so short a time. His face had grown sallow and wasted, and his figure slightly stooped, with an appearance almost of feebleness.

“Mr. Marston,” said the clergyman, gravely, and almost sternly, though with some embarrassment, “it is a long time since you and I have seen one another, and many and painful events have passed in the interval. I scarce know upon what terms we meet. I am prompted to speak to you, and in a tone, perhaps, which you will hardly brook; and yet, if we keep company, as it seems likely we may, I cannot, and I ought not, to be silent.”

“Well, Mr. Danvers, I accept the condition – speak what you will,” said Marston, with a gloomy promptitude. “If you exceed your privilege, and grow uncivil, I need but use my spurs, and leave you behind me preaching to the winds.”

“Ah! Mr. Marston,” said Dr. Danvers, almost sadly, after a considerable pause, “when I saw you close beside me, my heart was troubled within me.”

“You looked on me as something from the nether world, and expected to see the cloven hoof,” said Marston, bitterly, and raising his booted foot a little as he spoke; “but, after all, I am but a vulgar sinner of flesh and blood, without enough of the preternatural about me to frighten an old nurse, much less to agitate a pillar of the Church.”

“Mr. Marston, you talk sarcastically, but you feel that recent circumstances, as well as old recollections, might well disturb and trouble me at sight of you,” answered Dr. Danvers.

“Well – yes – perhaps it is so,” said Marston, hastily and sullenly, and became silent for a while.

“My heart is full, Mr. Marston; charged with grief, when I think of the sad history of those with whom, in my mind, you must ever be associated,” said Doctor Danvers.

“Aye, to be sure,” said Marston, with stern impatience; “but, then, you have much to console you. You have got your comforts and your respectability; all the dearer, too, from the contrast of other people’s misfortunes and degradations; then you have your religion moreover—”

“Yes,” interrupted Danvers, earnestly, and hastening to avoid a sneer upon this subject; “God be blessed, I am an humble follower of his gracious Son, our Redeemer; and though, I trust, I should bear with patient submission whatever chastisement in his wisdom and goodness he might see fit to inflict upon me, yet I do praise and bless him for the mercy which has hitherto spared me, and I do feel that mercy all the more profoundly, from the afflictions and troubles with which I daily see others overtaken.”

“And in the matter of piety and decorum, doubtless, you bless God also,” said Marston, sarcastically, “that you are not as other men are, nor even as this publican.”

“Nay, Mr. Marston; God forbid I should harden my sinful heart with the wicked pride of the Pharisee. Evil and corrupt am I already over much. Too well I know the vileness of my heart, to make myself righteous in my own eyes,” replied Dr. Danvers, humbly. “But, sinner as I am, I am yet a messenger of God, whose mission is one of authority to his fellow-sinners; and woe is me if I speak not the truth at all seasons, and in all places where my words may be profitably heard.”

“Well, Doctor Danvers, it seems you think it your duty to speak to me, of course, respecting my conduct and my spiritual state. I shall save you the pain and trouble of opening the subject; I shall state the case for you in two words,” said Marston, almost fiercely. “I have put away my wife without just cause, and am living in sin with another woman. Come, what have you to say on this theme? Speak out. Deal with me as roughly as you will, I will hear it, and answer you again.”

“Alas, Mr. Marston! And do not these things trouble you?” exclaimed Dr. Danvers, earnestly. “Do they not weigh heavy upon your conscience? Ah, sir, do you not remember that, slowly and surely, you are drawing towards the hour of death, and the Day of Judgment?”

“The hour or death! Yes, I know it is coming, and I await it with indifference. But, for the Day of Judgment, with its books and trumpets! My dear doctor, pray don’t expect to frighten me with that.”

Marston spoke with an angry scorn, which had the effect of interrupting the conversation for some moments.

They rode on, side by side, for a long time, without speaking. At length, however, Marston unexpectedly broke the silence—

“Doctor Danvers,” said he, “you asked me some time ago if I feared the hour of death, and the Day of Judgment. I answered you truly, I do not fear them; nay death, I think, I could meet with a happier and a quieter heart than any other chance that can befall me; but there are other fears; fears that do trouble me much.”

Doctor Danvers looked inquiringly at him; but neither spoke for a time.

“You have not seen the catastrophe of the tragedy yet,” said Marston, with a stern, stony look, made more horrible by a forced smile and something like a shudder. “I wish I could tell you – you, Doctor Danvers – for you are honourable and gentle-hearted. I wish I durst tell you what I fear; the only, only thing I really do fear. No mortal knows it but myself, and I see it coming upon me with slow, but unconquerable power. Oh, God – dreadful Spirit – spare me!”

Again they were silent, and again Marston resumed—

“Doctor Danvers, don’t mistake me,” he said, turning sharply, and fixing his eyes with a strange expression upon his companion. “I dread nothing human; I fear neither death, nor disgrace, nor eternity; I have no secrets to keep – no exposures to apprehend; but I dread – I dread—”

He paused, scowled darkly, as if stung with pain, turned away, muttering to himself, and gradually became much excited.

“I can’t tell you now, sir, and I won’t,” he said, abruptly and fiercely, and with a countenance darkened with a wild and appalling rage that was wholly unaccountable. “I see you searching me with your eyes. Suspect what you will, sir, you shan’t inveigle me into admissions. Aye, pry – whisper – stare – question, conjecture, sir – I suppose I must endure the world’s impertinence, but damn me if I gratify it.”

It would not be easy to describe Dr. Danvers’ astonishment at this unaccountable explosion of fury. He was resolved, however, to bear his companion’s violence with temper.

They rode on slowly for fully ten minutes in utter silence, except that Marston occasionally muttered to himself, as it seemed, in excited abstraction. Danvers had at first felt naturally offended at the violent and insulting tone in which he had been so unexpectedly and unprovokedly addressed; but this feeling of irritation was but transient, and some fearful suspicions as to Marston’s sanity flitted through his mind. In a calmer and more dogged tone, his companion now addressed him:

“There is little profit you see, doctor, in worrying me about your religion,” said Marston. “it is but sowing the wind, and reaping the whirlwind; and, to say the truth, the longer you pursue it, the less I am in the mood to listen. If ever you are cursed and persecuted as I have been, you will understand how little tolerant of gratuitous vexations and contradictions a man may become. We have squabbled over religion long enough, and each holds his own faith still. Continue to sun yourself in your happy delusions, and leave me untroubled to tread the way of my own dark and cheerless destiny.”

Thus saying, he made a sullen gesture of farewell, and spurring his horse, crossed the broken fence at the roadside, and so, at a listless pace, through gaps and by farm-roads, penetrated towards his melancholy and guilty home.

Two years had now passed since the decisive event which had forever separated Marston from her who had loved him so devotedly and so fatally; two years to him of disappointment, abasement, and secret rage; two years to her of gentle and heartbroken submission to the chastening hand of heaven. At the end of this time she died. Marston read the letter that announced the event with a stern look, and silently, but the shock he felt was terrific. No man is so self-abandoned to despair and degradation, that at some casual moment thoughts of amendment – some gleams of hope, however faint and transient, from the distant future – will not visit him. With Marston, those thoughts had somehow ever been associated with vague ideas of a reconciliation with the being whom he had forsaken – good and pure, and looking at her from the darkness and distance of his own fallen state, almost angelic as she seemed. But she was now dead; he could make her no atonement; she could never smile forgiveness upon him. This long-familiar image – the last that had reflected for him one ray of the lost peace and love of happier times – had vanished, and henceforward there was before him nothing but storm and fear.

Marston’s embarrassed fortunes made it to him an object to resume the portion of his income heretofore devoted to the separate maintenance of his wife and daughter. In order to effect this it became, of course, necessary to recall his daughter, Rhoda, and fix her residence once more at Gray Forest. No more dreadful penalty could have been inflicted upon the poor girl – no more agonizing ordeal than that she was thus doomed to undergo. She had idolized her mother, and now adored her memory. She knew that Mademoiselle de Barras had betrayed and indirectly murdered the parent she had so devotedly loved; she knew that that woman had been the curse, the fate of her family, and she regarded her naturally with feelings of mingled terror and abhorrence, the intensity of which was indescribable.

The few scattered friends and relatives, whose sympathies had been moved by the melancholy fate of poor Mrs. Marston, were unanimously agreed that the intended removal of the young and innocent daughter to the polluted mansion of sin and shame, was too intolerably revolting to be permitted. But each of these virtuous individuals unhappily thought it the duty of the others to interpose; and with a running commentary of wonder and reprobation, and much virtuous criticism, events were suffered uninterruptedly to take their sinister and melancholy course.

It was about two months after the death of Mrs. Marston, and on a bleak and ominous night at the wintry end of autumn, that poor Rhoda, in deep mourning, and pale with grief and agitation, descended from a chaise at the well-known door of the mansion of Gray Forest. Whether from consideration for her feelings, or, as was more probable, from pure indifference, Rhoda was conducted, on her arrival, direct to her own chamber, and it was not until the next morning that she saw her father. He entered her room unexpectedly, he was very pale, and as she thought, greatly altered, but he seemed perfectly collected, and free from agitation. The marked and even shocking change in his appearance, and perhaps even the trifling though painful circumstance that he wore no mourning for the beloved being who was gone, caused her, after a moment’s mute gazing in his face, to burst into an irrepressible flood of tears. Marston waited stoically until the paroxysm had subsided, and then taking her hand, with a look in which a dogged sternness was contending with something like shame, he said:

“There, there; you can weep when I am gone. I shan’t say very much to you at present, Rhoda, and only wish you to attend to me for one minute. Listen, Rhoda; the lady whom you have been in the habit (here he slightly averted his eyes) of calling Mademoiselle de Barras, is no longer so; she is married; she is my wife, and consequently you will treat her with the respect due to” – he would have said “a mother,” but could not, and supplied the phrase by adding, “to that relation.”

Rhoda was unable to speak, but almost unconsciously bowed her head in token of attention and submission, and her father pressed her hand more kindly, as he continued:

“I have always found you a dutiful and obedient child, Rhoda, and expected no other conduct from you. Mrs. Marston will treat you with proper kindness and consideration, and desires me to say that you can, whenever you please, keep strictly to yourself, and need not, unless you feel so disposed, attend the regular meals of the family. This privilege may suit your present depressed spirits, and you must not scruple to use it.”

After a few words more, Marston withdrew, leaving his daughter to her reflections, and bleak and bitter enough they were.

Some weeks passed away, and perhaps we shall best consult our readers’ ease by substituting for the formal precision of narrative, a few extracts from the letters which Rhoda wrote to her brother, still at Cambridge. These will convey her own impressions respecting the scenes and personages among whom she was now to move.

“The house and place are much neglected, and the former in some parts suffered almost to go to decay. The windows broken in the last storm, nearly eight months ago, they tell me, are still unmended, and the roof, too, unrepaired. The pretty garden, near the well, among the lime trees, that our darling mother was so fond of, is all but obliterated with weeds and grass, and since my first visit I have not had heart to go near it again. All the old servants are gone; new faces everywhere.

“I have been obliged several times, through fear of offending my father, to join the party in the drawing room. You may conceive what I felt at seeing mademoiselle in the place once filled by our dear mamma, I was so choked with sorrow, bitterness, and indignation, and my heart so palpitated, that I could not speak, and I believe they thought I was going to faint. Mademoiselle looked very angry, but my father pretending to show me, heaven knows what, from the window, led me to it, and the air revived me a little. Mademoiselle (for I cannot call her by her new name) is altered a good deal – more, however, in the character than in the contour of her face and figure. Certainly, however, she has grown a good deal fuller, and her colour is higher; and whether it is fancy or not, I cannot say, but certainly to me it seems that the expression of her face has acquired something habitually lowering and malicious, and which, I know not how, inspires me with an undefinable dread. She has, however, been tolerably civil to me, but seems contemptuous and rude to my father, and I am afraid he is very wretched, I have seen them exchange such looks, and overheard such intemperate and even appalling altercations between them, as indicate something worse and deeper than ordinary ill-will. This makes me additionally wretched, especially as I cannot help thinking that some mysterious cause enables her to frighten and tyrannise over my poor father. I sometimes think he absolutely detests her; yet, though fiery altercations ensue, he ultimately submits to this bad and cruel woman. Oh, my dear Charles, you have no idea of the shocking, or rather the terrifying, reproaches I have heard interchanged between them, as I accidentally passed the room where they were sitting – such terms as have sent me to my room, feeling as if I were in a horrid dream, and made me cry and tremble for hours after I got there…. I see my father very seldom, and when I do, he takes but little notice of me…. Poor Willett, you know, returned with me. She accompanies me in my walks, and is constantly dropping hints about mademoiselle, from which I know not what to gather….

.   .   .   .

“I often fear that my father has some secret and mortal ailment. He generally looks ill, and sometimes quite wretched. He came twice lately to my room, I think to speak to me on some matter of importance; but he said only a sentence or two, and even these broken and incoherent. He seemed unable to command spirits for the interview; and, indeed, he grew so agitated and strange, that I was alarmed, and felt greatly relieved when he left me….

.   .   .   .

“I do not, you see, disguise my feelings, dear Charles; I do not conceal from you the melancholy and anguish of my present situation. How intensely I long for your promised arrival. I have not a creature to whom I can say one word in confidence, except poor Willett; who, though very good-natured, and really dear to me, is yet far from being a companion. I sometimes think my intense anxiety to see you here is almost selfish; for I know you will feel as acutely as I do, the terrible change observable everywhere. But I cannot help longing for your return, dear Charles, and counting the days and the very hours till you arrive….

.   .   .   .

“Be cautious, in writing to me, not to say anything which you would not wish mademoiselle to see; for Willett tells me that she knows that she often examines, and even intercepts the letters that arrive; and, though Willett may be mistaken, and I hope she is, yet it is better that you should be upon your guard. Ever since I heard this, I have brought my letters to the post office myself, instead of leaving them with the rest upon the hall table; and you know it is a long walk for me….

.   .   .   .

“I go to church every Sunday, and take Willett along with me. No one from this seems to think of doing so but ourselves. I see the Mervyns there. Mrs. Mervyn is particularly kind; and I know that she wishes to offer me an asylum at Newton Park; and you cannot think with how much tenderness and delicacy she conveys the wish. But I dare not hint the subject to my father; and, earnestly as I desire it, I could not but feel that I should go there, not to visit, but to reside. And so even in this, in many respects, delightful project, is mingled the bitter apprehension of dependence – something so humiliating, that, kindly and delicately as the offer is made, I could not bring myself to embrace it. I have a great deal to say to you, and long to see you.”

.   .   .   .

These extracts will enable the reader to form a tolerably accurate idea of the general state of affairs at Gray Forest. Some particulars must, however, be added.

Marston continued to be the same gloomy and joyless being as heretofore. Sometimes moody and apathetic, sometimes wayward and even savage, but never for a moment at ease, never social – an isolated, disdainful, ruined man.

One day as Rhoda sat and read under the shade of some closely-interwoven evergreens, in a lonely and sheltered part of the neglected pleasure-grounds, with her honest maid Willett in attendance, she was surprised by the sudden appearance of her father, who stood unexpectedly before her. Though his attitude for some time was fixed, his countenance was troubled with anxiety and pain, and his sunken eyes rested upon her with a fiery and fretted gaze. He seemed lost in thought for a while, and then, touching Willett sharply on the shoulder, said abruptly:

“Go; I shall call you when you are wanted. Walk down that alley.” And, as he spoke, he indicated with his walking-cane the course he desired her to take.

When the maid was sufficiently distant to be quite out of hearing, Marston sat down beside Rhoda upon the bench, and took her hand in silence. His grasp was cold, and alternately relaxed and contracted with an agitated uncertainty, while his eyes were fixed upon the ground, and he seemed meditating how to open the conversation. At last, as if suddenly awaking from a fearful reverie, he said – “You correspond with Charles?”

“Yes, sir,” she replied, with the respectful formality prescribed by the usages of the time, “we correspond regularly.”

“Aye, aye; and, pray, when did you last hear from him?” he continued.

“About a month since, sir,” she replied.

“Ha – and – and – was there nothing strange – nothing – nothing mysterious and menacing in his letter? Come, come, you know what I speak of.” He stopped abruptly, and stared in her face with an agitated gaze.

“No, indeed, sir; there was not anything of the kind,” she replied.

“I have been greatly shocked, I may say incensed,” said Marston excitedly, “by a passage in his last letter to me. Not that it says anything specific; but – but it amazes me – it enrages me.”

He again checked himself, and Rhoda, much surprised, and even shocked, said, stammeringly—

“I am sure, sir, that dear Charles would not intentionally say or do anything that could offend you.”

“Ah, as to that, I believe so, too. But it is not with him I am indignant; no, no. Poor Charles! I believe he is, as you say, disposed to conduct himself as a son ought to do, respectfully and obediently. Yes, yes, Charles is very well; but I fear he is leading a bad life, notwithstanding – a very bad life. He is becoming subject to influences which never visit or torment the good; believe me, he is.”

Marston shook his head, and muttered to himself, with a look of almost craven anxiety, and then whispered to his daughter—

“Just read this, and then tell me is it not so. Read it, read it, and pronounce.”

As he thus spoke, he placed in her hand the letter of which he had spoken, and with the passage to which he invited her attention folded down. It was to the following effect:

“I cannot tell you how shocked I have been by a piece of scandal, as I must believe it, conveyed to me in an anonymous letter, and which is of so very delicate a nature, that without your special command I should hesitate to pain you by its recital. I trust it may be utterly false. Indeed I assume it to be so. It is enough to say that it is of a very distressing nature, and affects the lady (Mademoiselle de Barras) whom you have recently honoured with your hand.”

“Now you see,” cried Marston, with a shuddering fierceness, as she returned the letter with a blanched cheek and trembling hand – “now you see it all. Are you stupid? – the stamp of the cloven hoof – eh?”

Rhoda, unable to gather his meaning, but, at the same time, with a heart full and trembling very much, stammered a few frightened words, and became silent.

“It is he, I tell you, that does it all; and if Charles were not living an evil life, he could not have spread his nets for him,” said Marston, vehemently. “He can’t go near anything good; but, like a scoundrel, he knows where to find a congenial nature; and when he does, he has skill enough to practice upon it. I know him well, and his arts and his smiles; aye, and his scowls and his grins, too. He goes, like his master, up and down, and to and fro upon the earth, for ceaseless mischief. There is not a friend of mine he can get hold of, but he whispered in his ear some damned slander of me. He is drawing them all into a common understanding against me; and he takes an actual pleasure in telling me how the thing goes on – how, one after the other, he has converted my friends into conspirators and libellers, to blast my character, and take my life, and now the monster essays to lure my children into the hellish confederation.”

“Who is he, father, who is he?” faltered Rhoda.

“You never saw him,” retorted Marston, sternly. “No, no; you can’t have seen him, and you probably never will; but if he does come here again, don’t listen to him. He is half-fiend and half-idiot, and no good comes of his mouthing and muttering. Avoid him, I warn you, avoid him. Let me see: how shall I describe him? Let me see. You remember – you remember Berkley – Sir Wynston Berkley. Well, he greatly resembles that dead villain: he has all the same grins, and shrugs, and monkey airs, and his face and figure are like. But he is a grimed, ragged, wasted piece of sin, little better than a beggar – a shrunken, malignant libel on the human shape. Avoid him, I tell you, avoid him: he is steeped in lies and poison, like the very serpent that betrayed us. Beware of him, I say, for if he once gains your ear, he will delude you, spite of all your vigilance; he will make you his accomplice, and thenceforth, inevitably, there is nothing but mortal and implacable hatred between us!”

Frightened at this wild language, Rhoda did not answer, but looked up in his face in silence. A fearful transformation was there – a scowl so livid and maniacal, that her very senses seemed leaving her with terror. Perhaps the sudden alteration observable in her countenance, as this spectacle so unexpectedly encountered her, recalled him to himself; for he added, hurriedly, and in a tone of gentler meaning—

“Rhoda, Rhoda, watch and pray. My daughter, my child! keep your heart pure, and nothing bad can approach you for ill. No, no; you are good, and the good need not fear!”

Suddenly Marston burst into tears, as he ended this sentence, and wept long and convulsively. She did not dare to speak, or even to move; but after a while he ceased, appeared uneasy, half ashamed and half angry; and looking with a horrified and bewildered glance into her face, he said—

“Rhoda, child, what – what have I said? My God! what have I been saying? Did I – do I look ill? Oh, Rhoda, Rhoda, may you never feel this!”

He turned away from her without awaiting her answer, and walked away with the appearance of intense agitation, as if to leave her. He turned again, however, and with a face pallid and sunken as death, approached her slowly.

“Rhoda,” said he, “don’t tell what I have said to anyone – don’t, I conjure you, even to Charles. I speak too much at random, and say more than I mean – a foolish, rambling habit: so do not repeat one word of it, not one word to any living mortal. You and I, Rhoda, must have our little secrets.”

He ended with an attempt at a smile, so obviously painful and fear-stricken that as he walked hurriedly away, the astounded girl burst into a bitter flood of tears. What was, what could be, the meaning of the shocking scene she had then been forced to witness? She dared not answer the question. Yet one ghastly doubt haunted her like her shadow – a suspicion that the malignant and hideous light of madness was already glaring upon his mind. As, leaning upon the arm of her astonished attendant, she retracted her steps, the trees, the flowers, the familiar hall door, the echoing passages – every object that met her eye – seemed strange and unsubstantial, and she gliding on among them in a horrid dream.

Time passed on: there was no renewal of the painful scene which dwelt so sensibly in the affrighted imagination of Rhoda. Marston’s manner was changed towards her; he seemed shy, cowed, and uneasy in her presence, and thenceforth she saw less than ever of him. Meanwhile the time approached which was to witness the long expected, and, by Rhoda, the intensely prayed for arrival of her brother.

Some four or five days before this event, Mr. Marston, having, as he said, some business in Chester, and further designing to meet his son there, took his departure from Gray Forest, leaving poor Rhoda to the guardianship of her guilty stepmother; and although she had seen so little of her father, yet the very consciousness of his presence had given her a certain confidence and sense of security, which vanished at the moment of his departure. Fear-stricken and wretched as he had been, his removal, nevertheless, seemed to her to render the lonely and inauspicious mansion still more desolate and ominous than before.

She had, with a vague and instinctive antipathy, avoided all contact and intercourse with Mrs. Marston, or as, for distinctness sake, we shall continue to call her, “Mademoiselle,” since her return; and she on her part had appeared to acquiesce with a sort of scornful nonchalance, in the tacit understanding that she and her former pupil should see and hear as little as might be of one another.

Meanwhile poor Willett, with her good-natured honesty and her inexhaustible gossip, endeavoured to amuse and reassure her young mistress, and sometimes even with some partial success.

~   ~   ~   ~

We must now follow Mr. Marston in his solitary expedition to Chester. When he took his place in the stagecoach he had the whole interior of the vehicle to himself, and thus continued to be its solitary occupant for several miles. The coach, however, was eventually hailed, brought to, and the door being opened, Dr. Danvers got in, and took his place opposite to the passenger already established there. The worthy man was so busied in directing the disposition of his luggage from the window, and in arranging the sundry small parcels with which he was charged, that he did not recognize his companion until they were in motion. When he did so it was with no very pleasurable feeling; and it is probable that Marston, too, would have gladly escaped the coincidence which thus reduced them once more to the temporary necessity of a tête-à-tête. Embarrassing as each felt the situation to be, there was, however, no avoiding it, and, after a recognition and a few forced attempts at conversation, they became, by mutual consent, silent and uncommunicative.

The journey, though in point of space a mere trifle, was, in those slowcoach days, a matter of fully five hours’ duration; and before it was completed the sun had set, and darkness began to close. Whether it was that the descending twilight dispelled the painful constraint under which Marston had seemed to labour, or that some more purely spiritual and genial influence had gradually dissipated the repulsion and distrust with which, at first, he had shrunk from a renewal of intercourse with Dr. Danvers, he suddenly accosted him thus.

“Dr. Danvers, I have been fifty times on the point of speaking to you – confidentially of course – while sitting here opposite to you, what I believe I could scarcely bring myself to hint to any other man living; yet I must tell it, and soon, too, or I fear it will have told itself.”

Dr. Danvers intimated his readiness to hear and advise, if desired; and Marston resumed abruptly, after a pause—

“Pray, Doctor Danvers, have you heard any stories of an odd kind; any surmises – I don’t mean of a moral sort, for those I hold very cheap – to my prejudice? Indeed I should hardly say to my prejudice; I mean – I ought to say – in short, have you heard people remark upon any fancied eccentricities, or that sort of thing, about me?”

He put the question with obvious difficulty, and at last seemed to overcome his own reluctance with a sort of angry and excited self-contempt and impatience. Doctor Danvers was a little puzzled by the interrogatory, and admitted, in reply, that he did not comprehend its drift.

“Doctor Danvers,” he resumed, sternly and dejectedly, “I told you, in the chance interview we had some months ago, that I was haunted by a certain fear. I did not define it, nor do I think you suspect its nature. It is a fear of nothing mortal, but of the immortal tenant of this body. My mind; sir, is beginning to play me tricks; my guide mocks and terrifies me.”

There was a perceptible tinge of horror in the look of astonishment with which Dr. Danvers listened.

“You are a gentleman, sir, and a Christian clergyman; what I have said and shall say is confided to your honour; to be held sacred as the confession of misery, and hidden from the coarse gaze of the world. I have become subject to a hideous delusion. It comes at intervals. I do not think any mortal suspects it, except, maybe, my daughter Rhoda. It comes and disappears, and comes again. I kept my pleasant secret for a long time, but at last I let it slip, and committed myself fortunately, to but one person, and that my daughter; and, even so, I hardly think she understood me. I recollected myself before I had disclosed the grotesque and infernal chimera that haunts me.”

Marston paused. He was stooped forward, and looking upon the floor of the vehicle, so that his companion could not see his countenance. A silence ensued, which was interrupted by Marston, who once more resumed.

“Sir,” said he, “I know not why, but I have longed, intensely longed, for some trustworthy ear into which to pour this horrid secret; why, I repeat, I cannot tell, for I expect no sympathy, and hate compassion. It is, I suppose, the restless nature of the devil that is in me; but, be it what it may, I will speak to you, but to you only, for the present, at least, to you alone.”

Doctor Danvers again assured him that he might repose the most entire confidence in his secrecy.

“The human mind, I take it, must have either comfort in the past or hope in the future,” he continued, “otherwise it is in danger. To me, sir, the past is intolerably repulsive; one boundless, barren, and hideous Golgotha of dead hopes and murdered opportunities; the future, still blacker and more furious, peopled with dreadful features of horror and menace, and losing itself in utter darkness. Sir, I do not exaggerate. Between such a past and such a future I stand upon this miserable present; and the only comfort I still am capable of feeling is, that no human being pities me; that I stand aloof from the insults of compassion and the hypocrisies of sympathetic morality; and that I can safely defy all the respectable scoundrels in Christendom to enhance, by one feather’s weight, the load which I myself have accumulated, and which I myself hourly and unaided sustain.”

Doctor Danvers here introduced a word or two in the direction of their former conversation.

“No, sir, there is no comfort from that quarter either,” said Marston, bitterly; “you but cast your seeds, as the parable terms your teaching, upon the barren sea, in wasting them on me. My fate, be it what it may, is as irrevocably fixed, as though I were dead and judged a hundred years ago.

“This cursed dream,” he resumed abruptly, “that everyday enslaves me more and more, has reference to that – that occurrence about Wynston Berkley – he is the hero of the hellish illusion. At certain times, sir, it seems to me as if he, though dead, were still invested with a sort of spurious life; going about unrecognized, except by me, in squalor and contempt, and whispering away my fame and life; labouring with the malignant industry of a fiend to involve me in the meshes of that special perdition from which alone I shrink, and to which this emissary of hell seems to have predestined me. Sir, this is a monstrous and hideous extravagance, a delusion, but, after all, no more than a trick of the imagination; the reason, the judgment, is untouched. I cannot choose but see all the damned phantasmagoria, but I do not believe it real, and this is the difference between my case and – and – madness!”

They were now entering the suburbs of Chester, and Doctor Danvers, pained and shocked beyond measure by this unlooked-for disclosure, and not knowing what remark or comfort to offer, relieved his temporary embarrassment by looking from the window, as though attracted by the flash of the lamps, among which the vehicle was now moving. Marston, however, laid his hand upon his arm, and thus recalled him, for a moment, to a forced attention.

“It must seem strange to you, Doctor, that I should trust this cursed secret to your keeping,” he said; “and, truth to say, it seems so to myself. I cannot account for the impulse, the irresistible power of which has forced me to disclose the hateful mystery to you, but the fact is this, beginning like a speck, this one idea has gradually darkened and dilated, until it has filled my entire mind. The solitary consciousness of the gigantic mastery it has established there had grown intolerable; I must have told it. The sense of solitude under this aggressive and tremendous delusion was agony, hourly death to my soul. That is the secret of my talkativeness; my sole excuse for plaguing you with the dreams of a wretched hypochondriac.”

Doctor Danvers assured him that no apologies were needed, and was only restrained from adding the expression of that pity which he really felt, by the fear of irritating a temper so full of bitterness, pride and defiance. A few minutes more, and the coach having reached its destination, they bid one another farewell, and parted.

~   ~   ~   ~

At that time there resided in a decent mansion about a mile from the town of Chester, a dapper little gentleman, whom we shall call Doctor Parkes. This gentleman was the proprietor and sole professional manager of a private asylum for the insane and enjoyed a high reputation, and a proportionate amount of business, in his melancholy calling. It was about the second day after the conversation we have just sketched, that this little gentleman, having visited, according to his custom, all his domestic patients, was about to take his accustomed walk in his somewhat restricted pleasure grounds, when his servant announced a visitor.

“A gentleman,” he repeated; “you have seen him before – eh?”

“No, sir,” replied the man; “he is in the study, sir.”

“Ha! a professional call. Well, we shall see.”

So saying, the little gentleman summoned his gravest look, and hastened to the chamber of audience.

On entering he found a man dressed well, but gravely, having in his air and manner something of high breeding. In countenance striking, dark-featured, and stern, furrowed with the lines of pain or thought, rather than of age, although his dark hairs were largely mingled with white.

The physician bowed, and requested the stranger to take a chair; he, however, nodded slightly and impatiently, as if to intimate an intolerance of ceremony, and, advancing a step or two, said abruptly—

“My name, sir, is Marston; I have come to give you a patient.”

The doctor bowed with a still deeper inclination, and paused for a continuance of the communication thus auspiciously commenced.

“You are Dr. Parkes, I take it for granted,” said Marston, in the same tone.

“Your most obedient, humble servant, sir,” replied he, with the polite formality of the day, and another grave bow.

“Doctor,” demanded Marston, fixing his eye upon him sternly, and significantly tapping his own forehead, “can you stay execution?”

The physician looked puzzled, hesitated, and at last requested his visitor to be more explicit.

“Can you,” said Marston, with the same slow and stern articulation, and after a considerable pause – “can you prevent the malady you profess to cure? – can you meet and defeat the enemy halfway? – can you scare away the spirit of madness before it takes actual possession, and while it is still only hovering about its threatened victim?”

“Sir,” he replied, “in certain cases – in very many, indeed – the enemy, as you well call it, may thus be met, and effectually worsted at a distance. Timely interposition, in ninety cases out of a hundred, is everything; and, I assure you, I hear your question with much pleasure, inasmuch as I assume it to have reference to the case of the patient about whom you desire to consult me; and who is, therefore, I hope, as yet merely menaced with the misfortune from which you would save him.”

“I, myself, am that patient, sir,” said Marston, with an effort; “your surmise is right. I am not mad, but unequivocally menaced with madness; it is not to be mistaken. Sir, there is no misunderstanding the tremendous and intolerable signs that glare upon my mind.”

“And pray, sir, have you consulted your friends or your family upon the course best to be pursued?” inquired Dr. Parkes, with grave interest.

“No, sir,” he answered sharply, and almost fiercely; “I have no fancy to make myself the subject of a writ de lunatico inquirendo; I don’t want to lose my liberty and my property at a blow. The course I mean to take has been advised by no one but myself – is known to no other. I now disclose it, and the causes of it, to you, a gentleman, and my professional adviser, in the expectation that you will guard with the strictest secrecy my spontaneous revelations; this you promise me?”

“Certainly, Mr. Marston; I have neither the disposition nor the right to withhold such a promise,” answered the physician.

“Well, then, I will first tell you the arrangement I propose, with your permission, to make, and then I shall answer all your questions, respecting my own case,” resumed Marston, gloomily. “I wish to place myself under your care, to live under your roof, reserving my full liberty of action. I must be free to come and to go as I will; and on the other hand, I undertake that you shall find me an amenable and docile patient enough. In addition, I stipulate that there shall be no attempt whatever made to communicate with those who are connected with me: these terms agreed upon, I place myself in your hands. You will find in me, as I said before, a deferential patient, and I trust not a troublesome one. I hope you will excuse my adding, that I shall myself pay the charge of my sojourn here from week to week, in advance.”

The proposed arrangement was a strange one; and although Dr. Parkes dimly foresaw some of the embarrassments which might possibly arise from his accepting it, there was yet so much that was reasonable as well as advantageous in the proposal, that he could not bring himself to decline it.

The preliminary arrangement concluded, Dr. Parkes proceeded to his more strictly professional investigation. It is, of course, needless to recapitulate the details of Marston’s tormenting fancies, with which the reader has indeed been already sufficiently acquainted. Doctor Parkes, having attentively listened to the narrative, and satisfied himself as to the physical health of his patient, was still sorely puzzled as to the probable issue of the awful struggle already but too obviously commenced between the mind and its destroyer in the strange case before him. One satisfactory symptom unquestionably was, the as yet transitory nature of the delusion, and the evident and energetic tenacity with which reason contended for her vital ascendancy. It was a case, however, which for many reasons sorely perplexed him, but of which, notwithstanding, he was disposed, whether rightly or wrongly the reader will speedily see, to take by no means a decidedly gloomy view.

Having disburdened his mind of this horrible secret, Marston felt for a time a sense of relief amounting almost to elation. With far less of apprehension and dismay than he had done so for months before, he that night repaired to his bedroom. There was nothing in his case, Doctor Parkes believed, to warrant his keeping any watch upon Marston’s actions, and accordingly he bid him goodnight, in the full confidence of meeting him, if not better, at least not worse, on the ensuing morning.

He miscalculated, however. Marston had probably himself been conscious of some coming crisis in his hideous malady, when he took the decisive step of placing himself under the care of Doctor Parkes. Certain it is, that upon that very night the disease broke forth in a new and appalling development. Doctor Parkes, whose bedroom was next to that occupied by Marston, was awakened in the dead of night by a howling, more like that of a beast than a human voice, and which gradually swelled into an absolute yell; then came some horrid laughter and entreaties, thick and frantic; then again the same unearthly howl. The practised ear of Doctor Parkes recognized but too surely the terrific import of those sounds. Springing from his bed, and seizing the candle which always burned in his chamber, in anticipation of such sudden and fearful emergencies, he hurried with a palpitating heart, and spite of his long habituation to such scenes as he expected, with a certain sense of horror, to the chamber of his aristocratic patient.

Late as it was, Marston had not yet gone to bed; his candle was still burning, and he himself, half dressed, stood in the centre of the floor, shaking and livid, his eyes burning with the preterhuman fires of insanity. As Doctor Parkes entered the chamber, another shout, or rather yell, thundered from the lips of this demoniac effigy; and the mad-doctor stood freezing with horror in the doorway, and yet exerting what remained to him of presence of mind, in the vain endeavour, in the flaring light of the candle, to catch and fix with his own practised eye the gaze of the maniac. Second after second, and minute after minute, he stood confronting this frightful slave of Satan, in the momentary expectation that he would close with and destroy him. On a sudden, however, this brief agony of suspense was terminated; a change like an awakening consciousness of realities, or rather like the withdrawal of some hideous and visible influence from within, passed over the tense and darkened features of the wretched being; a look of horrified perplexity, doubt, and inquiry, supervened, and he at last said, in a subdued and sullen tone, to Doctor Parkes:

“Who are you, sir? What do you want here? Who are you, sir, I say?”

“Who am I? Why, your physician, sir; Doctor Parkes, sir; the owner of this house, sir,” replied he, with all the sternness he could command, and yet white as a spectre with agitation. “For shame, sir, for shame, to give way thus. What do you mean by creating this causeless alarm, and disturbing the whole household at so unseasonable an hour? For shame, sir; go to your bed; undress yourself this moment; for shame.”

Doctor Parkes, as he spoke, was reassured by the arrival of one of his servants, alarmed by the unmistakable sounds of violent frenzy; he signed, however, to the man not to enter, feeling confident, as he did, that the paroxysm had spent itself.

“Aye, aye,” muttered Marston, looking almost sheepishly; “Doctor Parkes, to be sure. What was I thinking of? how cursedly absurd! And this,” he continued, glancing at his sword, which he threw impatiently upon a sofa as he spoke. “Folly – nonsense! A false alarm, as you say, doctor. I beg your pardon.”

As Marston spoke, he proceeded with much agitation slowly to undress himself. He had, however, but commenced the process, when, turning abruptly to Doctor Parkes, he said, with a countenance of horror, and in a whisper—

“By God, doctor, it has been upon me worse than ever, I would have sworn I had the villain with me for hours – hours, sir – torturing me with his damned sneering threats; till, by God, I could stand it no longer, and took my sword. Oh, doctor, can’t you save me? can nothing be done for me?”

Pale, covered with the dews of horror, he uttered these last words in accents of such imploring despair, as might have borne across the dreadful gulf the prayer of Dives for that one drop of water which never was to cool his burning tongue.

~   ~   ~   ~

When Rhoda learned that her father, on leaving Gray Forest, had fixed no definite period for his return, she began to feel her situation at home so painful and equivocal, that, having taken honest Willett to counsel, she came at last to the resolution of accepting the often conveyed invitation of Mrs. Mervyn and sojourning, at all events until her father’s return, at Newton Park.

“My dear young friend,” said the kind lady, as soon as she heard Rhoda’s little speech to its close, “I can scarcely describe the gratification with which I see you here; the happiness with which I welcome you to Newton Park; nor, indeed, the anxiety with which I constantly contemplated your trying and painful position at Gray Forest. Indeed I ought to be angry with you for having refused me this happiness so long; but you have made amends at last; though, indeed, it was impossible to have deferred it longer. You must not fancy, however, that I will consent to lose you so soon as you seem to have intended. No, no; I have found it too hard to catch you, to let you take wing so easily; besides, I have others to consult as well as myself, and persons, too, who are just as anxious as I am to make a prisoner of you here.”

The good Mrs. Mervyn accompanied these words with looks so sly, and emphasis so significant, that Rhoda was fain to look down, to hide her blushes; and compassionating the confusion she herself had caused, the kind old lady led her to the chamber which was henceforward, so long as she consented to remain, to be her own apartment.

How that day was passed, and how fleetly its hours sped away, it is needless to tell. Old Mervyn had his gentle as well as his grim aspect; and no welcome was ever more cordial and tender than that with which he greeted the unprotected child of his morose and repulsive neighbour. It would be impossible to convey any idea of the countless assiduities and the secret delight with which young Mervyn attended their rambles.

The party were assembled at supper. What a contrast did this cheerful, happy – unutterably happy – gathering, present, in the mind of Rhoda, to the dull, drear, fearful evenings which she had long been wont to pass at Gray Forest.

As they sat together in cheerful and happy intercourse, a chaise drove up to the hall door, and the knocking had hardly ceased to reverberate, when a well-known voice was heard in the hall.

Young Mervyn started to his feet, and merrily ejaculating, “Charles Marston! this is delightful!” disappeared, and in an instant returned with Charles himself.

We pass over all the embraces of brother and sister; the tears and smiles of reunited affection. We omit the cordial shaking of hands; the kind looks; the questions and answers; all these, and all the little attentions of that good old-fashioned hospitality, which was never weary of demonstrating the cordiality of its welcome, we abandon to the imagination of the good-natured reader.

Charles Marston, with the advice of his friend, Mr. Mervyn, resolved to lose no time in proceeding to Chester, whither it was ascertained his father had gone, with the declared intention of meeting and accompanying him home. He arrived in that town in the evening; and having previously learned that Doctor Danvers had been for some time in Chester, he at once sought him at his usual lodgings, and found the worthy old gentleman at his solitary “dish” of tea.

“My dear Charles,” said he, greeting his young friend with earnest warmth, “I am rejoiced beyond measure to see you. Your father is in town, as you supposed; and I have just had a note from him, which has, I confess, not a little agitated me, referring, as it does, to a subject of painful and horrible interest; one with which, I suppose, you are familiar, but upon which I myself have never yet spoken fully to any person, excepting your father only.”

“And pray, my dear sir, what is this topic?” inquired Charles, with marked interest.

“Read this note,” answered the clergyman, placing one at the same time in his young visitor’s hand.

Charles read as follows:

“My Dear Sir,

“I have a singular communication to make to you, but in the strictest privacy, with reference to a subject which, merely to name, is to awaken feelings of doubt and horror; I mean the confession of Merton, with respect to the murder of Wynston Berkley. I will call upon you this evening after dark; for I have certain reasons for not caring to meet old acquaintances about town; and if you can afford me half an hour, I promise to complete my intended disclosure within that time. Let us be strictly private; this is my only proviso.

“Yours with much respect,

“Richard Marston”

“Your father has been sorely troubled in mind,” said Doctor Danvers, as soon as the young man had read this communication; “he has told me as much; it may be that the discovery he has now made may possibly have relieved him from certain galling anxieties. The fear that unjust suspicion should light upon himself, or those connected with him, has, I dare say, tormented him sorely. God grant, that as the providential unfolding of all the details of this mysterious crime comes about, he maybe brought to recognize, in the just and terrible process, the hand of heaven. God grant, that at last his heart may be softened, and his spirit illuminated by the blessed influence he has so long and so sternly rejected.”

As the old man thus spake – as if in symbolic answering to his prayer – a sudden glory from the setting sun streamed through the funereal pile of clouds which filled the western horizon, and flooded the chamber where they were.

After a silence, Charles Marston said, with some little embarrassment – “It may be a strange confession to make, though, indeed, hardly so to you – for you know but too well the gloomy reserve with which my father has uniformly treated me – that the exact nature of Merton’s confession never reached my ears; and once or twice, when I approached the subject, in conversation with you, it seemed to me that the subject was one which, for some reason, it was painful to you to enter upon.”

“And so it was, in truth, my young friend – so it was; for that confession left behind it many fearful doubts, proving, indeed, nothing but the one fact, that, morally, the wretched man was guilty of the murder.”

Charles, urged by a feeling of the keenest interest, requested Dr. Danvers to detail to him the particulars of the dying man’s narration.

“Willingly,” answered Dr. Danvers, with a look of gloom, and heaving a profound sigh – “willingly, for you have now come to an age when you may safely be entrusted with secrets affecting your own family, and which, although, thank God, as I believe they in no respect involve the honour of anyone of its members, yet might deeply involve its peace and its security against the assaults of vague and horrible slander. Here, then, is the narrative: Merton, when he was conscious of the approach of death, qualified, by a circumstantial and detailed statement, the absolute confession of guilt which he had at first sullenly made. In this he declared that the guilt of design and intention only was his – that in the act itself he had been anticipated. He stated, that from the moment when Sir Wynston’s servant had casually mentioned the circumstance of his master’s usually sleeping with his watch and pocketbook under his pillow, the idea of robbing him had taken possession of his mind. With the idea of robbing him (under the peculiar circumstances, his servant sleeping in the apartment close by, and the slightest alarm being, in all probability, sufficient to call him to the spot) the idea of anticipating resistance by murder had associated itself. He had contended against these haunting and growing solicitations of Satan, with an earnest agony. He had intended to leave his place, and fly from the mysterious temptation which he felt he wanted power to combat, but accident or fate prevented him. In a state of ghastly excitement he had, on the memorable night of Sir Wynston’s murder, proceeded, as had afterwards appeared in evidence, by the back stair to the baronet’s chamber; he had softly stolen into it, and gone to the bedside, with the weapon in his hand. He drew his breath for the decisive stroke, which was to bereave the (supposedly) sleeping man of life, and when stretching his left hand under the clothes, it rested upon a dull, cold corpse, and, at the same moment, his right hand was immersed in a pool of blood. He dropped the knife, recoiled a pace or so. With a painful effort, however, he again grasped with his hand to recover the weapon he had suffered to escape, and secured, as it afterwards turned out, not the knife with which he had meditated the commission of his crime, but the dagger which was afterwards found where he had concealed it. He was now fully alive to the horror of his situation; he was compromised as fully as if he had in very deed driven home the weapon. To be found under such circumstances, would convict him as surely as if fifty eyes had seen him strike the blow. He had nothing now for it but flight; and in order to guard himself against the contingency of being surprised from the door opening upon the corridor, he bolted it; then groped under the murdered man’s pillow for the booty which had so fatally fascinated his imagination. Here he was disappointed. What further happened you already know.”

Charles listened with breathless attention to this recital, and, after a painful interval, said—

“Then the actual murderer is, after all, unascertained. This is, indeed, horrible; it was very natural that my father should have felt the danger to which such a disclosure would have exposed the reputation of our family, yet I should have preferred encountering it, were it ten times as great, to the equivocal prudence of suppressing the truth with respect to a murder committed under my own roof.”

“He has, however, it would seem, arrived at some new conclusions,” said Dr. Danvers, “and is now prepared to throw some unanticipated light upon the whole transaction.”

Even as they were talking, a knocking was heard at the hall door, and after a brief and hurried consultation, it was agreed, that, considering the strict condition of privacy attached to this visit by Mr. Marston himself, as well as his reserved and wayward temper, it might be better for Charles to avoid presenting himself to his father on this occasion. A few seconds afterwards the door opened, and Mr. Marston entered the apartment. It was now dark, and the servant, unbidden, placed candles upon the table. Without answering one word to Dr. Danvers’ greeting, Marston sat down, as it seemed, in agitated abstraction. Removing his hat suddenly (for he had not even made this slight homage to the laws of courtesy), he looked round with a careworn, fiery eye, and a pale countenance, and said—

“We are quite alone, Dr. Danvers – no one anywhere near?”

Dr. Danvers assured him that all was secure. After a long and agitated pause, Marston said—

“You remember Merton’s confession. He admitted his intention to kill Berkley, but denied that he was the actual murderer. He spoke truth – no one knew it better than I; for I am the murderer.”

Dr. Danvers was so shocked and overwhelmed that he was utterly unable to speak.

“Aye, sir, in point of law and of morals, literally and honestly, the murderer of Wynston Berkley. I am resolved you shall know it all. Make what use of it you will – I care for nothing now, but to get rid of the damned, unsustainable secret, and that is done. I did not intend to kill the scoundrel when I went to his room; but with the just feelings of exasperation with which I regarded him, it would have been wiser had I avoided the interview; and I meant to have done so. But his candle was burning; I saw the light through the door, and went in. It was his evil fortune to indulge in his old strain of sardonic impertinence. He provoked me; I struck him – he struck me again – and with his own dagger I stabbed him three times. I did not know what I had done; I could not believe it. I felt neither remorse nor sorrow – why should I? – but the thing was horrible, astounding. There he sat in the corner of his cushioned chair, with the old fiendish smile on still. Sir, I never thought that any human shape could look so dreadful. I don’t know how long I stayed there, freezing with horror and detestation, and yet unable to take my eyes from the face. Did you see it in the coffin? Sir, there was a sneer of triumph on it that was diabolic and prophetic.”

Marston was fearfully agitated as he spoke, and repeatedly wiped from his face the cold sweat that gathered there.

“I could not leave the room by the back stairs,” he resumed, “for the valet slept in the intervening chamber. I felt such an appalled antipathy to the body, that I could scarcely muster courage to pass it. But, sir, I am not easily cowed – I mastered this repugnance in a few minutes – or, rather, I acted spite of it, I knew not how; but instinctively it seemed to me that it was better to lay the body in the bed, than leave it where it was, showing, as its position might, that the thing occurred in an altercation. So, sir, I raised it, and bore it softly across the room, and laid it in the bed; and, while I was carrying it, it swayed forward, the arms glided round my neck, and the head rested against my cheek – that was a parody upon a brotherly embrace!

“I do not know at what moment it was, but some time when I was carrying Wynston, or laying him in the bed,” continued Marston, who spoke rather like one pursuing a horrible reverie, than as a man relating facts to a listener, “I heard a light tread, and soft breathing in the lobby. A thunderclap would have stunned me less that minute. I moved softly, holding my breath, to the door. I believe, in moments of strong excitement, men hear more acutely than at other times; but I thought I heard the rustling of a gown, going from the door again. I waited – it ceased; I waited until all was quiet. I then extinguished the candle, and groped my way to the door; there was a faint light in the corridor, and I thought I saw a head projected from the chamber door, next to the Frenchwoman’s – mademoiselle’s. As I came on, it was softly withdrawn, and the door not quite noiselessly closed. I could not be absolutely certain, but I learned all afterward. And now, sir, you have the story of Sir Wynston’s murder.”

Dr. Danvers groaned in spirit, being wrung alike with fear and sorrow. With hands clasped, and head bowed down, in an exceeding bitter agony of soul, he murmured only the words of the Litany – “Lord, have mercy upon us; Christ, have mercy upon us; Lord, have mercy upon us.”

Marston had recovered his usual lowering aspect and gloomy self-possession in a few moments, and was now standing erect and defiant before the humbled and afflicted minister of God. The contrast was terrible – almost sublime.

~   ~   ~   ~

Doctor Danvers resolved to keep this dreadful secret, at least for a time, to himself. He could not make up his mind to inflict upon those whom he loved so well as Charles and Rhoda the shame and agony of such a disclosure; yet he was sorely troubled, for his was a conflict of duty and mercy, of love and justice.

He told Charles Marston, when urged with earnest inquiry, that what he had heard that evening was intended solely for his own ear, and gently but peremptorily declined telling, at least until some future time, the substance of his father’s communication.

Charles now felt it necessary to see his father, for the purpose of letting him know the substance of the letter respecting “mademoiselle” and the late Sir Wynston which had reached him. Accordingly, he proceeded, accompanied by Doctor Danvers, on the next morning, to the hotel where Marston had intimated his intention of passing the night.

On their inquiring for him in the hall, the porter appeared much perplexed and disturbed, and as they pressed him with questions, his answers became conflicting and mysterious. Mr. Marston was there – he had slept there last night; he could not say whether or not he was then in the house; but he knew that no one could be admitted to see him. He would, if the gentlemen wished it, send their cards to (not Mr. Marston, but) the proprietor. And, finally, he concluded by begging that they would themselves see “the proprietor,” and dispatched a waiter to apprise him of the circumstances of the visit. There was something odd and even sinister in all this, which, along with the whispering and the curious glances of the waiters, who happened to hear the errand on which they came, inspired the two companions with vague misgivings, which they did not care mutually to disclose.

In a few moments they were shown into a small sitting room up stairs, where the proprietor, a fussy little gentleman, and apparently very uneasy and frightened, received them.

“We have called here to see Mr. Marston,” said Doctor Danvers, “and the porter has referred us to you.”

“Yes, sir, exactly – precisely so,” answered the little man, fidgeting excessively, and as it seemed, growing paler every instant; “but – but, in fact, sir, there is, there has been – in short, have you not heard of the – the accident?”

He wound up with a prodigious effort, and wiped his forehead when he had done.

“Pray, sir, be explicit: we are near friends of Mr. Marston; in fact, sir, this is his son,” said Doctor Danvers, pointing to Charles Marston; “and we are both uneasy at the reserve with which our inquiries have been met. Do, I entreat of you, say what has happened?”

“Why – why,” hesitated the man, “I really – I would not for five hundred pounds it had happened in my house. The – the unhappy gentleman has, in short—” He glanced at Charles, as if afraid of the effect of the disclosure he was on the point of making, and then hurriedly said – “He is dead, sir; he was found dead in his room, this morning, at eight o’clock. I assure you I have not been myself ever since.”

Charles Marston was so stunned by this sudden blow, that he was upon the point of fainting. Rallying, however, with a strong effort, he demanded to be conducted to the chamber where the body lay. The man assented, but hesitated on reaching the door, and whispered something in the ear of Doctor Danvers, who, as he heard it, raised his hands and eyes with a mute expression of horror, and turning to Charles, said—

“My dear young friend, remain where you are for a few moments. I will return to you immediately, and tell you whatever I have ascertained. You are in no condition for such a scene at present.”

Charles, indeed, felt that the fact was so, and, sick and giddy, suffered Doctor Danvers, with gentle compulsion, to force him into a seat.

In silence the venerable clergyman followed his conductor. With a palpitating heart he advanced to the bedside, and twice essayed to draw the curtain, and twice lost courage; but gathering resolution at last, he pulled the drapery aside, and beheld all he was to see again of Richard Marston.

The bedclothes were drawn so as nearly to cover the mouth.

“There is the wound, sir,” whispered the man, as with coarse officiousness he drew back the bedclothes from the throat of the corpse, and exhibited a gash, as it seemed, nearly severing the head from the body. With sickening horror Doctor Danvers turned away from the awful spectacle. He covered his face in his hands, and it seemed to him as if a soft, solemn voice whispered in his ear the mystic words, “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.”

The hand which, but a few years before, had, unsuspected, consigned a fellow-mortal to the grave, had itself avenged the murder – Marston had perished by his own hand.

~   ~   ~   ~

Naturally ambitious and intriguing, the perilous tendencies of such a spirit in Mademoiselle de Barras had never been schooled by the mighty and benignant principles of religion; of her accidental acquaintance at Rouen with Sir Wynston Berkley, and her subsequent introduction, in an evil hour, into the family at Gray Forest, it is unnecessary to speak. The unhappy terms on which she found Marston living with his wife, suggested, in their mutual alienation, the idea of founding a double influence in the household; and to conceive the idea, and to act upon it, were, in her active mind, the same. Young, beautiful, fascinating, she well knew the power of her attractions, and determined, though probably without one thought of transgressing the limits of literal propriety, to bring them to bear upon the discontented, retired roué, for whom she cared absolutely nothing, except as the instrument, and in part the victim of her schemes. Thus yielding to the double instinct that swayed her, she gratified, at the same time, her love of intrigue and her love of power. At length, however, came the hour which demanded a sacrifice to the evil influence she had hitherto worshipped on such easy terms. She found that her power must now be secured by crime, and she fell. Then came the arrival of Sir Wynston – his murder – her elopement with Marston, and her guilty and joyless triumph. At last, however, came the blow, long suspended and terrific, which shattered all her hopes and schemes, and drove her once again upon the world. The catastrophe we have just described. After it she made her way to Paris. Arrived in the capital of France, she speedily dissipated whatever remained of the money and valuables which she had taken with her from Gray Forest; and Madame Marston, as she now styled herself, was glad to place herself once more as a governess in an aristocratic family. So far her good fortune had prevailed in averting the punishment but too well earned by her past life. But a day of reckoning was to come. A few years later France was involved in the uproar and conflagration of revolution. Noble families were scattered, beggared, decimated; and their dependants, often dragged along with them into the flaming abyss, in many instances suffered the last dire extremities of human ill. It was at this awful period that a retribution so frightful and extraordinary overtook Madame Marston, that we may hereafter venture to make it the subject of a separate narrative. Until then the reader will rest satisfied with what he already knows of her history; and meanwhile bid a long, and as it may possibly turn out, an eternal farewell to that beautiful embodiment of an evil and disastrous influence.

The concluding chapter in a novel is always brief, though seldom so short as the world would have it. In a tale like this, the “winding up” must be proportionately contracted. We have scarcely a claim to so many lines as the formal novelist may occupy pages, in the distribution of poetic justice, and the final grouping of his characters into that effective tableau upon which, at last, the curtain gracefully descends. We, too, may be all the briefer, inasmuch as the reader has doubtless anticipated the little we have to say. It amounts, then, to this: – Within two years after the fearful event which we have just recorded, an alliance had drawn together, in nearer and dearer union, the inmates of Gray Forest and Newton Park. Rhoda had given her hand to young Mervyn; of later consequences we say nothing – the nursery is above our province. And now, at length, after this Christmas journey through somewhat stern and gloomy scenery, in this long-deferred flood of golden sunshine we bid thee, gentle reader, a fond farewell.

originally “Some Account of the Latter Days
of the Honourable Richard Marston of Dunoran”

“Dublin University Magazine” Apr.–Jun. 1848

revised as “The Evil Guest”
with addendum of 12,000 words
revised version (the above story) —
Ghost Stories And Tales Of Mystery (1851)

later developed as A Lost Name (1868)

THE MYSTERIOUS LODGER

(1850)

PART I

About the year 1822 I resided in a comfortable and roomy old house, the exact locality of which I need not particularise, further than to say that it was not very far from Old Brompton, in the immediate neighbourhood, or rather continuity (as even my Connemara readers perfectly well know), of the renowned city of London.

Though this house was roomy and comfortable, as I have said, it was not, by any means, a handsome one. It was composed of dark red brick, with small windows, and thick white sashes; a porch, too – none of your flimsy trelliswork, but a solid projection of the same vermillion masonry – surmounted by a leaded balcony, with heavy, half-rotten balustrades, darkened the hall door with a perennial gloom. The mansion itself stood in a walled enclosure, which had, perhaps, from the date of the erection itself, been devoted to shrubs and flowers. Some of the former had grown there almost to the dignity of trees; and two dark little yews stood at each side of the porch, like swart and inauspicious dwarfs, guarding the entrance of an enchanted castle. Not that my domicile in any respect deserved the comparison: it had no reputation as a haunted house; if it ever had any ghosts, nobody remembered them. Its history was not known to me: it may have witnessed plots, cabals, and forgeries, bloody suicides and cruel murders. It was certainly old enough to have become acquainted with iniquity; a small stone slab, under the balustrade, and over the arch of the porch I mentioned, had the date 1672, and a half-effaced coat of arms, which I might have deciphered any day, had I taken the trouble to get a ladder, but always put it off. All I can say for the house is, that it was well stricken in years, with a certain air of sombre comfort about it; contained a vast number of rooms and closets; and, what was of far greater importance, was got by me a dead bargain.

Its individuality attracted me. I grew fond of it for itself, and for its associations, until other associations of a hateful kind first disturbed, and then destroyed, their charm. I forgave its dull red brick, and pinched white windows, for the sake of the beloved and cheerful faces within: its ugliness was softened by its age; and its sombre evergreens, and moss-grown stone flower-pots, were relieved by the brilliant hues of a thousand gay and graceful flowers that peeped among them, or nodded over the grass.

Within that old house lay my life’s treasure! I had a darling little girl of nine, and another little darling – a boy – just four years of age; and dearer, unspeakably, than either – a wife – the prettiest, gayest, best little wife in all London. When I tell you that our income was scarcely £380 a year, you will perceive that our establishment cannot have been a magnificent one; yet, I do assure you, we were more comfortable than a great many lords, and happier, I dare say, than the whole peerage put together.

This happiness was not, however, what it ought to have been. The reader will understand at once, and save me a world of moralising circumlocution, when he learns, bluntly and nakedly, that, among all my comforts and blessings, I was an infidel.

I had not been without religious training; on the contrary, more than average pains had been bestowed upon my religious instruction from my earliest childhood. My father, a good, plain, country clergyman, had worked hard to make me as good as himself; and had succeeded, at least, in training me in godly habits. He died, however, when I was but twelve years of age; and fate had long before deprived me of the gentle care of a mother. A boarding-school, followed by a college life, where nobody having any very direct interest in realising in my behalf the ancient blessing, that in fullness of time I should “die a good old man,” I was left very much to my own devices, which, in truth, were none of the best.

Among these were the study of Voltaire, Tom Paine, Hume, Shelley, and the whole school of infidels, poetical as well as prose. This pursuit, and the all but blasphemous vehemence with which I gave myself up to it, was, perhaps, partly reactionary. A somewhat injudicious austerity and precision had indissolubly associated in my childish days the ideas of restraint and gloom with religion. I bore it a grudge; and so, when I became thus early my own master, I set about paying off, after my own fashion, the old score I owed it. I was besides, like every other young infidel whom it has been my fate to meet, a conceited coxcomb. A smattering of literature, without any real knowledge, and a great assortment of all the cut-and-dry flippancies of the school I had embraced, constituted my intellectual stock in trade. I was, like most of my school of philosophy, very proud of being an unbeliever; and fancied myself, in the complacency of my wretched ignorance, at an immeasurable elevation above the churchgoing, Bible-reading herd, whom I treated with a good-humoured superciliousness which I thought vastly indulgent.

My wife was an excellent little creature and truly pious. She had married me in the full confidence that my levity was merely put on, and would at once give way before the influence she hoped to exert upon my mind. Poor little thing! she deceived herself. I allowed her, indeed, to do entirely as she pleased; but for myself, I carried my infidelity to the length of an absolute superstition. I made an ostentation of it. I would rather have been in a “hell” than in a church on Sunday; and though I did not prevent my wife’s instilling her own principles into the minds of our children, I, in turn, took especial care to deliver mine upon all occasions in their hearing, by which means I trusted to sow the seeds of that unprejudiced scepticism in which I prided myself, at least as early as my good little partner dropped those of her own gentle “superstition” into their infant minds. Had I had my own absurd and impious will in this matter, my children should have had absolutely no religious education whatsoever, and been left wholly unshackled to choose for themselves among all existing systems, infidelity included, precisely as chance, fancy, or interest might hereafter determine.

It is not to be supposed that such a state of things did not afford her great uneasiness. Nevertheless, we were so very fond of one another, and in our humble way enjoyed so many blessings, that we were as entirely happy as any pair can be without the holy influence of religious sympathy.

But the even flow of prosperity which had for so long gladdened my little household was not destined to last forever. It was ordained that I should experience the bitter truth of more than one of the wise man’s proverbs, and first, especially, of that which declares that “he that hateth suretyship is sure.” I found myself involved (as how many have been before) by a “d – d good-natured friend,” for more than two hundred pounds. This agreeable intelligence was conveyed to me in an attorney’s letter, which, to obviate unpleasant measures, considerately advised my paying the entire amount within just one week of the date of his pleasant epistle. Had I been called upon within that time to produce the Pitt diamond, or to make title to the Buckingham estates, the demand would have been just as easily complied with.

I have no wish to bore my reader further with this little worry – a very serious one to me, however – and it will be enough to mention, that the kindness of a friend extricated me from the clutches of the law by a timely advance, which, however, I was bound to replace within two years. To enable me to fulfill this engagement, my wife and I, after repeated consultations, resolved upon the course which resulted in the odd and unpleasant consequences which form the subject of this narrative.

We resolved to advertise for a lodger, with or without board, &c.; and by resolutely submitting, for a single year, to the economy we had prescribed for ourselves, as well as to the annoyance of a stranger’s intrusion, we calculated that at the end of that term we should have liquidated our debt.

Accordingly, without losing time, we composed an advertisement in the most tempting phraseology we could devise, consistently with that economic laconism which the cost per line in the columns of the Times newspaper imposes upon the rhetoric of the advertising public.

Somehow we were unlucky; for although we repeated our public notification three times in the course of a fortnight, we had but two applications. The one was from a clergyman in ill health – a man of great ability and zealous piety, whom we both knew by reputation, and who has since been called to his rest. My good little wife was very anxious that we should close with his offer, which was very considerably under what we had fixed upon; and I have no doubt that she was influenced by the hope that his talents and zeal might exert a happy influence upon my stubborn and unbelieving heart. For my part, his religious character displeased me. I did not wish my children’s heads to be filled with mythic dogmas – for so I judged the doctrines of our holy faith – and instinctively wished him away. I therefore declined his offer; and I have often since thought not quite so graciously as I ought to have done. The other offer – if so it can be called – was so very inadequate that we could not entertain it.

I was now beginning to grow seriously uneasy – our little project, so far from bringing in the gains on which we had calculated, had put me considerably out of pocket; for, independently of the cost of the advertisement I have mentioned, there were sundry little expenses involved in preparing for the meet reception of our expected inmate, which, under ordinary circumstances, we should not have dreamed of. Matters were in this posture, when an occurrence took place which immediately revived my flagging hopes.

As we had no superfluity of servants, our children were early obliged to acquire habits of independence; and my little girl, then just nine years of age, was frequently consigned with no other care than that of her own good sense, to the companionship of a little band of playmates, pretty similarly circumstanced, with whom it was her wont to play. Having one fine summer afternoon gone out as usual with these little companions, she did not return quite so soon as we had expected her; when she did so, she was out of breath, and excited.

“Oh, papa,” she said, “I have seen such a nice old, kind gentleman, and he told me to tell you that he has a particular friend who wants a lodging in a quiet place, and that he thinks your house would suit him exactly, and ever so much more; and, look here, he gave me this.”

She opened her hand, and showed me a sovereign.

“Well, this does look promisingly,” I said, my wife and I having first exchanged a smiling glance.

“And what kind of gentleman was he, dear?” inquired she. “Was he well dressed – whom was he like?”

“He was not like anyone that I know,” she answered; “but he had very nice new clothes on, and he was one of the fattest men I ever saw; and I am sure he is sick, for he looks very pale, and he had a crutch beside him.”

“Dear me, how strange!” exclaimed my wife; though, in truth there was nothing very wonderful in the matter. “Go on, child,” I said; “let us hear it all out.”

“Well, papa, he had such an immense yellow waistcoat! – I never did see such a waistcoat,” she resumed; “and he was sitting or leaning, I can’t say which, against the bank of the green lane; I suppose to rest himself, for he seems very weak, poor gentleman!”

“And how did you happen to speak to him?” asked my wife.

“When we were passing by, none of us saw him at all but I suppose he heard them talking to me, and saying my name; for he said, ‘Fanny – little Fanny – so, that’s your name – come here child, I have a question to ask you.’”

“And so you went to him?” I said.

“Yes,” she continued, “he beckoned to me, and I did go over to him, but not very near, for I was greatly afraid of him at first.”

“Afraid! dear, and why afraid?” asked I.

“I was afraid, because he looked very old, very frightful, and as if he would hurt me.”

“What was there so old and frightful about him?” I asked.

She paused and reflected a little, and then said—

“His face was very large and pale, and it was looking upwards: it seemed very angry, I thought, but maybe it was angry from pain; and sometimes one side of it used to twitch and tremble for a minute, and then to grow quite still again; and all the time he was speaking to me, he never looked at me once, but always kept his face and eyes turned upwards; but his voice was very soft, and he called me little Fanny, and gave me this pound to buy toys with; so I was not so frightened in a little time, and then he sent a long message to you, papa, and told me if I forgot it he would beat me; but I knew he was only joking, so that did not frighten me either.”

“And what was the message, my girl?” I asked, patting her pretty head with my hand.

“Now, let me remember it all,” she said, reflectively; “for he told it to me twice. He asked me if there was a good bedroom at the top of the house, standing by itself – and you know there is, so I told him so; it was exactly the kind of room that he described. And then he said that his friend would pay two hundred pounds a year for that bedroom, his board and attendance; and he told me to ask you, and have your answer when he should next meet me.”

“Two hundred pounds!” ejaculated my poor little wife; “why, that is nearly twice as much as we expected.”

“But did he say that his friend was sick, or very old; or that he had any servant to be supported also?” I asked.

“Oh! no; he told me that he was quite able to take care of himself, and that he had, I think he called it, an asthma, but nothing else the matter; and that he would give no trouble at all, and that any friend who came to see him, he would see, not in the house, but only in the garden.”

“In the garden!” I echoed, laughing in spite of myself.

“Yes, indeed he said so; and he told me to say that he would pay one hundred pounds when he came here, and the next hundred in six months, and so on,” continued she.

“Oh, ho! half-yearly in advance – better and better,” said I.

“And he bid me say, too, if you should ask about his character, that he is just as good as the master of the house himself,” she added; “and when he said that, he laughed a little.”

“Why, if he gives us a hundred pounds in advance,” I answered, turning to my wife, “we are safe enough; for he will not find half that value in plate and jewels in the entire household, if he is disposed to rob us. So I see no reason against closing with the offer, should it be seriously meant – do you, dear?”

“Quite the contrary, love,” said she. “I think it most desirable – indeed, most providential.”

“Providential! my dear little bigot!” I repeated, with a smile. “Well, be it so. I call it lucky merely; but, perhaps, you are happier in your faith, than I in my philosophy. Yes, you are grateful for the chance that I only rejoice at. You receive it as a proof of a divine and tender love – I as an accident. Delusions are often more elevating than truth.”

And so saying, I kissed away the saddened cloud that for a moment overcast her face.

“Papa, he bid me be sure to have an answer for him when we meet again,” resumed the child. “What shall I say to him when he asks me?”

“Say that we agree to his proposal, my dear – or stay,” I said, addressing my wife, “may it not be prudent to reduce what the child says to writing, and accept the offer so? This will prevent misunderstanding, as she may possibly have made some mistake.”

My wife agreed, and I wrote a brief note, stating that I was willing to receive an inmate upon the terms recounted by little Fanny, and which I distinctly specified, so that no mistake could possibly arise owing to the vagueness of what lawyers term a parole agreement. This important memorandum I placed in the hands of my little girl, who was to deliver it whenever the old gentleman in the yellow waistcoat should chance to meet her. And all these arrangements completed, I awaited the issue of the affair with as much patience as I could affect. Meanwhile, my wife and I talked it over incessantly; and she, good little soul, almost wore herself to death in settling and unsettling the furniture and decorations of our expected inmate’s apartments. Days passed away – days of hopes deferred, tedious and anxious. We were beginning to despond again, when one morning our little girl ran into the breakfast-parlour, more excited even than she had been before, and fresh from a new interview with the gentleman in the yellow waistcoat. She had encountered him suddenly, pretty nearly where she had met him before, and the result was, that he had read the little note I have mentioned, and desired the child to inform me that his friend, Mr. Smith, would take possession of the apartments I proposed setting, on the terms agreed between us, that very evening.

“This evening!” exclaimed my wife and I simultaneously – I full of the idea of making a first instalment on the day following; she, of the hundred-and-one preparations which still remained to be completed.

“And so Smith is his name! Well, that does not tell us much,” said I; “but where did you meet your friend on this occasion, and how long is it since?”

“Near the corner of the wallflower lane (so we indicated one which abounded in these fragrant plants); he was leaning with his back against the old tree you cut my name on, and his crutch was under his arm.”

“But how long ago?” I urged.

“Only this moment; I ran home as fast as I could,” she replied.

“Why, you little blockhead, you should have told me that at first,” I cried, snatching up my hat, and darting away in pursuit of the yellow waistcoat, whose acquaintance I not unnaturally coveted, inasmuch as a man who, for the first time, admits a stranger into his house, on the footing of permanent residence, desires generally to know a little more about him than that his name is Smith.

The place indicated was only, as we say, a step away; and as yellow waistcoat was fat, and used a crutch, I calculated on easily overtaking him. I was, however, disappointed; crutch, waistcoat, and all had disappeared. I climbed to the top of the wall, and from this commanding point of view made a sweeping observation – but in vain. I returned home, cursing my ill-luck, the child’s dullness, and the fat old fellow’s activity.

I need hardly say that Mr. Smith, in all his aspects, moral, social, physical, and monetary, formed a fruitful and interesting topic of speculation during dinner. How many phantom Smiths, short and long, stout and lean, ill-tempered and well-tempered – rich, respectable, or highly dangerous merchants, spies, forgers, nabobs, swindlers, danced before us, in the endless mazes of fanciful conjecture, during that anxious tête-à-tête, which was probably to be interrupted by the arrival of the gentleman himself.

My wife and I puzzled over the problem as people would over the possible dénouement of a French novel; and at last, by mutual consent, we came to the conclusion that Smith could, and would turn out to be no other than the good-natured valetudinarian in the yellow waistcoat himself, a humorist, as was evident enough, and a millionaire, as we unhesitatingly pronounced, who had no immediate relatives, and as I hoped, and my wife “was certain,” taken a decided fancy to our little Fanny; I patted the child’s head with something akin to pride, as I thought of the magnificent, though remote possibilities, in store for her.

Meanwhile, hour after hour stole away. It was a beautiful autumn evening, and the amber lustre of the declining sun fell softly upon the yews and flowers, and gave an air, half melancholy, half cheerful, to the dark-red brick piers surmounted with their cracked and grass-grown stone urns, and furnished with the light foliage of untended creeping plants. Down the short broad walk leading to this sombre entrance, my eye constantly wandered; but no impatient rattle on the latch, no battering at the gate, indicated the presence of a visited, and the lazy bell hung dumbly among the honeysuckle.

“When will he come? Yellow waistcoat promised this evening! It has been evening a good hour and a half, and yet he is not here. When will he come? It will soon be dark – the evening will have passed – will he come at all?”

Such were the uneasy speculations which began to trouble us. Redder and duskier grew the light of the setting sun, till it saddened into the mists of night. Twilight came, and then darkness, and still no arrival, no summons at the gate. I would not admit even to my wife the excess of my own impatience. I could, however, stand it no longer; so I took my hat and walked to the gate, where I stood by the side of the public road, watching every vehicle and person that approached, in a fever of expectation. Even these, however, began to fail me, and the road grew comparatively quiet and deserted. Having kept guard like a sentinel for more than half an hour, I returned in no very good humour, with the punctuality of an expected inmate – ordered the servant to draw the curtains and secure the hall door; and so my wife and I sat down to our disconsolate cup of tea. It must have been about ten o’clock, and we were both sitting silently – she working, I looking moodily into a paper – and neither of us any longer entertaining a hope that anything but disappointment would come of the matter, when a sudden tapping, very loud and sustained, upon the window pane, startled us both in an instant from our reveries.

I am not sure whether I mentioned before that the sitting-room we occupied was upon the ground-floor, and the sward came close under the window. I drew the curtains, and opened the shutters with a revived hope; and looking out, saw a very tall thin figure, a good deal wrapped up, standing about a yard before me, and motioning with head and hand impatiently towards the hall door. Though the night was clear, there was no moon, and therefore I could see no more than the black outline, like that of an ombre chinoise figure, signing to me with mop and moe. In a moment I was at the hall door, candle in hand; the stranger stepped in – his long fingers clutched in the handle of a valise, and a bag which trailed upon the ground behind him.

The light fell full upon him. He wore a long, ill-made, black surtout, buttoned across, and which wrinkled and bagged about his lank figure; his hat was none of the best, and rather broad in the brim; a sort of white woollen muffler enveloped the lower part of his face; a pair of prominent green goggles, fenced round with leather, completely concealed his eyes; and nothing of the genuine man, but a little bit of yellow forehead, and a small transverse segment of equally yellow cheek and nose, encountered the curious gaze of your humble servant.

“You are – I suppose” – I began; for I really was a little doubtful about my man.

“Mr. Smith – the same; be good enough to show me to my bedchamber,” interrupted the stranger, brusquely, and in a tone which, spite of the muffler that enveloped his mouth, was sharp and grating enough.

“Ha! – Mr. Smith – so I supposed. I hope you may find everything as comfortable as we desire to make it—”

I was about making a speech, but was cut short by a slight bow, and a decisive gesture of the hand in the direction of the staircase. It was plain that the stranger hated ceremony.

Together, accordingly, we mounted the staircase; he still pulling his luggage after him, and striding lightly up without articulating a word; and on reaching his bedroom, he immediately removed his hat, showing a sinister, black scratch-wig underneath, and then began unrolling the mighty woollen wrapping of his mouth and chin.

“Come,” thought I, “we shall see something of your face after all.”

This something, however, proved to be very little; for under his muffler was a loose cravat, which stood up in front of his chin and upon his mouth, he wore a respirator – an instrument which I had never seen before, and of the use of which I was wholly ignorant.

There was something so excessively odd in the effect of this piece of unknown mechanism upon his mouth, surmounted by the huge goggles which encased his eyes, that I believe I should have laughed outright, were it not for a certain unpleasant and peculiar impressiveness in the tout ensemble of the narrow-chested, long-limbed, and cadaverous figure in black. As it was, we stood looking at one another in silence for several seconds.

“Thank you, sir,” at last he said, abruptly. “I shan’t want anything whatever tonight; if you can only spare me this candle.”

I assented; and, becoming more communicative, he added—

“I am, though an invalid, an independent sort of fellow enough. I am a bit of a philosopher; I am my own servant, and, I hope, my own master, too. I rely upon myself in matters of the body and of the mind. I place valets and priests in the same category – fellows who live by our laziness, intellectual or corporeal. I am a Voltaire, without his luxuries – a Robinson Crusoe, without his Bible – an anchorite, without a superstition – in short, my indulgence is asceticism, and my faith infidelity. Therefore, I shan’t disturb your servants much with my bell, nor yourselves with my psalmody. You have got a rational lodger, who knows how to attend upon himself.”

During this singular address he was drawing off his ill-fitting black gloves, and when he had done so, a banknote, which had been slipped underneath for safety, remained in his hand.

“Punctuality, sir, is one of my poor pleasures,” he said; “will you allow me to enjoy it now? Tomorrow you may acknowledge this; I should not rest were you to decline it.”

He extended his bony and discoloured fingers, and placed the note in my hand. Oh, Fortune and Plutus! It was a hundred-pound banknote.

“Pray, not one word, my dear sir,” he continued, unbending still further; “it is simply done pursuant to agreement. We shall know one another better, I hope, in a little time; you will find me always equally punctual. At present pray give yourself no further trouble; I require nothing more. Good night.”

I returned the valediction, closed his door, and groped my way down the stairs. It was not until I had nearly reached the hall, that I recollected that I had omitted to ask our new inmate at what hour he would desire to be called in the morning, and so I groped my way back again. As I reached the lobby on which his chamber opened, I perceived a long line of light issuing from the partially-opened door, within which stood Mr. Smith, the same odd figure I had just left; while along the boards was creeping towards him across the lobby, a great, big-headed, buff-coloured cat. I had never seen this ugly animal before; and it had reached the threshold of his door, arching its back, and rubbing itself on the post, before either appeared conscious of my approach, when, with an angry growl, it sprang into the stranger’s room.

“What do you want?” he demanded, sharply, standing in the doorway.

I explained my errand.

“I shall call myself,” was his sole reply; and he shut the door with a crash that indicated no very pleasurable emotions.

I cared very little about my lodger’s temper. The stealthy rustle of his banknote in my waistcoat pocket was music enough to sweeten the harshest tones of his voice, and to keep alive a cheerful good humour in my heart; and although there was, indisputably, something queer about him, I was, on the whole, very well pleased with my bargain.

The next day our new inmate did not ring his bell until noon. As soon as he had had some breakfast, of which he very sparingly partook, he told the servant that, for the future, he desired that a certain quantity of milk and bread might be left outside his door; and this being done, he would dispense with regular meals. He desired, too, that, on my return, I should be acquainted that he wished to see me in his own room at about nine o’clock; and, meanwhile, he directed that he should be left undisturbed. I found my little wife full of astonishment at Mr. Smith’s strange frugality and seclusion, and very curious to learn the object of the interview he had desired with me. At nine o’clock I repaired to his room.

I found him in precisely the costume in which I had left him – the same green goggles – the same muffling of the mouth, except that being now no more than a broadly-folded black silk handkerchief, very loose, and covering even the lower part of the nose, it was obviously intended for the sole purpose of concealment. It was plain I was not to see more of his features than he had chosen to disclose at our first interview. The effect was as if the lower part of his face had some hideous wound or sore. He closed the door with his own hand on my entrance, nodded slightly, and took his seat. I expected him to begin, but he was so long silent that I was at last constrained to address him.

I said, for want of something more to the purpose, that I hoped he had not been tormented by the strange cat the night before.

“What cat?” he asked, abruptly; “what the plague do you mean?”

“Why, I certainly did see a cat go into your room last night,” I resumed.

“Hey, and what if you did – though I fancy you dreamed it – I’m not afraid of a cat; are you?” he interrupted, tartly.

At this moment there came a low growling mew from the closet which opened from the room in which we sat.

“Talk of the devil,” said I, pointing towards the closet. My companion, without any exact change of expression, looked, I thought, somehow still more sinister and lowering; and I felt for a moment a sort of superstitious misgiving, which made the rest of the sentence die away on my lips.

Perhaps Mr. Smith perceived this, for he said, in a tone calculated to reassure me—

“Well, sir, I think I am bound to tell you that I like my apartments very well; they suit me, and I shall probably be your tenant for much longer than at first you anticipated.”

I expressed my gratification.

He then began to talk, something in the strain in which he had spoken of his own peculiarities of habit and thinking upon the previous evening. He disposed of all classes and denominations of superstition with an easy sarcastic slang, which for me was so captivating, that I soon lost all reserve, and found myself listening and suggesting by turns – acquiescent and pleased – sometimes hazarding dissent; but whenever I did, foiled and floored by a few pointed satirical sentences, whose sophistry, for such I must now believe it, confounded me with a rapidity which, were it not for the admiration with which he had insensibly inspired me, would have piqued and irritated my vanity not a little.

While this was going on, from time to time the mewing and growling of a cat within the closet became more and more audible. At last these sounds became so loud, accompanied by scratching at the door, that I paused in the midst of a sentence, and observed—

“There certainly is a cat shut up in the closet?”

“Is there?” he ejaculated, in a surprised tone; “nay, I do not hear it.”

He rose abruptly and approached the door; his back was towards me, but I observed he raised the goggles which usually covered his eyes, and looked steadfastly at the closet door. The angry sounds all died away into a low, protracted growl, which again subsided into silence. He continued in the same attitude for some moments, and then returned.

“I do not hear it,” he said, as he resumed his place, and taking a book from his capacious pocket, asked me if I had seen it before? I never had, and this surprised me, for I had flattered myself that I knew, at least by name, every work published in England during the last fifty years in favour of that philosophy in which we both delighted. The book, moreover, was an odd one, as both its title and table of contents demonstrated.

While we were discoursing upon these subjects, I became more and more distinctly conscious of a new class of sounds proceeding from the same closet. I plainly heard a measured and heavy tread, accompanied by the tapping of some hard and heavy substance like the end of a staff, pass up and down the floor – first, as it seemed, stealthily, and then more and more unconcealedly. I began to feel very uncomfortable and suspicious. As the noise proceeded, and became more and more unequivocal, Mr. Smith abruptly rose, opened the closet door, just enough to admit his own lath-like person, and steal within the threshold for some seconds. What he did I could not see – I felt conscious he had an associate concealed there; and though my eyes remained fixed on the book, I could not avoid listening for some audible words, or signal of caution. I heard, however, nothing of the kind. Mr. Smith turned back – walked a step or two towards me, and said—

“I fancied I heard a sound from that closet, but there is nothing – nothing – nothing whatever; bring the candle, let us both look.”

I obeyed with some little trepidation, for I fully anticipated that I should detect the intruder, of whose presence my own ears had given me, for nearly half an hour, the most unequivocal proofs. We entered the closet together; it contained but a few chairs and a small spider table. At the far end of the room there was a sort of grey woollen cloth upon the floor, and a bundle of something underneath it. I looked jealously at it, and half thought I could trace the outline of a human figure; but, if so, it was perfectly motionless.

“Some of my poor wardrobe,” he muttered, as he pointed his lean finger in the direction. “It did not sound like a cat, did it – hey – did it?” he muttered; and without attending to my answer, he went about the apartment, clapping his hands, and crying, “Hish – hish – hish!”

The game, however, whatever it was, did not start. As I entered I had seen, however, a large crutch reposing against the wall in the corner opposite to the door. This was the only article in the room, except that I have mentioned, with which I was not familiar. With the exception of our two selves, there was not a living creature to be seen there; no shadow but ours upon the bare walls; no feet but our own upon the comfortless floor.

I had never before felt so strange and unpleasant a sensation.

“There is nothing unusual in the room but that crutch,” I said.

“What crutch, you dolt? I see no crutch,” he ejaculated, in a tone of sudden but suppressed fury.

“Why, that crutch,” I answered (for somehow I neither felt nor resented his rudeness), turning and pointing to the spot where I had seen it. It was gone! – it was neither there nor anywhere else. It must have been an illusion – rather an odd one, to be sure. And yet I could at this moment, with a safe conscience, swear that I never saw an object more distinctly than I had seen it but a second before.

My companion was muttering fast to himself as we withdrew; his presence rather scared than reassured me; and I felt something almost amounting to horror, as, holding the candle above his cadaverous and sable figure, he stood at his threshold, while I descended the stairs, and said, in a sort of whisper—

“Why, but that I am, like yourself, a philosopher, I should say that your house is – is – a – ha! ha! ha! – HAUNTED!”

“You look very pale, my love,” said my wife, as I entered the drawing-room, where she had been long awaiting my return. “Nothing unpleasant has happened?”

“Nothing, nothing, I assure you. Pale! – do I look pale?” I answered. “We are excellent friends, I assure you. So far from having had the smallest disagreement, there is every prospect of our agreeing but too well, as you will say; for I find that he holds all my opinions upon speculative subjects. We have had a great deal of conversation this evening, I assure you; and I never met, I think, so scholarlike and able a man.”

“I am sorry for it, dearest,” she said, sadly. “The greater his talents, if such be his opinions, the more dangerous a companion is he.”

We turned, however, to more cheerful topics, and it was late before we retired to rest. I believe it was pride – perhaps only vanity – but, at all events, some obstructive and stubborn instinct of my nature, which I could not overcome – that prevented my telling my wife the odd occurrences which had disturbed my visit to our guest. I was unable or ashamed to confess that so slight a matter had disturbed me; and, above all, that any accident could possibly have clouded, even for a moment, the frosty clearness of my pure and lofty scepticism with the shadows of superstition.

Almost every day seemed to develop some new eccentricity of our strange guest. His dietary consisted, without any variety or relief, of the monotonous bread and milk with which he started; his bed had not been made for nearly a week; nobody had been admitted into his room since my visit, just described; and he never ventured down stairs, or out of doors, until after nightfall, when he used sometimes to glide swiftly round our little enclosed shrubbery, and at others stand quite motionless, composed, as if in an attitude of deep attention. After employing about an hour in this way, he would return, and steal up stairs to his room, when he would shut himself up, and not be seen again until the next night – or, it might be, the night after that – when, perhaps, he would repeat his odd excursion.

Strange as his habits were, their eccentricity was all upon the side least troublesome to us. He required literally no attendance; and as to his occasional night ramble, even it caused not the slightest disturbance of our routine hour for securing the house and locking up the hall door for the night, inasmuch as he had invariably retired before that hour arrived.

All this stimulated curiosity, and, in no small degree, that of my wife, who, notwithstanding her vigilance and her anxiety to see our strange inmate, had been hitherto foiled by a series of cross accidents. We were sitting together somewhere about ten o’clock at night, when there came a tap at the room door. We had just been discussing the unaccountable Smith; and I felt a sheepish consciousness that he might be himself at the door, and have possibly even overheard our speculation – some of them anything but complimentary, respecting himself.

“Come in,” cried, I, with an effort; and the tall form of our lodger glided into the room. My wife was positively frightened, and stood looking at him, as he advanced, with a stare of manifest apprehension, and even recoiled mechanically, and caught my hand.

Sensitiveness, however, was not his fault: he made a kind of stiff nod as I mumbled an introduction; and seating himself unasked, began at once to chat in that odd, offhand, and sneering style, in which he excelled, and which had, as he wielded it, a sort of fascination of which I can pretend to convey no idea.

My wife’s alarm subsided, and although she still manifestly felt some sort of misgiving about our visitor, she yet listened to his conversation, and, spite of herself, soon began to enjoy it. He stayed for nearly half an hour. But although he glanced at a great variety of topics, he did not approach the subject of religion. As soon as he was gone, my wife delivered judgment upon him in form. She admitted he was agreeable; but then he was such an unnatural, awful-looking object: there was, besides, something indescribably frightful, she thought, in his manner – the very tone of his voice was strange and hateful; and, on the whole, she felt unutterably relieved at his departure.

A few days after, on my return, I found my poor little wife agitated and dispirited. Mr. Smith had paid her a visit, and brought with him a book, which he stated he had been reading, and which contained some references to the Bible which he begged of her to explain in that profounder and less obvious sense in which they had been cited. This she had endeavoured to do; and affecting to be much gratified by her satisfactory exposition, he had requested her to reconcile some discrepancies which he said had often troubled him when reading the Scriptures. Some of them were quite new to my good little wife; they startled and even horrified her. He pursued this theme, still pretending only to seek for information to quiet his own doubts, while in reality he was sowing in her mind the seeds of the first perturbations that had ever troubled the sources of her peace. He had been with her, she thought, no more than a quarter of an hour; but he had contrived to leave her abundant topics on which to ruminate for days. I found her shocked and horrified at the doubts which this potent Magus had summoned from the pit – doubts which she knew not how to combat, and from the torment of which she could not escape.

“He has made me very miserable with his deceitful questions. I never thought of them before; and, merciful Heaven! I cannot answer them! What am I to do? My serenity is gone; I shall never be happy again.”

In truth, she was so very miserable, and, as it seemed to me, so disproportionately excited, that, inconsistent in me as the task would have been, I would gladly have explained away her difficulties, and restored to her mind its wonted confidence and serenity, had I possessed sufficient knowledge for the purpose. I really pitied her, and heartily wished Mr. Smith, for the nonce, at the devil.

I observed after this that my wife’s spirits appeared permanently affected. There was a constantly-recurring anxiety, and I thought something was lying still more heavily at her heart than the uncertainties inspired by our lodger.

One evening, as we two were sitting together, after a long silence, she suddenly laid her hand upon my arm, and said—

“Oh, Richard, my darling! would to God you could pray for me!”

There was something so agitated, and even terrified, in her manner, that I was absolutely startled. I urged her to disclose whatever preyed upon her mind.

“You can’t sympathise with me – you can’t help me – you can scarcely compassionate me in my misery! Oh, dearest Richard! Some evil influence has been gaining upon my heart, dulling and destroying my convictions, killing all my holy affections, and – and absolutely transforming me. I look inward upon myself with amazement, with terror – with – oh, God! – with actual despair!”

Saying this, she threw herself on her knees, and wept an agonised flood of tears, with her head reposing in my lap.

Poor little thing, my heart bled for her! But what could I do or say?

All I could suggest was what I really thought, that she was unwell – hysterical – and needed to take better care of her precious self; that her change of feeling was fancied, not real; and that a few days would restore her to her old health and former spirits and serenity.

“And sometimes,” she resumed, after I had ended a consolatory discussion, which it was but too manifest had fallen unprofitably upon her ear, “such dreadful, impious thoughts come into my mind, whether I choose it or not; they come, and stay, and return, strive as I may; and I can’t pray against them. They are forced upon me with the strength of an independent will; and oh! – horrible – frightful – they blaspheme the character of God himself. They upbraid the Almighty upon his throne, and I can’t pray against them; there is something in me now that resists prayer.”

There was such a real and fearful anguish in the agitation of my gentle companion, that it shook my very soul within me, even while I was affecting to make light of her confessions. I had never before witnessed a struggle at all like this, and I was awestruck at the spectacle.

At length she became comparatively calm. I did gradually succeed, though very imperfectly, in reassuring her. She strove hard against her depression, and recovered a little of her wonted cheerfulness.

After a while, however, the cloud returned. She grew sad and earnest, though no longer excited; and entreated, or rather implored, of me to grant her one special favour, and this was, to avoid the society of our lodger.

“I never,” she said, “could understand till now the instinctive dread with which poor Margaret, in Faust, shrinks from the hateful presence of Mephistopheles. I now feel it in myself. The dislike and suspicion I first felt for that man – Smith, or whatever else he may call himself – has grown into literal detestation and terror. I hate him – I am afraid of him – I never knew what anguish of mind was until he entered our doors; and would to God – would to God he were gone.”

I reasoned with her – kissed her – laughed at her; but could not dissipate, in the least degree, the intense and preternatural horror with which she had grown to regard the poor philosophic invalid, who was probably, at that moment, poring over some metaphysical book in his solitary bedchamber.

The circumstance I am about to mention will give you some notion of the extreme to which these excited feelings had worked upon her nerves. I was that night suddenly awakened by a piercing scream – I started upright in the bed, and saw my wife standing at the bedside, white as ashes with terror. It was some seconds, so startled was I, before I could find words to ask her the cause of her affright. She caught my wrist in her icy grasp, and climbed, trembling violently, into bed. Notwithstanding my repeated entreaties, she continued for a long time stupefied and dumb. At length, however, she told me, that having lain awake for a long time, she felt, on a sudden, that she could pray, and lighting the candle, she had stolen from beside me, and kneeled down for the purpose. She had, however, scarcely assumed the attitude of prayer, when somebody, she said, clutched her arm violently near the wrist, and she heard, at the same instant, some blasphemous menace, the import of which escaped her the moment it was spoken, muttered close in her ear. This terrifying interruption was the cause of the scream which had awakened me; and the condition in which she continued during the remainder of the night confirmed me more than ever in the conviction, that she was suffering under some morbid action of the nervous system.

After this event, which I had no hesitation in attributing to fancy, she became literally afraid to pray, and her misery and despondency increased proportionately.

It was shortly after this that an unusual pressure of business called me into town one evening after office hours. I had left my dear little wife tolerably well, and little Fanny was to be her companion until I returned. She and her little companion occupied the same room in which we sat on the memorable evening which witnessed the arrival of our eccentric guest. Though usually a lively child, it most provokingly happened upon this night that Fanny was heavy and drowsy to excess. Her mamma would have sent her to bed, but that she now literally feared to be left alone; although, however, she could not so far overcome her horror of solitude as to do this, she yet would not persist in combating the poor child’s sleepiness.

Accordingly, little Fanny was soon locked in a sound sleep, while her mamma quietly pursued her work beside her. They had been perhaps some ten minutes thus circumstanced, when my wife heard the window softly raised from without – a bony hand parted the curtains, and Mr. Smith leaned into the room.

She was so utterly overpowered at sight of this apparition, that even had it, as she expected, climbed into the room, she told me she could not have uttered a sound, or stirred from the spot where she sat transfixed and petrified.

“Ha, ha!” he said gently, “I hope you’ll excuse this, I must admit, very odd intrusion; but I knew I should find you here, and could not resist the opportunity of raising the window just for a moment, to look in upon a little family picture, and say a word to yourself. I understand that you are troubled, because for some cause you cannot say your prayers – because what you call your ‘faith’ is, so to speak, dead and gone, and also because what you consider bad thoughts are constantly recurring to your mind. Now, all that is very silly. If it is really impossible for you to believe and to pray, what are you to infer from that? It is perfectly plain your Christian system can’t be a true one – faith and prayer it everywhere represents as the conditions of grace, acceptance, and salvation; and yet your Creator will not permit you either to believe or pray. The Christian system is, forsooth, a free gift, and yet he who formed you and it, makes it absolutely impossible for you to accept it. Is it, I ask you, from your own experience – is it a free gift? And if your own experience, in which you can’t be mistaken, gives its pretensions the lie, why, in the name of common sense, will you persist in believing it? I say it is downright blasphemy to think it has emanated from the Good Spirit – assuming that there is one. It tells you that you must be tormented hereafter in a way only to be made intelligible by the image of eternal fires – pretty strong, we must all allow – unless you comply with certain conditions, which it pretends are so easy that it is a positive pleasure to embrace and perform them; and yet, for the life of you, you can’t – physically can’t – do either. Is this truth and mercy? – or is it swindling and cruelty? Is it the part of the Redeemer, or that of the tyrant, deceiver, and tormentor?”

Up to that moment, my wife had sat breathless and motionless, listening, in the catalepsy of nightmare, to a sort of echo of the vile and impious reasoning which had haunted her for so long. At the last words of the sentence his voice became harsh and thrilling; and his whole manner bespoke a sort of crouching and terrific hatred, the like of which she could not have conceived.

Whatever may have been the cause, she was on a sudden disenchanted. She started to her feet; and, freezing with horror though she was, in a shrill cry of agony commanded him, in the name of God, to depart from her. His whole frame seemed to darken; he drew back silently; the curtains dropped into their places, the window was let down again as stealthily as it had just been raised; and my wife found herself alone in the chamber with our little child, who had been startled from her sleep by her mother’s cry of anguish, and with the fearful words, “tempter,” “destroyer,” “devil,” still ringing in her ears, was weeping bitterly, and holding her terrified mother’s hand.

There is nothing, I believe, more infectious than that species of nervousness which shows itself in superstitious fears. I began – although I could not bring myself to admit anything the least like it – to partake insensibly, but strongly of the peculiar feelings with which my wife, and indeed my whole household, already regarded the lodger up stairs. The fact was, beside, that the state of my poor wife’s mind began to make me seriously uneasy; and, although I was fully sensible of the pecuniary and other advantages attendant upon his stay, they were yet far from outweighing the constant gloom and frequent misery in which the protracted sojourn was involving my once cheerful house. I resolved, therefore, at whatever monetary sacrifice, to put an end to these commotions; and, after several debates with my wife, in which the subject was, as usual, turned in all its possible and impossible bearings, we agreed that, deducting a fair proportion for his five weeks’ sojourn, I should return the remainder of his £100, and request immediate possession of his apartments. Like a man suddenly relieved of an insufferable load, and breathing freely once more, I instantly prepared to carry into effect the result of our deliberations.

In pursuance of this resolution, I waited upon Mr. Smith. This time my call was made in the morning, somewhere about nine o’clock. He received me at his door, standing as usual in the stealthy opening which barely admitted his lank person. There he stood, fully equipped with goggles and respirator, and swathed, rather than dressed, in his puckered black garments.

As he did not seem disposed to invite me into his apartment, although I had announced my visit as one of business, I was obliged to open my errand where I stood; and after a great deal of fumbling and muttering, I contrived to place before him distinctly the resolution to which I had come.

“But I can’t think of taking back any portion of the sum I have paid you,” said he, with a cool, dry emphasis.

“Your reluctance to do so, Mr. Smith, is most handsome, and I assure you, appreciated,” I replied. “It is very generous; but, at the same time, it is quite impossible for me to accept what I have no right to take, and I must beg of you not to mention that part of the subject again.”

“And why should I take it?” demanded Mr. Smith.

“Because you have paid this hundred pounds for six months, and you are leaving me with nearly five months of the term still unexpired,” I replied. “I expect to receive fair play myself, and always give it.”

“But who on earth said that I was going away so soon?” pursued Mr. Smith, in the same dry, sarcastic key. “I have not said so – because I really don’t intend it; I mean to stay here to the last day of the six months for which I have paid you. I have no notion of vacating my hired lodgings, simply because you say, go. I shan’t quarrel with you – I never quarrel with anybody. I’m as much your friend as ever; but, without the least wish to disoblige, I can’t do this, positively I cannot. Is there anything else?”

I had not anticipated in the least the difficulty which thus encountered and upset our plans. I had so set my heart upon effecting the immediate retirement of our inauspicious inmate, that the disappointment literally stunned me for a moment. I, however, returned to the charge: I urged, and prayed, and almost besought him to give up his apartments, and to leave us. I offered to repay every farthing of the sum he had paid me – reserving nothing on account of the time he had already been with us. I suggested all the disadvantages of the house. I shifted my ground, and told him that my wife wanted the rooms; I pressed his gallantry – his good nature – his economy; in short, I assailed him upon every point – but in vain, he did not even take the trouble of repeating what he had said before – he neither relented, nor showed the least irritation, but simply said—

“I can’t do this; here I am, and here I stay until the half-year has expired. You wanted a lodger, and you have got one – the quietest, least troublesome, least expensive person you could have; and though your house, servants, and furniture are none of the best, I don’t care for that. I pursue my own poor business and enjoyments here entirely to my satisfaction.”

Having thus spoken, he gave me a sort of nod, and closed the door.

So, instead of getting rid of him the next day, as we had hoped, we had nearly five months more of his company in expectancy; I hated, and my wife dreaded the prospect. She was literally miserable and panic-struck at her disappointment – and grew so nervous and wretched that I made up my mind to look out for lodgings for her and the children (subversive of all our schemes of retrenchment as such a step would be), and surrendering the house absolutely to Mr. Smith and the servants during the remainder of his term.

Circumstances, however, occurred to prevent our putting this plan in execution. My wife, meanwhile, was, if possible, more depressed and nervous every day. The servants seemed to sympathise in the dread and gloom which involved ourselves; the very children grew timid and spiritless, without knowing why – and the entire house was pervaded with an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear. A poorhouse or a dungeon would have been cheerful, compared with a dwelling haunted unceasingly with unearthly suspicions and alarms. I would have made any sacrifice short of ruin, to emancipate our household from the odious mental and moral thraldom which was invisibly established over us – overcasting us with strange anxieties and an undefined terror.

About this time my wife had a dream which troubled her much, although she could not explain its supposed significance satisfactorily by any of the ordinary rules of interpretation in such matters. The vision was as follows.

She dreamed that we were busily employed in carrying out our scheme of removal, and that I came into the parlour where she was making some arrangements, and, with rather an agitated manner, told her that the carriage had come for the children. She thought she went out to the hall, in consequence, holding little Fanny by one hand, and the boy – or, as we still called him, “baby,” – by the other, and feeling, as she did so, an unaccountable gloom, almost amounting to terror, steal over her. The children, too, seemed, she thought, frightened, and disposed to cry.

So close to the hall door as to exclude the light, stood some kind of vehicle, of which she could see nothing but that its door was wide open, and the interior involved in total darkness. The children, she thought, shrunk back in great trepidation, and she addressed herself to induce them, by persuasion, to enter, telling them that they were only “going to their new home.” So, in a while, little Fanny approached it; but, at the same instant, some person came swiftly up from behind, and, raising the little boy in his hands, said fiercely, “No, the baby first”; and placed him in the carriage. This person was our lodger, Mr. Smith, and was gone as soon as seen. My wife, even in her dream, could not act or speak; but as the child was lifted into the carriage door, a man, whose face was full of beautiful tenderness and compassion, leaned forward from the carriage and received the little child, which, stretching his arms to the stranger, looked back with a strange smile upon his mother.

“He is safe with me, and I will deliver him to you when you come.”

These words the man spoke, looking upon her, as he received him, and immediately the carriage door shut, and the noise of its closing wakened my wife from her nightmare.

This dream troubled her very much, and even haunted my mind unpleasantly too. We agreed, however, not to speak of it to anybody, not to divulge any of our misgivings respecting the stranger. We were anxious that neither the children nor the servants should catch the contagion of those fears which had seized upon my poor little wife, and, if truth were spoken, upon myself in some degree also. But this precaution was, I believe, needless, for, as I said before, everybody under the same roof with Mr. Smith was, to a certain extent, affected with the same nervous gloom and apprehension.

And now commences a melancholy chapter in my life. My poor little Fanny was attacked with a cough which soon grew very violent, and after a time degenerated into a sharp attack of inflammation. We were seriously alarmed for her life, and nothing that care and medicine could effect was spared to save it. Her mother was indefatigable, and scarcely left her night or day; and, indeed, for some time we all but despaired of her recovery.

One night, when she was at the worst, her poor mother, who had sat for many a melancholy hour listening, by her bedside, to those plaintive incoherences of delirium and moanings of fever, which have harrowed so many a fond heart, gained gradually from her very despair the courage which she had so long wanted, and knelt down at the side of her sick darling’s bed to pray for her deliverance.

With clasped hands, in an agony of supplication, she prayed that God would, in his mercy, spare her little child – that, justly as she herself deserved the sorest chastisement his hand could inflict, he would yet deal patiently and tenderly with her in this one thing. She poured out her sorrows before the mercy-seat – she opened her heart, and declared her only hope to be in his pity; without which, she felt that her darling would only leave the bed where she was lying for her grave.

Exactly as she came to this part of her supplication, the child, who had grown, as it seemed, more and more restless, and moaned and muttered with increasing pain and irritation, on a sudden started upright in her bed, and, in a thrilling voice, cried—

“No! no! – the baby first.”

The mysterious sentence which had secretly tormented her for so long, thus piercingly uttered by this delirious, and, perhaps, dying child, with what seemed a preternatural earnestness and strength, arrested her devotions, and froze her with a feeling akin to terror.

“Hush, hush, my darling!” said the poor mother, almost wildly, as she clasped the attenuated frame of the sick child in her arms; “hush, my darling; don’t cry out so loudly – there – there – my own love.”

The child did not appear to see or hear her, but sat up still with feverish cheeks, and bright unsteady eyes, while her dry lips were muttering inaudible words.

“Lie down, my sweet child – lie down, for your own mother,” she said; “if you tire yourself, you can’t grow well, and your poor mother will lose you.”

At these words, the child suddenly cried out again, in precisely the same loud, strong voice – “No! no! the baby first, the baby first” – and immediately afterwards lay down, and fell, for the first time since her illness into a tranquil sleep.

My good little wife sat, crying bitterly by her bedside. The child was better – that was, indeed, delightful. But then there was an omen in the words, thus echoed from her dream, which she dared not trust herself to interpret, and which yet had seized, with a grasp of iron, upon every fibre of her brain.

“Oh, Richard,” she cried, as she threw her arms about my neck, “I am terrified at this horrible menace from the unseen world. Oh! poor, darling little baby, I shall lose you – I am sure I shall lose you. Comfort me, darling, and say he is not to die.”

And so I did; and tasked all my powers of argument and persuasion to convince her how unsubstantial was the ground of her anxiety. The little boy was perfectly well, and, even were he to die before his sister that event might not occur for seventy years to come. I could not, however, conceal from myself that there was something odd and unpleasant in the coincidence; and my poor wife had grown so nervous and excitable, that a much less ominous conjecture would have sufficed to alarm her.

Meanwhile, the unaccountable terror which our lodger’s presence inspired continued to increase. One of our maids gave us warning, solely from her dread of our queer inmate, and the strange accessories which haunted him. She said – and this was corroborated by her fellow-servant – that Mr. Smith seemed to have constantly a companion in his room; that although they never heard them speak, they continually and distinctly heard the tread of two persons walking up and down the room together, and described accurately the peculiar sound of a stick or crutch tapping upon the floor, which my own ears had heard. They also had seen the large, ill-conditioned cat I have mentioned, frequently steal in and out of the stranger’s room; and observed that when our little girl was in greatest danger, the hateful animal was constantly writhing, fawning, and crawling about the door of the sick room after nightfall. They were thoroughly persuaded that this ill-omened beast was the foul fiend himself, and I confess I could not – sceptic as I was – bring myself absolutely to the belief that he was nothing more than a “harmless, necessary cat.” These and similar reports – implicitly believed as they palpably were by those who made them – were certainly little calculated to allay the perturbation and alarm with which our household was filled.

The evenings had by this time shortened very much, and darkness often overtook us before we sat down to our early tea. It happened just at this period of which I have been speaking, after my little girl had begun decidedly to mend, that I was sitting in our dining-parlour, with my little boy fast asleep upon my knees, and thinking of I know not what, my wife having gone up stairs, as usual, to sit in the room with little Fanny. As I thus sat in what was to me, in effect, total solitude, darkness unperceived stole on us.

On a sudden, as I sat, with my elbow leaning upon the table, and my other arm round the sleeping child, I felt, as I thought, a cold current of air faintly blowing upon my forehead. I raised my head, and saw, as nearly as I could calculate, at the far end of the table on which my arm rested, two large green eyes confronting me. I could see no more, but instantly concluded they were those of the abominable cat. Yielding to an impulse of horror and abhorrence, I caught a water-croft that was close to my hand, and threw it full at it with all my force. I must have missed my object, for the shining eyes continued fixed for a second, and then glided still nearer to me, and then a little nearer still. The noise of the glass smashed with so much force upon the table called in the servant, who happened to be passing. She had a candle in her hand, and, perhaps, the light alarmed the odious beast, for as she came in it was gone.

I had had an undefined idea that its approach was somehow connected with a designed injury of some sort to the sleeping child. I could not be mistaken as to the fact that I had plainly seen the two broad, glaring, green eyes. Where the cursed animal had gone I had not observed: it might, indeed, easily have run out at the door as the servant opened it, but neither of us had seen it do so; and we were every one of us in such a state of nervous excitement, that even this incident was something in the catalogue of our ambiguous experiences.

It was a great happiness to see our darling little Fanny every day mending, and now quite out of danger: this was cheering and delightful. It was also something to know that more than two months of our lodger’s term of occupation had already expired; and to realise, as we now could do, by anticipation, the unspeakable relief of his departure.

My wife strove hard to turn our dear child’s recovery to good account for me; but the impressions of fear soon depart, and those of religious gratitude must be preceded by religious faith. All as yet was but as seed strewn upon the rock.

Little Fanny, though recovering rapidly, was still very weak, and her mother usually passed a considerable part of every evening in her bedroom – for the child was sometimes uneasy and restless at night. It happened at this period that, sitting as usual at Fanny’s bedside, she witnessed an occurrence which agitated her not a little.

The child had been, as it seems, growing sleepy, and was lying listlessly, with eyes half open, apparently taking no note of what was passing. Suddenly, however, with an expression of the wildest terror, she drew up her limbs, and cowered in the bed’s head, gazing at some object; which, judging from the motion of her eyes, must have been slowly advancing from the end of the room next the door.

The child made a low shuddering cry, as she grasped her mother’s hand, and, with features white and tense with terror, slowly following with her eyes the noiseless course of some unseen spectre, shrinking more and more fearfully backward every moment.

“What is it? Where? What is it that frightens you, my darling?” asked the poor mother, who, thrilled with horror, looked in vain for the apparition which seemed to have all but bereft the child of reason.

“Stay with me – save me – keep it away – look, look at it – making signs to me – don’t let it hurt me – it is angry – Oh! mamma, save me, save me!”

The child said this, all the time clinging to her with both her hands, in an ecstasy of panic.

“There – there, my darling,” said my poor wife, “don’t be afraid; there’s nothing but me – your own mamma – and little baby in the room; nothing, my darling; nothing indeed.”

“Mamma, mamma, don’t move; don’t go near him”; the child continued wildly. “It’s only his back now; don’t make him turn again; he’s untying his handkerchief. Oh! baby, baby; he’ll kill baby! and he’s lifting up those green things from his eyes; don’t you see him doing it? Mamma, mamma, why does he come here? Oh, mamma, poor baby – poor little baby!”

She was looking with a terrified gaze at the little boy’s bed, which lay directly opposite to her own, and in which he was sleeping calmly.

“Hush, hush, my darling child,” said my wife, with difficulty restraining an hysterical burst of tears; “for God’s sake don’t speak so wildly, my own precious love – there, there – don’t be frightened – there, darling, there.”

“Oh! poor baby – poor little darling baby,” the child continued as before; “will no one save him – tell that wicked man to go away – oh – there – why, mamma – don’t – oh, sure you won’t let him – don’t – don’t – he’ll take the child’s life – will you let him lie down that way on the bed – save poor little baby – oh, baby, baby, waken – his head is on your face.”

As she said this she raised her voice to a cry of despairing terror which made the whole room ring again.

This cry, or rather yell, reached my ears as I sat reading in the parlour by myself, and fearing I knew not what, I rushed to the apartment; before I reached it, the sound had subsided into low but violent sobbing; and, just as I arrived at the threshold I heard, close at my feet, a fierce protracted growl, and something rubbing along the surbase. I was in the dark, but, with a feeling of mingled terror and fury, I stamped and struck at the abhorred brute with my feet, but in vain. The next moment I was in the room, and heard little Fanny, through her sobs, cry—

“Oh, poor baby is killed – that wicked man has killed him – he uncovered his face, and put it on him, and lay upon the bed and killed poor baby. I knew he came to kill him. Ah, papa, papa, why did you not come up before he went? – he is gone, he went away as soon as he killed our poor little darling baby.”

I could not conceal my agitation, quite, and I said to my wife—

“Has he, Smith, been here?”

“No.”

“What is it, then?”

“The child has seen someone.”

“Seen whom? Who? Who has been here?”

“I did not see it; but – but I am sure the child saw – that is, thought she saw him; – the person you have named. Oh, God, in mercy deliver us! What shall I do – what shall I do!”

Thus saying, the dear little woman burst into tears, and crying, as if her heart would break, sobbed out an entreaty that I would look at baby; adding, that she herself had not courage to see whether her darling was sleeping or dead.

“Dead!” I exclaimed. “Tut, tut, my darling; you must not give way to such morbid fancies – he is very well, I see him breathing;” and so saying, I went over to the bed where our little boy was lying. He was slumbering; though it seemed to me very heavily, and his cheeks were flushed.

“Sleeping tranquilly, my darling – tranquilly, and deeply; and with a warm colour in his cheeks,” I said, rearranging the coverlet, and retiring to my wife, who sat almost breathless whilst I was looking at our little boy.

“Thank God – thank God,” she said quietly; and she wept again; and rising, came to his bedside.

“Yes, yes – alive; thank God; but it seems to me he is breathing very short, and with difficulty, and he looks – does he not look hot and feverish? Yes, he is very hot; feel his little hand – feel his neck; merciful heaven! he is burning.”

It was, indeed, very true, that his skin was unnaturally dry and hot; his little pulse, too, was going at a fearful rate.

“I do think,” said I – resolved to conceal the extent of my own apprehensions – “I do think that he is just a little feverish; but he has often been much more so; and will, I dare say, in the morning, be perfectly well again. I dare say, but for little Fanny’s dream, we should not have observed it at all.”

“Oh, my darling, my darling, my darling!” sobbed the poor little woman, leaning over the bed, with her hands locked together, and looking the very picture of despair. “Oh, my darling, what has happened to you? I put you into your bed, looking so well and beautiful, this evening, and here you are, stricken with sickness, my own little love. Oh, you will not – you cannot, leave your poor mother!”

It was quite plain that she despaired of the child from the moment we had ascertained that it was unwell. As it happened, her presentiment was but too truly prophetic. The apothecary said the child’s ailment was “suppressed smallpox”; the physician pronounced it “typhus.” The only certainty about it was the issue – the child died.

To me few things appear so beautiful as a very young child in its shroud. The little innocent face looks so sublimely simple and confiding amongst the cold terrors of death – crimeless, and fearless, that little mortal has passed alone under the shadow, and explored the mystery of dissolution. There is death in its sublimest and purest image – no hatred, no hypocrisy, no suspicion, no care for the morrow ever darkened that little face; death has come lovingly upon it; there is nothing cruel, or harsh, in his victory. The yearnings of love, indeed, cannot be stifled; for the prattle, and smiles, and all the little world of thoughts that were so delightful, are gone forever. Awe, too, will overcast us in its presence – for we are looking on death; but we do not fear for the little, lonely voyager – for the child has gone, simple and trusting, into the presence of its all-wise Father; and of such, we know, is the kingdom of heaven.

And so we parted from poor little baby. I and his poor old nurse drove in a mourning carriage, in which lay the little coffin, early in the morning, to the churchyard of ———. Sore, indeed, was my heart, as I followed that little coffin to the grave! Another burial had just concluded as we entered the churchyard, and the mourners stood in clusters round the grave, into which the sexton was now shovelling the mould.

As I stood, with head uncovered, listening to the sublime and touching service which our ritual prescribes, I found that a gentleman had drawn near also, and was standing at my elbow. I did not turn to look at him until the earth had closed over my darling boy; I then walked a little way apart, that I might be alone, and drying my eyes, sat down upon a tombstone, to let the confusion of my mind subside.

While I was thus lost in a sorrowful reverie, the gentleman who had stood near me at the grave was once more at my side. The face of the stranger, though I could not call it handsome, was very remarkable; its expression was the purest and noblest I could conceive, and it was made very beautiful by a look of such compassion as I never saw before.

“Why do you sorrow as one without hope?” he said, gently.

“I have no hope,” I answered.

“Nay, I think you have,” he answered again; “and I am sure you will soon have more. That little child for which you grieve, has escaped the dangers and miseries of life; its body has perished; but he will receive in the end the crown of life. God has given him an early victory.”

I know not what it was in him that rebuked my sullen pride, and humbled and saddened me, as I listened to this man. He was dressed in deep mourning, and looked more serene, noble, and sweet than any I had ever seen. He was young, too, as I have said, and his voice very clear and harmonious. He talked to me for a long time, and I listened to him with involuntary reverence. At last, however, he left me, saying he had often seen me walking into town, about the same hour that he used to go that way, and that if he saw me again he would walk with me, and so we might reason of these things together.

It was late when I returned to my home, now a house of mourning.

PART II

Our home was one of sorrow and of fear. The child’s death had stricken us with terror no less than grief. Referring it, as we both tacitly did, to the mysterious and fiendish agency of the abhorred being whom, in an evil hour, we had admitted into our house, we both viewed him with a degree and species of fear for which I can find no name.

I felt that some further calamity was impending. I could not hope that we were to be delivered from the presence of the malignant agent who haunted, rather than inhabited our home, without some additional proofs alike of his malice and his power.

My poor wife’s presentiments were still more terrible and overpowering, though not more defined, than my own. She was never tranquil while our little girl was out of her sight; always dreading and expecting some new revelation of the evil influence which, as we were indeed both persuaded, had bereft our darling little boy of life. Against an hostility so unearthly and intangible there was no guarding, and the sense of helplessness intensified the misery of our situation. Tormented with doubts of the very basis of her religion, and recoiling from the ordeal of prayer with the strange horror with which the victim of hydrophobia repels the pure water, she no longer found the consolation which, had sorrow reached her in any other shape, she would have drawn from the healing influence of religion. We were both of us unhappy, dismayed, demon-stricken.

Meanwhile, our lodger’s habits continued precisely the same. If, indeed, the sounds which came from his apartments were to be trusted, he and his agents were more on the alert than ever. I can convey to you, good reader, no notion, even the faintest, of the dreadful sensation always more or less present to my mind, and sometimes with a reality which thrilled me almost to frenzy – the apprehension that I had admitted into my house the incarnate spirit of the dead or damned, to torment me and my family.

It was some nights after the burial of our dear little baby; we had not gone to bed until late, and I had slept, I suppose, some hours, when I was awakened by my wife, who clung to me with the energy of terror. She said nothing, but grasped and shook me with more than her natural strength. She had crept close to me, and was cowering with her head under the bedclothes.

The room was perfectly dark, as usual, for we burned no night-light; but from the side of the bed next her proceeded a voice as of one sitting there with his head within a foot of the curtains – and, merciful heavens! it was the voice of our lodger.

He was discoursing of the death of our baby, and inveighing, in the old mocking tone of hate and suppressed fury, against the justice, mercy, and goodness of God. He did this with a terrible plausibility of sophistry, and with a resolute emphasis and precision, which seemed to imply, “I have got something to tell you, and, whether you like it or like it not, I will say out my say.”

To pretend that I felt anger at his intrusion, or emotion of any sort, save the one sense of palsied terror, would be to depart from the truth. I lay, cold and breathless, as if frozen to death – unable to move, unable to utter a cry – with the voice of that demon pouring, in the dark, his undisguised blasphemies and temptations close into my ears. At last the dreadful voice ceased – whether the speaker went or stayed I could not tell – the silence, which he might be improving for the purpose of some hellish stratagem, was to me more tremendous even than his speech.

We both lay awake, not daring to move or speak, scarcely even breathing, but clasping one another fast, until at length the welcome light of day streamed into the room through the opening door, as the servant came in to call us. I need not say that our nocturnal visitant had left us.

The magnanimous reader will, perhaps, pronounce that I ought to have pulled on my boots and inexpressibles with all available despatch, run to my lodger’s bedroom, and kicked him forthwith downstairs, and the entire way moreover out to the public road, as some compensation for the scandalous affront put upon me and my wife by his impertinent visit. Now, at that time, I had no scruples against what are termed the laws of honour, was by no means deficient in “pluck,” and gifted, moreover, with a somewhat excitable temper. Yet, I will honestly avow that, so far from courting a collision with the dreaded stranger, I would have recoiled at his very sight, and given my eyes to avoid him, such was the ascendancy which he had acquired over me, as well as everybody else in my household, in his own quiet, irresistible, hellish way.

The shuddering antipathy which our guest inspired did not rob his infernal homily of its effect. It was not a new or strange thing which he presented to our minds. There was an awful subtlety in the train of his suggestions. All that he had said had floated through my own mind before, without order, indeed, or show of logic. From my own rebellious heart the same evil thoughts had risen, like pale apparitions hovering and lost in the fumes of a necromancer’s cauldron. His was like the summing up of all this – a reflection of my own feelings and fancies – but reduced to an awful order and definiteness, and clothed with a sophistical form of argument. The effect of it was powerful. It revived and exaggerated these bad emotions – it methodised and justified them – and gave to impulses and impressions, vague and desultory before, something of the compactness of a system.

My misfortune, therefore, did not soften, it exasperated me. I regarded the Great Disposer of events as a persecutor of the human race, who took delight in their miseries. I asked why my innocent child had been smitten down into the grave? – and why my darling wife, whose first object, I knew, had ever been to serve and glorify her Maker, should have been thus tortured and desolated by the cruelest calamity which the malignity of a demon could have devised? I railed and blasphemed, and even in my agony defied God with the impotent rage and desperation of a devil, in his everlasting torment.

In my bitterness, I could not forbear speaking these impenitent repetitions of the language of our nightly visitant, even in the presence of my wife. She heard me with agony, almost with terror. I pitied and loved her too much not to respect even her weaknesses – for so I characterised her humble submission to the chastisements of heaven. But even while I spared her reverential sensitiveness, the spectacle of her patience but enhanced my own gloomy and impenitent rage.

I was walking into town in this evil mood, when I was overtaken by the gentleman whom I had spoken with in the churchyard on the morning when my little boy was buried. I call him gentleman, but I could not say what was his rank – I never thought about it; there was a grace, a purity, a compassion, and a grandeur of intellect in his countenance, in his language, in his mien, that was beautiful and kinglike. I felt, in his company, a delightful awe, and an humbleness more gratifying than any elation of earthly pride.

He divined my state of feeling, but he said nothing harsh. He did not rebuke, but he reasoned with me – and oh! how mighty was that reasoning – without formality – without effort – as the flower grows and blossoms. Its process was in harmony with the successions of nature – gentle, spontaneous, irresistible.

At last he left me. I was grieved at his departure – I was wonder-stricken. His discourse had made me cry tears at once sweet and bitter; it had sounded depths I knew not of, and my heart was disquieted within me. Yet my trouble was happier than the resentful and defiant calm that had reigned within me before.

When I came home, I told my wife of my having met the same good, wise man I had first seen by the grave of my child. I recounted to her his discourse, and, as I brought it again to mind, my tears flowed afresh, and I was happy while I wept.

I now see that the calamity which bore at first such evil fruit, was good for me. It fixed my mind, however rebelliously, upon God, and it stirred up all the passions of my heart. Levity, inattention, and self-complacency are obstacles harder to be overcome than the violence of evil passions – the transition from hate is easier than from indifference, to love. A mighty change was making on my mind.

I need not particularise the occasions upon which I again met my friend, for so I knew him to be, nor detail the train of reasoning and feeling which in such interviews he followed out; it is enough to say, that he assiduously cultivated the good seed he had sown, and that his benignant teachings took deep root, and flourished in my soul, heretofore so barren.

One evening, having enjoyed on the morning of the same day another of those delightful and convincing conversations, I was returning on foot homeward; and as darkness had nearly closed, and the night threatened cold and fog, the footpaths were nearly deserted.

As I walked on, deeply absorbed in the discourse I had heard on the same morning, a person overtook me, and continued to walk, without much increasing the interval between us, a little in advance of me. There came upon me, at the same moment, an indefinable sinking of the heart, a strange and unaccountable fear. The pleasing topics of my meditations melted away, and gave place to a sense of danger, all the more unpleasant that it was vague and objectless. I looked up. What was that which moved before me? I stared – I faltered; my heart fluttered as if it would choke me, and then stood still. It was the peculiar and unmistakeable form of our lodger.

Exactly as I looked at him, he turned his head, and looked at me over his shoulder. His face was muffled as usual. I cannot have seen its features with any completeness, yet I felt that his look was one of fury. The next instant he was at my side; and my heart quailed within me – my limbs all but refused their office; yet the very emotions of terror, which might have overcome me, acted as a stimulus, and I quickened my pace.

“Hey! what a pious person! So I suppose you have learned at last that ‘evil communications corrupt good manners’; and you are absolutely afraid of the old infidel, the old blasphemer, hey?”

I made him no answer; I was indeed too much agitated to speak.

“You’ll make a good Christian, no doubt,” he continued; “the independent man, who thinks for himself, reasons his way to his principles, and sticks fast to them, is sure to be true to whatever system he embraces. You have been so consistent a philosopher, that I am sure you will make a steady Christian. You’re not the man to be led by the nose by a sophistical mumbler. You could never be made the prey of a grasping proselytism; you are not the sport of every whiff of doctrine, nor the facile slave of whatever superstition is last buzzed in your ear. No, no: you’ve got a masculine intellect, and think for yourself, hey?”

I was incapable of answering him. I quickened my pace to escape from his detested persecution; but he was close beside me still.

We walked on together thus for a time, during which I heard him muttering fast to himself, like a man under fierce and malignant excitement. We reached, at length, the gateway of my dwelling; and I turned the latchkey in the wicket, and entered the enclosure. As we stood together within, he turned full upon me, and confronting me with an aspect whose character I felt rather than saw, he said—

“And so you mean to be a Christian, after all! Now just reflect how very absurdly you are choosing. Leave the Bible to that class of fanatics who may hope to be saved under its system, and, in the name of common sense, study the Koran, or some less ascetic tome. Don’t be gulled by a plausible slave, who wants nothing more than to multiply professors of his theory. Why don’t you read the Bible, you miserable, puling poltroon, before you hug it as a treasure? Why don’t you read it, and learn out of the mouth of the founder of Christianity, that there is one sin for which there is no forgiveness – blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, hey? – and that sin I myself have heard you commit by the hour – in my presence – in my room. I have heard you commit it in our free discussions a dozen times. The Bible seals against you the lips of mercy. If it be true, you are this moment as irrevocably damned as if you had died with those blasphemies on your lips.”

Having thus spoken, he glided into the house. I followed slowly.

His words rang in my ears – I was stunned. What he had said I feared might be true. Giant despair felled me to the earth. He had recalled, and lighted up with a glare from the pit, remembrances with which I knew not how to cope. It was true I had spoken with daring impiety of subjects whose sacredness I now began to appreciate. With trembling hands I opened the Bible. I read and re-read the mysterious doom recorded by the Redeemer himself against blasphemers of the Holy Ghost – monsters set apart from the human race, and damned and dead, even while they live and walk upon the earth. I groaned – I wept. Henceforward the Bible, I thought, must be to me a dreadful record of despair. I dared not read it.

I will not weary you with all my mental agonies. My dear little wife did something toward relieving my mind, but it was reserved for the friend, to whose heavenly society I owed so much, to tranquillise it once more. He talked this time to me longer, and even more earnestly than before. I soon encountered him again. He expounded to me the ways of Providence, and showed me how needful sorrow was for every servant of God. How mercy was disguised in tribulation, and our best happiness came to us, like our children, in tears and wailing. He showed me that trials were sent to call us up, with a voice of preternatural power, from the mortal apathy of sin and the world. And then, again, in our new and better state, to prove our patience and our faith:

“The more trouble befalls you, the nearer is God to you. He visits you in sorrow – and sorrow, as well as joy, is a sign of his presence. If, then, other griefs overtake you, remember this – be patient, be faithful; and bless the name of God.”

I returned home comforted and happy, although I felt assured that some further and sadder trial was before me.

Still our household was overcast by the same insurmountable dread of our tenant. The same strange habits characterised him, and the same unaccountable sounds disquieted us – an atmosphere of death and malice hovered about his door, and we all hated and feared to pass it.

Let me now tell, as well and briefly as I may, the dreadful circumstances of my last great trial. One morning, my wife being about her household affairs, and I on the point of starting for town, I went into the parlour for some letters which I was to take with me. I cannot easily describe my consternation when, on entering the room, I saw our lodger seated near the window, with our darling little girl upon his knee.

His back was toward the door, but I could plainly perceive that the respirator had been removed from his mouth, and that the odious green goggles were raised. He was sitting, as it seemed, absolutely without motion, and his face was advanced close to that of the child.

I stood looking at this group in a state of stupor for some seconds. He was, I suppose, conscious of my presence, for although he did not turn his head, or otherwise take any note of my arrival, he readjusted the muffler which usually covered his mouth, and lowered the clumsy spectacles to their proper place.

The child was sitting upon his knee as motionless as he himself, with a countenance white and rigid as that of a corpse, and from which every trace of meaning, except some vague character of terror, had fled, and staring with a fixed and dilated gaze into his face.

As it seemed, she did not perceive my presence. Her eyes were transfixed and fascinated. She did not even seem to me to breathe. Horror and anguish at last overcame my stupefaction.

“What – what is it?” I cried; “what ails my child, my darling child?”

“I’d be glad to know, myself,” he replied, coolly; “it is certainly something very queer.”

“What is it, darling?” I repeated, frantically, addressing the child.

“What is it?” he reiterated. “Why, it’s pretty plain, I should suppose, that the child is ill.”

“Oh merciful God!” I cried, half furious, half terrified – “You have injured her – you have terrified her. Give me my child – give her to me.”

These words I absolutely shouted, and stamped upon the floor in my horrid excitement.

“Pooh, pooh!” he said, with a sort of ugly sneer; “the child is nervous – you’ll make her more so – be quiet and she’ll probably find her tongue presently. I have had her on my knee some minutes, but the sweet bird could not tell what ails her.”

“Let the child go,” I shouted in a voice of thunder; “let her go, I say – let her go.”

He took the passive, deathlike child, and placed her standing by the window, and rising, he simply said—

“As soon as you grow cool, you are welcome to ask me what questions you like. The child is plainly ill. I should not wonder if she had seen something that frightened her.”

Having thus spoken, he passed from the room. I felt as if I spoke, saw, and walked in a horrid dream. I seized the darling child in my arms, and bore her away to her mother.

“What is it – for mercy’s sake what is the matter?” she cried, growing in an instant as pale as the poor child herself.

“I found that – that demon – in the parlour with the child on his lap, staring in her face. She is manifestly terrified.”

“Oh! gracious God! she is lost – she is killed,” cried the poor mother, frantically looking into the white, apathetic, meaningless face of the child.

“Fanny, darling Fanny, tell us if you are ill,” I cried, pressing the little girl in terror to my heart.

“Tell your own mother, my darling,” echoed my poor little wife. “Oh! darling, darling child, speak to your poor mother.”

It was all in vain. Still the same dilated, imploring gaze – the same pale face – wild and dumb. We brought her to the open window – we gave her cold water to drink – we sprinkled it in her face. We sent for the apothecary, who lived hard by, and he arrived in a few moments, with a parcel of tranquillising medicines. These, however, were equally unavailing.

Hour after hour passed away. The darling child looked upon us as if she would have given the world to speak to us, or to weep, but she uttered no sound. Now and then she drew a long breath as though preparing to say something, but still she was mute. She often put her hand to her throat, as if there was some pain or obstruction there.

I never can, while I live, lose one line of that mournful and terrible portrait – the face of my stricken child. As hour after hour passed away, without bringing the smallest change or amendment, we grew both alarmed, and at length absolutely terrified for her safety.

We called in a physician toward night, and told him that we had reason to suspect that the child had somehow been frightened, and that in no other way could we at all account for the extraordinary condition in which he found her.

This was a man, I may as well observe, though I do not name him, of the highest eminence in his profession, and one in whose skill, from past personal experience, I had the best possible reasons for implicitly confiding.

He asked a multiplicity of questions, the answers to which seemed to baffle his attempts to arrive at a satisfactory diagnosis. There was something undoubtedly anomalous in the case, and I saw plainly that there were features in it which puzzled and perplexed him not a little.

At length, however, he wrote his prescription, and promised to return at nine o’clock. I remember there was something to be rubbed along her spine, and some medicines beside.

But these remedies were as entirely unavailing as the others. In a state of dismay and distraction we watched by the bed in which, in accordance with the physician’s direction, we had placed her. The absolute changelessness of her condition filled us with despair. The day which had elapsed had not witnessed even a transitory variation in the dreadful character of her seizure. Any change, even a change for the worse, would have been better than this sluggish, hopeless monotony of suffering.

At the appointed hour the physician returned. He appeared disappointed, almost shocked, at the failure of his prescriptions. On feeling her pulse he declared that she must have a little wine. There had been a wonderful prostration of all the vital powers since he had seen her before. He evidently thought the case a strange and precarious one.

She was made to swallow the wine, and her pulse rallied for a time, but soon subsided again. I and the physician were standing by the fire, talking in whispers of the darling child’s symptoms, and likelihood of recovery, when we were arrested in our conversation by a cry of anguish from the poor mother, who had never left the bedside of her little child, and this cry broke into bitter and convulsive weeping.

The poor little child had, on a sudden, stretched down her little hands and feet, and died. There is no mistaking the features of death: the filmy eye and dropt jaw once seen, are recognised whenever we meet them again. Yet, spite of our belief, we cling to hope; and the distracted mother called on the physician, in accents which might have moved a statue, to say that her darling was not dead, not quite dead – that something might still be done – that it could not be all over. Silently he satisfied himself that no throb of life still fluttered in that little frame.

“It is, indeed, all over,” he said, in tones scarce above a whisper; and pressing my hand kindly, he said, “comfort your poor wife”; and so, after a momentary pause, he left the room.

This blow had smitten me with stunning suddenness. I looked at the dead child, and from her to her poor mother. Grief and pity were both swallowed up in transports of fury and detestation with which the presence in my house of the wretch who had wrought all this destruction and misery filled my soul. My heart swelled with ungovernable rage; for a moment my habitual fear of him was neutralised by the vehemence of these passions. I seized a candle in silence, and mounted the stairs. The sight of the accursed cat, flitting across the lobby, and the loneliness of the hour, made me hesitate for an instant. I had, however, gone so far, that shame sustained me. Overcoming a momentary thrill of dismay, and determined to repel and defy the influence that had so long awed me, I knocked sharply at the door, and, almost at the same instant, pushed it open, and entered our lodger’s chamber.

He had had no candle in the room, and it was lighted only by the “darkness visible” that entered through the window. The candle which I held very imperfectly illuminated the large apartment; but I saw his spectral form floating, rather than walking, back and forward in front of the windows.

At sight of him, though I hated him more than ever, my instinctive fear returned. He confronted me, and drew nearer and nearer, without speaking. There was something indefinably fearful in the silent attraction which seemed to be drawing him to me. I could not help recoiling, little by little, as he came toward me, and with an effort I said—

“You know why I have come: the child – she’s dead!”

“Dead – ha! – dead – is she?” he said, in his odious, mocking tone.

“Yes – dead!” I cried, with an excitement which chilled my very marrow with horror; “and you have killed her, as you killed my other.”

“How? – I killed her! – eh? – ha, ha!” he said, still edging nearer and nearer.

“Yes; I say you!” I shouted, trembling in every joint, but possessed by that unaccountable infatuation which has made men invoke, spite of themselves, their own destruction, and which I was powerless to resist – “deny it as you may, it is you who killed her – wretch! – fiend! – no wonder she could not stand the breath and glare of hell!”

“And you are one of those who believe that not a sparrow falls to the ground without your Creator’s consent,” he said, with icy sarcasm; “and this is a specimen of Christian resignation – hey? You charge his act upon a poor fellow like me, simply that you may cheat the devil, and rave and rebel against the decrees of heaven, under pretence of abusing me. The breath and flare of hell! – eh? You mean that I removed this and these (touching the covering of his mouth and eyes successively) as I shall do now again, and show you there’s no great harm in that.”

There was a tone of menace in his concluding words not to be mistaken.

“Murderer and liar from the beginning, as you are, I defy you!” I shouted, in a frenzy of hate and horror, stamping furiously on the floor.

As I said this, it seemed to me that he darkened and dilated before my eyes. My senses, thoughts, consciousness, grew horribly confused, as if some powerful, extraneous will, were seizing upon the functions of my brain. Whether I were to be mastered by death, or madness, or possession, I knew not; but hideous destruction of some sort was impending: all hung upon the moment, and I cried aloud, in my agony, an adjuration in the name of the three persons of the Trinity, that he should not torment me.

Stunned, bewildered, like a man recovered from a drunken fall, I stood, freezing and breathless, in the same spot, looking into the room, which wore, in my eyes, a strange, unearthly character. Mr. Smith was cowering darkly in the window, and, after a silence, spoke to me in a croaking, sulky tone, which was, however, unusually submissive.

“Don’t it strike you as an odd procedure to break into a gentleman’s apartment at such an hour, for the purpose of railing at him in the coarsest language? If you have any charge to make against me, do so; I invite inquiry and defy your worst. If you think you can bring home to me the smallest share of blame in this unlucky matter, call the coroner, and let his inquest examine and cross-examine me, and sift the matter – if, indeed, there is anything to be sifted – to the bottom. Meanwhile, go you about your business, and leave me to mine. But I see how the wind sits; you want to get rid of me, and so you make the place odious to me. But it won’t do; and if you take to making criminal charges against me, you had better look to yourself; for two can play at that game.”

There was a suppressed whine in all this, which strangely contrasted with the cool and threatening tone of his previous conversation.

Without answering a word I hurried from the room, and scarcely felt secure, even when once more in the melancholy chamber, where my poor wife was weeping.

Miserable, horrible was the night that followed. The loss of our child was a calamity which we had not dared to think of. It had come, and with a suddenness enough to bereave me of reason. It seemed all unreal, all fantastic. It needed an effort to convince me, minute after minute, that the dreadful truth was so; and the old accustomed feeling that she was still alive, still running from room to room, and the expectation that I should hear her step and her voice, and see her entering at the door, would return. But still the sense of dismay, of having received some stunning, irreparable blow, remained behind; and then came the horrible effort, like that with which one rouses himself from a haunted sleep, the question, “What disaster is this that has befallen?” – answered, alas! but too easily, too terribly! Amidst all this was perpetually rising before my fancy the obscure, dilated figure of our lodger, as he had confronted me in his malign power that night. I dismissed the image with a shudder as often as it recurred; and even now, at this distance of time, I have felt more than I could well describe in the mere effort to fix my recollection upon its hated traits, while writing the passages I have just concluded.

This hateful scene I did not recount to my poor wife. Its horrors were too fresh upon me. I had not courage to trust myself with the agitating narrative; and so I sat beside her, with her hand locked in mine: I had no comfort to offer but the dear love I bore her.

At last, like a child, she cried herself to sleep – the dull, heavy slumber of worn-out grief. As for me, the agitation of my soul was too fearful and profound for repose. My eye accidentally rested on the holy volume, which lay upon the table open, as I had left it in the morning; and the first words which met my eye were these – “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” This blessed sentence riveted my attention, and shed a stream of solemn joy upon my heart; and so the greater part of that mournful night, I continued to draw comfort and heavenly wisdom from the same inspired source.

Next day brought the odious incident, the visit of the undertaker – the carpentry, upholstery, and millinery of death. Why has not civilisation abolished these repulsive and shocking formalities? What has the poor corpse to do with frills, and pillows, and napkins, and all the equipage in which it rides on its last journey? There is no intrusion so jarring to the decent grief of surviving affection, no conceivable mummery more derisive of mortality.

In the room which we had been so long used to call “the nursery,” now desolate and mute, the unclosed coffin lay, with our darling shrouded in it. Before we went to our rest at night we visited it. In the morning the lid was to close over that sweet face, and I was to see the child laid by her little brother. We looked upon the well-known and loved features, purified in the sublime serenity of death, for a long time, whispering to one another, among our sobs, how sweet and beautiful we thought she looked; and at length, weeping bitterly, we tore ourselves away.

We talked and wept for many hours, and at last, in sheer exhaustion, dropt asleep. My little wife awaked me, and said—

“I think they have come – the – the undertakers.”

It was still dark, so I could not consult my watch; but they were to have arrived early, and as it was winter, and the nights long, the hour of their visit might well have arrived.

“What, darling, is your reason for thinking so?” I asked.

“I am sure I have heard them for some time in the nursery,” she answered. “Oh! dear, dear little Fanny! Don’t allow them to close the coffin until I have seen my darling once more.”

I got up, and threw some clothes hastily about me. I opened the door and listened. A sound like a muffled knocking reached me from the nursery.

“Yes, my darling!” I said, “I think they have come. I will go and desire them to wait until you have seen her again.”

And, so saying, I hastened from the room.

Our bedchamber lay at the end of a short corridor, opening from the lobby, at the head of the stairs, and the nursery was situated nearly at the end of a corresponding passage, which opened from the same lobby at the opposite side As I hurried along I distinctly heard the same sounds. The light of dawn had not yet appeared, but there was a strong moonlight shining through the windows. I thought the morning could hardly be so far advanced as we had at first supposed; but still, strangely as it now seems to me, suspecting nothing amiss, I walked on in noiseless, slippered feet, to the nursery door. It stood half open; someone had unquestionably visited it since we had been there. I stepped forward, and entered. At the threshold horror arrested my advance.

The coffin was placed upon tressles at the further extremity of the chamber, with the foot of it nearly towards the door, and a large window at the side of it admitted the cold lustre of the moon full upon the apparatus of mortality, and the objects immediately about it.

At the foot of the coffin stood the ungainly form of our lodger. He seemed to be intently watching the face of the corpse, and was stooped a little, while with his hands he tapped sharply, from time to time at the sides of the coffin, like one who designs to awaken a slumberer. Perched upon the body of the child, and nuzzling among the grave-clothes, with a strange kind of ecstasy, was the detested brute, the cat I have so often mentioned.

The group thus revealed, I looked upon but for one instant; in the next I shouted, in absolute terror—

“In God’s name! what are you doing?”

Our lodger shuffled away abruptly, as if disconcerted; but the ill-favoured cat, whisking round, stood like a demon sentinel upon the corpse, growling and hissing, with arched back and glaring eyes.

The lodger, turning abruptly toward me, motioned me to one side. Mechanically I obeyed his gesture, and he hurried hastily from the room.

Sick and dizzy, I returned to my own chamber. I confess I had not nerve to combat the infernal brute, which still held possession of the room, and so I left it undisturbed.

This incident I did not tell to my wife until some time afterwards; and I mention it here because it was, and is, in my mind associated with a painful circumstance which very soon afterwards came to light.

That morning I witnessed the burial of my darling child. Sore and desolate was my heart; but with infinite gratitude to the great controller of all events, I recognised in it a change which nothing but the spirit of all good can effect. The love and fear of God had grown strong within me – in humbleness I bowed to his awful will – with a sincere trust I relied upon the goodness, the wisdom, and the mercy of him who had sent this great affliction. But a further incident connected with this very calamity was to test this trust and patience to the uttermost.

It was still early when I returned, having completed the last sad office. My wife, as I afterwards learned, still lay weeping upon her bed. But somebody awaited my return in the hall, and opened the door, anticipating my knock. This person was our lodger.

I was too much appalled by the sudden presentation of this abhorred spectre even to retreat, as my instinct would have directed, through the open door.

“I have been expecting your return,” he said, “with the design of saying something which it might have profited you to learn, but now I apprehend it is too late. What a pity you are so violent and impatient; you would not have heard me, in all probability, this morning. You cannot think how cross-grained and intemperate you have grown since you became a saint – but that is your affair, not mine. You have buried your little daughter this morning. It requires a good deal of that new attribute of yours, faith, which judges all things by a rule of contraries, and can never see anything but kindness in the worst afflictions which malignity could devise, to discover benignity and mercy in the torturing calamity which has just punished you and your wife for nothing! But I fancy that it will be harder still when I tell you what I more than suspect – ha, ha. It would be really ridiculous, if it were not heart-rending; that your little girl has been actually buried alive; do you comprehend me? – alive. For, upon my life, I fancy she was not dead as she lay in her coffin.”

I knew the wretch was exulting in the fresh anguish he had just inflicted. I know not how it was, but any announcement of disaster from his lips, seemed to me to be necessarily true. Half-stifled with the dreadful emotions he had raised, palpitating between hope and terror, I rushed frantically back again, the way I had just come, running as fast as my speed could carry me, toward the, alas! distant burial-ground where my darling lay.

I stopped a cab slowly returning to town, at the corner of the lane, sprang into it, directed the man to drive to the church of ———, and promised him anything and everything for despatch. The man seemed amazed; doubtful, perhaps, whether he carried a maniac or a malefactor. Still he took his chance for the promised reward, and galloped his horse, while I, tortured with suspense, yelled my frantic incentives to further speed.

At last, in a space immeasurably short, but which to me was protracted almost beyond endurance, we reached the spot. I halloed to the sexton, who was now employed upon another grave, to follow me. I myself seized a mattock, and in obedience to my incoherent and agonised commands, he worked as he had never worked before. The crumbling mould flew swiftly to the upper soil – deeper and deeper, every moment, grew the narrow grave – at last I sobbed, “Thank God – thank God,” as I saw the face of the coffin emerge; a few seconds more and it lay upon the sward beside me, and we both, with the edges of our spades, ripped up the lid.

There was the corpse – but not the tranquil statue I had seen it last. Its knees were both raised, and one of its little hands drawn up and clenched near its throat, as if in a feeble but agonised struggle to force up the superincumbent mass. The eyes, that I had last seen closed, were now open, and the face no longer serenely pale, but livid and distorted.

I had time to see all in an instant; the whole scene reeled and darkened before me, and I swooned away.

When I came to myself, I found that I had been removed to the vestry-room. The open coffin was in the aisle of the church, surrounded by a curious crowd. A medical gentleman had examined the body carefully, and had pronounced life totally extinct. The trepidation and horror I experienced were indescribable. I felt like the murderer of my own child. Desperate as I was of any chance of its life, I dispatched messengers for no less than three of the most eminent physicians then practising in London. All concurred – the child was now as dead as any other, the oldest tenant of the churchyard.

Notwithstanding which, I would not permit the body to be re-interred for several days, until the symptoms of decay became unequivocal, and the most fantastic imagination could no longer cherish a doubt. This, however, I mention only parenthetically, as I hasten to the conclusion of my narrative. The circumstance which I have last described found its way to the public, and caused no small sensation at the time.

I drove part of the way home, and then discharged the cab, and walked the remainder. On my way, with an emotion of ecstasy I cannot describe, I met the good being to whom I owed so much. I ran to meet him, and felt as if I could throw myself at his feet, and kiss the very ground before him. I knew by his heavenly countenance he was come to speak comfort and healing to my heart.

With humbleness and gratitude, I drank in his sage and holy discourse. I need not follow the gracious and delightful exposition of God’s revealed will and character with which he cheered and confirmed my faltering spirit. A solemn joy, a peace and trust, streamed on my heart. The wreck and desolation there, lost their bleak and ghastly character, like ruins illuminated by the mellow beams of a solemn summer sunset.

In this conversation, I told him what I had never revealed to anyone before – the absolute terror, in all its stupendous and maddening amplitude, with which I regarded our ill-omened lodger, and my agonised anxiety to rid my house of him. My companion answered me—

“I know the person of whom you speak – he designs no good for you or any other. He, too, knows me, and I have intimated to him that he must now leave you, and visit you no more. Be firm and bold, trusting in God, through his Son, like a good soldier, and you will win the victory from a greater and even worse than he – the unseen enemy of mankind. You need not see or speak with your evil tenant any more. Call to him from your hall, in the name of the Most Holy, to leave you bodily, with all that appertains to him, this evening. He knows that he must go, and will obey you. But leave the house as soon as may be yourself; you will scarce have peace in it. Your own remembrances will trouble you and other minds have established associations within its walls and chambers too.”

These words sounded mysteriously in my ears.

Let me say here, before I bring my reminiscences to a close, a word or two about the house in which these detested scenes occurred, and which I did not long continue to inhabit. What I afterwards learned of it, seemed to supply in part a dim explanation of these words.

In a country village there is no difficulty in accounting for the tenacity with which the sinister character of a haunted tenement cleaves to it. Thin neighbourhoods are favourable to scandal; and in such localities the reputation of a house, like that of a woman, once blown upon, never quite recovers. In huge London, however, it is quite another matter; and, therefore, it was with some surprise that, five years after I had vacated the house in which the occurrences I have described took place, I learned that a respectable family who had taken it were obliged to give it up, on account of annoyances, for which they could not account, and all proceeding from the apartments formerly occupied by our “lodger.” Among the sounds described were footsteps restlessly traversing the floor of that room, accompanied by the peculiar tapping of the crutch.

I was so anxious about this occurrence, that I contrived to have strict inquiries made into the matter. The result, however, added little to what I had at first learned – except, indeed, that our old friend, the cat, bore a part in the transaction as I suspected; for the servant, who had been placed to sleep in the room, complained that something bounded on and off, and ran to-and-fro along the foot of the bed, in the dark. The same servant, while in the room, in the broad daylight, had heard the sound of walking, and even the rustling of clothes near him, as of people passing and re passing; and, although he had never seen anything, he yet became so terrified that he would not remain in the house, and ultimately, in a short time, left his situation.

These sounds, attention having been called to them, were now incessantly observed – the measured walking up and down the room, the opening and closing of the door, and the teazing tap of the crutch – all these sounds were continually repeated, until at last, worn out, frightened, and worried, its occupants resolved on abandoning the house.

About four years since, having had occasion to visit the capital, I resolved on a ramble by Old Brompton, just to see if the house were still inhabited. I searched for it, however, in vain, and at length, with difficulty, ascertained its site, upon which now stood two small, staring, bran-new brick houses, with each a gay enclosure of flowers. Every trace of our old mansion, and, let us hope, of our “mysterious lodger,” had entirely vanished.

Let me, however, return to my narrative where I left it.

Discoursing upon heavenly matters, my good and gracious friend accompanied me even within the outer gate of my own house. I asked him to come in and rest himself, but he would not; and before he turned to depart, he lifted up his hand, and blessed me and my household.

Having done this, he went away. My eyes followed him till he disappeared, and I turned to the house. My darling wife was standing at the window of the parlour. There was a seraphic smile on her face – pale, pure, and beautiful as death. She was gazing with an humble, heavenly earnestness on us. The parting blessing of the stranger shed a sweet and hallowed influence on my heart. I went into the parlour, to my darling: childless she was now; I had now need to be a tender companion to her.

She raised her arms in a sort of transport, with the same smile of gratitude and purity, and, throwing them round my neck, she said—

“I have seen him – it is he – the man that came with you to the door, and blessed us as he went away – is the same I saw in my dream – the same who took little baby in his arms, and said he would take care of him, and give him safely to me again.”

More than a quarter of a century has glided away since then; other children have been given us by the good God – children who have been, from infancy to maturity, a pride and blessing to us. Sorrows and reverses, too, have occasionally visited us; yet, on the whole, we have been greatly blessed; prosperity has long since ended all the cares of the res angusta domi, and expanded our power of doing good to our fellow-creatures. God has given it; and God, we trust, directs its dispensation. In our children, and – would you think it? – our grand-children, too, the same beneficent God has given us objects that elicit and return all the delightful affections, and exchange the sweet converse that makes home and family dearer than aught else, save that blessed home where the Christian family shall meet at last.

The dear companion of my early love and sorrows still lives, blessed be Heaven! The evening tints of life have fallen upon her; but the dear remembrance of a first love, that never grew cold, makes her beauty changeless for me. As for your humble servant, he is considerably her senior, and looks it: time has stolen away his raven locks, and given him a chevelure of snow instead. But, as I said before, I and my wife love, and, I believe, admire one another more than ever; and I have often seen our elder children smile archly at one another, when they thought we did not observe them, thinking, no doubt, how like a pair of lovers we two were.

“Dublin University Magazine”, Jan. 1850

ULTOR DE LACY

A LEGEND OF CAPPERCULLEN

(1861)

CHAPTER I

THE JACOBITE’S LEGACY

In my youth I heard a great many Irish family traditions, more or less of a supernatural character, some of them very peculiar, and all, to a child at least, highly interesting. One of these I will now relate, though the translation to cold type from oral narrative, with all the aids of animated human voice and countenance, and the appropriate mise en scéne of the old-fashioned parlour fireside and its listening circle of excited faces, and, outside, the wintry blast and the moan of leafless boughs, with the occasional rattle of the clumsy old window-frame behind shutter and curtain, as the blast swept by, is at best a trying one.

About midway up the romantic glen of Cappercullen, near the point where the counties of Limerick, Clare, and Tipperary converge, upon the then sequestered and forest-bound range of the Slieve-Felim hills, there stood, in the reigns of the two earliest Georges, the picturesque and massive remains of one of the finest of the Anglo-Irish castles of Munster – perhaps of Ireland.

It crowned the precipitous edge of the wooded glen, itself half-buried among the wild forest that covered that long and solitary range. There was no human habitation within a circle of many miles, except the half-dozen hovels and the small thatched chapel composing the little village of Murroa, which lay at the foot of the glen among the straggling skirts of the noble forest.

Its remoteness and difficulty of access saved it from demolition. It was worth nobody’s while to pull down and remove the ponderous and clumsy oak, much less the masonry or flagged roofing of the pile. Whatever would pay the cost of removal had been long since carried away. The rest was abandoned to time – the destroyer.

The hereditary owners of this noble building and of a wide territory in the contiguous counties I have named, were English – the De Lacys – long naturalized in Ireland. They had acquired at least this portion of their estate in the reign of Henry VIII., and held it, with some vicissitudes, down to the establishment of the revolution in Ireland, when they suffered attainder, and, like other great families of that period, underwent a final eclipse.

The De Lacy of that day retired to France, and held a brief command in the Irish Brigade, interrupted by sickness. He retired, became a poor hanger-on of the Court of St. Germains, and died early in the eighteenth century – as well as I remember, 1705 – leaving an only son, hardly twelve years old, called by the strange but significant name of Ultor.

At this point commences the marvellous ingredient of my tale.

When his father was dying, he had him to his bedside, with no one by except his confessor; and having told him, first, that on reaching the age of twenty-one, he was to lay claim to a certain small estate in the county of Clare, in Ireland, in right of his mother – the title-deeds of which he gave him – and next, having enjoined him not to marry before the age of thirty, on the ground that earlier marriages destroyed the spirit and the power of enterprise, and would incapacitate him from the accomplishment of his destiny – the restoration of his family – he then went on to open to the child a matter which so terrified him that he cried lamentably, trembling all over, clinging to the priest’s gown with one hand and to his father’s cold wrist with the other, and imploring him, with screams of horror, to desist from his communication.

But the priest, impressed, no doubt, himself, with its necessity, compelled him to listen. And then his father showed him a small picture, from which also the child turned with shrieks, until similarly constrained to look. They did not let him go until he had carefully conned the features, and was able to tell them, from memory, the colour of the eyes and hair, and the fashion and hues of the dress. Then his father gave him a black box containing this portrait, which was a full-length miniature, about nine inches long, painted very finely in oils, as smooth as enamel, and folded above it a sheet of paper, written over in a careful and very legible hand.

The deeds and this black box constituted the most important legacy bequeathed to his only child by the ruined Jacobite, and he deposited them in the hands of the priest, in trust, till his boy, Ultor, should have attained to an age to understand their value, and to keep them securely.

When this scene was ended, the dying exile’s mind, I suppose, was relieved, for he spoke cheerily, and said he believed he would recover; and they soothed the crying child, and his father kissed him, and gave him a little silver coin to buy fruit with; and so they sent him off with another boy for a walk, and when he came back his father was dead.

He remained in France under the care of this ecclesiastic until he had attained the age of twenty-one, when he repaired to Ireland, and his title being unaffected by his father’s attainder, he easily made good his claim to the small estate in the county of Clare.

There he settled, making a dismal and solitary tour now and then of the vast territories which had once been his father’s, and nursing those gloomy and impatient thoughts which befitted the enterprises to which he was devoted.

Occasionally he visited Paris, that common centre of English, Irish, and Scottish disaffection; and there, when a little past thirty, he married the daughter of another ruined Irish house. His bride returned with him to the melancholy seclusion of their Munster residence, where she bore him in succession two daughters – Alice, the elder, dark-eyed and dark-haired, grave and sensible – Una, four years younger, with large blue eyes and long and beautiful golden hair.

Their poor mother was, I believe, naturally a light-hearted, sociable, high-spirited little creature; and her gay and childish nature pined in the isolation and gloom of her lot. At all events she died young, and the children were left to the sole care of their melancholy and embittered father. In process of time the girls grew up, tradition says, beautiful. The elder was designed for a convent, the younger her father hoped to mate as nobly as her high blood and splendid beauty seemed to promise, if only the great game on which he had resolved to stake all succeeded.

CHAPTER II

THE FAIRIES IN THE CASTLE

The Rebellion of ’45 came, and Ultor De Lacy was one of the few Irishmen implicated treasonably in that daring and romantic insurrection. Of course there were warrants out against him, but he was not to be found. The young ladies, indeed, remained as heretofore in their father’s lonely house in Clare; but whether he had crossed the water or was still in Ireland was for some time unknown, even to them. In due course he was attainted, and his little estate forfeited. It was a miserable catastrophe – a tremendous and beggarly waking up from a lifelong dream of returning principality.

In due course the officers of the crown came down to take possession, and it behoved the young ladies to flit. Happily for them the ecclesiastic I have mentioned was not quite so confident as their father, of his winning back the magnificent patrimony of his ancestors; and by his advice the daughters had been secured twenty pounds a year each, under the marriage settlement of their parents, which was all that stood between this proud house and literal destitution.

Late one evening, as some little boys from the village were returning from a ramble through the dark and devious glen of Cappercullen, with their pockets laden with nuts and “frahans,” to their amazement and even terror they saw a light streaming redly from the narrow window of one of the towers overhanging the precipice among the ivy and the lofty branches, across the glen, already dim in the shadows of the deepening night.

“Look – look – look – ’tis the Phooka’s tower!” was the general cry, in the vernacular Irish, and a universal scamper commenced.

The bed of the glen, strewn with great fragments of rock, among which rose the tall stems of ancient trees, and overgrown with a tangled copse, was at the best no favourable ground for a run. Now it was dark; and, terrible work breaking through brambles and hazels, and tumbling over rocks. Little Shaeen Mull Ryan, the last of the panic rout, screaming to his mates to wait for him – saw a whitish figure emerge from the thicket at the base of the stone flight of steps that descended the side of the glen, close by the castle wall, intercepting his flight, and a discordant male voice shrieked—

“I have you!”

At the same time the boy, with a cry of terror, tripped and tumbled; and felt himself roughly caught by the arm, and hauled to his feet with a shake.

A wild yell from the child, and a volley of terror and entreaty followed.

“Who is it, Larry; what’s the matter?” cried a voice, high in air, from the turret window. The words floated down through the trees, clear and sweet as the low notes of a flute.

“Only a child, my lady; a boy.”

“Is he hurt?”

“Are you hurted?” demanded the whitish man, who held him fast, and repeated the question in Irish; but the child only kept blubbering and crying for mercy, with his hands clasped, and trying to drop on his knees.

Larry’s strong old hand held him up. He was hurt, and bleeding from over his eye.

“Just a trifle hurted, my lady!”

“Bring him up here.”

Shaeen Mull Ryan gave himself over. He was among “the good people,” who he knew would keep him prisoner for ever and a day. There was no good in resisting. He grew bewildered, and yielded himself passively to his fate, and emerged from the glen on the platform above; his captor’s knotted old hand still on his arm, and looked round on the tall mysterious trees, and the grey front of the castle, revealed in the imperfect moonlight, as upon the scenery of a dream.

The old man who, with thin wiry legs, walked by his side, in a dingy white coat, and blue facings, and great pewter buttons, with his silver grey hair escaping from under his battered three-cocked hat; and his shrewd puckered resolute face, in which the boy could read no promise of sympathy, showing so white and phantom-like in the moonlight, was, as he thought, the incarnate ideal of a fairy.

This figure led him in silence under the great arched gateway, and across the grass-grown court, to the door in the far angle of the building; and so, in the dark, round and round, up a stone screw stair, and with a short turn into a large room, with a fire of turf and wood, burning on its long unused hearth, over which hung a pot, and about it an old woman with a great wooden spoon was busy. An iron candlestick supported their solitary candle; and about the floor of the room, as well as on the table and chairs, lay a litter of all sorts of things; piles of old faded hangings, boxes, trunks, clothes, pewter-plates, and cups; and I know not what more.

But what instantly engaged the fearful gaze of the boy were the figures of two ladies; red drugget cloaks they had on, like the peasant girls of Munster and Connaught, and the rest of their dress was pretty much in keeping. But they had the grand air, the refined expression and beauty, and above all, the serene air of command that belong to people of a higher rank.

The elder, with black hair and full brown eyes, sat writing at the deal table on which the candle stood, and raised her dark gaze to the boy as he came in. The other, with her hood thrown back, beautiful and riant, with a flood of wavy golden hair, and great blue eyes, and with something kind, and arch, and strange in her countenance, struck him as the most wonderful beauty he could have imagined.

They questioned the man in a language strange to the child. It was not English, for he had a smattering of that, and the man’s story seemed to amuse them. The two young ladies exchanged a glance, and smiled mysteriously. He was more convinced than ever that he was among the good people. The younger stepped gaily forward and said—

“Do you know who I am, my little man? Well, I’m the fairy Una, and this is my palace; and that fairy you see there (pointing to the dark lady, who was looking out something in a box), is my sister and family physician, the Lady Graveairs; and these (glancing at the old man and woman), are some of my courtiers; and I’m considering now what I shall do with you, whether I shall send you tonight to Lough Guir, riding on a rush, to make my compliments to the Earl of Desmond in his enchanted castle; or, straight to your bed, two thousand miles under ground, among the gnomes; or to prison in that little corner of the moon you see through the window – with the man-in-the-moon for your gaoler, for thrice three hundred years and a day! There, don’t cry. You only see how serious a thing it is for you, little boys, to come so near my castle. Now, for this once, I’ll let you go. But, henceforward, any boys I, or my people, may find within half a mile round my castle, shall belong to me for life, and never behold their home or their people more.”

And she sang a little air and chased mystically half a dozen steps before him, holding out her cloak with her pretty fingers, and courtesying very low, to his indescribable alarm.

Then, with a little laugh, she said—

“My little man, we must mend your head.”

And so they washed his scratch, and the elder one applied a plaister to it. And she of the great blue eyes took out of her pocket a little French box of bonbons and emptied it into his hand, and she said—

“You need not be afraid to eat these – they are very good – and I’ll send my fairy, Blanc-et-bleu, to set you free. Take him (she addressed Larry), and let him go, with a solemn charge.”

The elder, with a grave and affectionate smile, said, looking on the fairy—

“Brave, dear, wild Una! nothing can ever quell your gaiety of heart.”

And Una kissed her merrily on the cheek.

So the oak door of the room again opened, and Shaeen, with his conductor, descended the stair. He walked with the scared boy in grim silence near half way down the wild hillside toward Murroa, and then he stopped, and said in Irish—

“You never saw the fairies before, my fine fellow, and ’tisn’t often those who once set eyes on us return to tell it. Whoever comes nearer, night or day, than this stone,” and he tapped it with the end of his cane, “will never see his home again, for we’ll keep him till the day of judgment; good-night, little gossoon – and away with you.”

So these young ladies, Alice and Una, with two old servants, by their father’s direction, had taken up their abode in a portion of that side of the old castle which overhung the glen; and with the furniture and hangings they had removed from their late residence, and with the aid of glass in the casements and some other indispensable repairs, and a thorough airing, they made the rooms they had selected just habitable, as a rude and temporary shelter.

CHAPTER III

THE PRIEST’S ADVENTURES IN THE GLEN

At first, of course, they saw or heard little of their father. In general, however, they knew that his plan was to procure some employment in France, and to remove them there. Their present strange abode was only an adventure and an episode, and they believed that any day they might receive instructions to commence their journey.

After a little while the pursuit relaxed. The government, I believe, did not care, provided he did not obtrude himself, what became of him, or where he concealed himself. At all events, the local authorities showed no disposition to hunt him down. The young ladies’ charges on the little forfeited property were paid without any dispute, and no vexatious inquiries were raised as to what had become of the furniture and other personal property which had been carried away from the forfeited house.

The haunted reputation of the castle – for in those days, in matters of the marvellous, the oldest were children – secured the little family in the seclusion they coveted. Once, or sometimes twice a week, old Laurence, with a shaggy little pony, made a secret expedition to the city of Limerick, starting before dawn, and returning under the cover of the night, with his purchases. There was beside an occasional sly moonlit visit from the old parish priest, and a midnight mass in the old castle for the little outlawed congregation.

As the alarm and inquiry subsided, their father made them, now and then, a brief and stealthy visit. At first these were but of a night’s duration, and with great precaution; but gradually they were extended and less guarded. Still he was, as the phrase is in Munster, “on his keeping.” He had firearms always by his bed, and had arranged places of concealment in the castle in the event of a surprise. But no attempt nor any disposition to molest him appearing, he grew more at ease, if not more cheerful.

It came, at last, that he would sometimes stay so long as two whole months at a time, and then depart as suddenly and mysteriously as he came. I suppose he had always some promising plot on hand, and his head full of ingenious treason, and lived on the sickly and exciting dietary of hope deferred.

Was there a poetical justice in this, that the little ménage thus secretly established, in the solitary and time-worn pile, should have themselves experienced, but from causes not so easily explicable, those very supernatural perturbations which they had themselves essayed to inspire?

The interruption of the old priest’s secret visits was the earliest consequence of the mysterious interference which now began to display itself. One night, having left his cob in care of his old sacristan in the little village, he trudged on foot along the winding pathway, among the grey rocks and ferns that threaded the glen, intending a ghostly visit to the fair recluses of the castle, and he lost his way in this strange fashion.

There was moonlight, indeed, but it was little more than quarter-moon, and a long train of funereal clouds were sailing slowly across the sky – so that, faint and wan as it was, the light seldom shone full out, and was often hidden for a minute or two altogether. When he reached the point in the glen where the castle-stairs were wont to be, he could see nothing of them, and above, no trace of the castle towers. So, puzzled somewhat, he pursued his way up the ravine, wondering how his walk had become so unusually protracted and fatiguing.

At last, sure enough, he saw the castle as plain as could be, and a lonely streak of candlelight issuing from the tower, just as usual, when his visit was expected. But he could not find the stair; and had to clamber among the rocks and copse-wood the best way he could. But when he emerged at top, there was nothing but the bare heath. Then the clouds stole over the moon again, and he moved along with hesitation and difficulty, and once more he saw the outline of the castle against the sky, quite sharp and clear. But this time it proved to be a great battlemented mass of cloud on the horizon. In a few minutes more he was quite close, all of a sudden, to the great front, rising grey and dim in the feeble light, and not till he could have struck it with his good oak “wattle” did he discover it to be only one of those wild, grey frontages of living rock that rise here and there in picturesque tiers along the slopes of those solitary mountains. And so, till dawn, pursuing this mirage of the castle, through pools and among ravines, he wore out a night of miserable misadventure and fatigue.

Another night, riding up the glen, so far as the level way at bottom would allow, and intending to make his nag fast at his customary tree, he hears on a sudden a horrid shriek at top of the steep rocks above his head, and something – a gigantic human form, it seemed – came tumbling and bounding headlong down through the rocks, and fell with a fearful impetus just before his horse’s hoofs and there lay like a huge palpitating carcass. The horse was scared, as, indeed, was his rider, too, and more so when this apparently lifeless thing sprang up to his legs, and throwing his arms apart to bar their further progress, advanced his white and gigantic face towards them. Then the horse started about, with a snort of terror, nearly unseating the priest, and broke away into a furious and uncontrollable gallop.

I need not recount all the strange and various misadventures which the honest priest sustained in his endeavours to visit the castle, and its isolated tenants. They were enough to wear out his resolution, and frighten him into submission. And so at last these spiritual visits quite ceased; and fearing to awaken inquiry and suspicion, he thought it only prudent to abstain from attempting them in the daytime.

So the young ladies of the castle were more alone than ever. Their father, whose visits were frequently of long duration, had of late ceased altogether to speak of their contemplated departure for France, grew angry at any allusion to it, and they feared, had abandoned the plan altogether.

CHAPTER IV

THE LIGHT IN THE BELL TOWER

Shortly after the discontinuance of the priest’s visits, old Laurence, one night, to his surprise, saw light issuing from a window in the Bell Tower. It was at first only a tremulous red ray, visible only for a few minutes, which seemed to pass from the room, through whose window it escaped upon the courtyard of the castle, and so to lose itself. This tower and casement were in the angle of the building, exactly confronting that in which the little outlawed family had taken up their quarters.

The whole family were troubled at the appearance of this dull red ray from the chamber in the Bell Tower. Nobody knew what to make of it. But Laurence, who had campaigned in Italy with his old master, the young ladies’ grandfather – “the heavens be his bed this night!” – was resolved to see it out, and took his great horse-pistols with him, and ascended to the corridor leading to the tower. But his search was vain.

This light left a sense of great uneasiness among the inmates, and most certainly it was not pleasant to suspect the establishment of an independent and possibly dangerous lodger or even colony, within the walls of the same old building.

The light very soon appeared again, steadier and somewhat brighter, in the same chamber. Again old Laurence buckled on his armour, swearing ominously to himself, and this time bent in earnest upon conflict. The young ladies watched in thrilling suspense from the great window in their stronghold, looking diagonally across the court. But as Laurence, who had entered the massive range of buildings opposite, might be supposed to be approaching the chamber from which this ill-omened glare proceeded, it steadily waned, finally disappearing altogether, just a few seconds before his voice was heard shouting from the arched window to know which way the light had gone.

This lighting up of the great chamber of the Bell Tower grew at last to be of frequent and almost continual recurrence. It was, there, long ago, in times of trouble and danger, that the De Lacys of those evil days used to sit in feudal judgment upon captive adversaries, and, as tradition alleged, often gave them no more time for shrift and prayer, than it needed to mount to the battlement of the turret overhead, from which they were forthwith hung by the necks, for a caveat and admonition to all evil disposed persons viewing the same from the country beneath.

Old Laurence observed these mysterious glimmerings with an evil and an anxious eye, and many and various were the stratagems he tried, but in vain, to surprise the audacious intruders. It is, however, I believe, a fact that no phenomenon, no matter how startling at first, if prosecuted with tolerable regularity, and unattended with any new circumstances of terror, will very long continue to excite alarm or even wonder.

So the family came to acquiesce in this mysterious light. No harm accompanied it. Old Laurence, as he smoked his lonely pipe in the grass-grown courtyard, would cast a disturbed glance at it, as it softly glowed out through the darking aperture, and mutter a prayer or an oath. But he had given over the chase as a hopeless business. And Peggy Sullivan, the old dame of all work, when, by chance, for she never willingly looked toward the haunted quarter, she caught the faint reflection of its dull effulgence with the corner of her eye, would sign herself with the cross or fumble at her beads, and deeper furrows would gather in her forehead, and her face grow ashen and perturbed. And this was not mended by the levity with which the young ladies, with whom the spectre had lost his influence, familiarity, as usual, breeding contempt, had come to talk, and even to jest, about it.

CHAPTER V

THE MAN WITH THE CLARET-MARK

But as the former excitement flagged, old Peggy Sullivan produced a new one; for she solemnly avowed that she had seen a thin-faced man, with an ugly red mark all over the side of his cheek, looking out of the same window, just at sunset, before the young ladies returned from their evening walk.

This sounded in their ears like an old woman’s dream, but still it was an excitement, jocular in the morning, and just, perhaps, a little fearful as night overspread the vast and desolate building, but still, not wholly unpleasant. This little flicker of credulity suddenly, however, blazed up into the full light of conviction.

Old Laurence, who was not given to dreaming, and had a cool, hard head, and an eye like a hawk, saw the same figure, just about the same hour, when the last level gleam of sunset was tinting the summits of the towers and the tops of the tall trees that surrounded them.

He had just entered the court from the great gate, when he heard all at once the hard peculiar twitter of alarm which sparrows make when a cat or a hawk invades their safety, rising all round from the thick ivy that overclimbed the wall on his left, and raising his eyes listlessly, he saw, with a sort of shock, a thin, ungainly man, standing with his legs crossed, in the recess of the window from which the light was wont to issue, leaning with his elbows on the stone mullion, and looking down with a sort of sickly sneer, his hollow yellow cheeks being deeply stained on one side with what is called a “claret mark.”

“I have you at last, you villain!” cried Larry, in a strange rage and panic: “drop down out of that on the grass here, and give yourself up, or I’ll shoot you.”

The threat was backed with an oath, and he drew from his coat pocket the long holster pistol he was wont to carry, and covered his man cleverly.

“I give you while I count ten – one – two – three – four. If you draw back, I’ll fire, mind; five-six – you’d better be lively – seven – eight – nine – one chance more; will you come down? Then take it – ten!”

Bang went the pistol. The sinister stranger was hardly fifteen feet removed from him, and Larry was a dead shot. But this time he made a scandalous miss, for the shot knocked a little white dust from the stone wall a full yard at one side; and the fellow never shifted his negligent posture or qualified his sardonic smile during the procedure.

Larry was mortified and angry.

“You’ll not get off this time, my tulip!” he said with a grin, exchanging the smoking weapon for the loaded pistol in reserve.

“What are you pistolling, Larry?” said a familiar voice close by his elbow, and he saw his master, accompanied by a handsome young man in a cloak.

“That villain, your honour, in the window, there.”

“Why, there’s nobody there, Larry,” said De Lacy, with a laugh, though that was no common indulgence with him.

As Larry gazed, the figure somehow dissolved and broke up without receding. A hanging tuft of yellow and red ivy nodded queerly in place of the face, some broken and discoloured masonry in perspective took up the outline and colouring of the arms and figure, and two imperfect red and yellow lichen streaks carried on the curved tracing of the long spindle shanks. Larry blessed himself, and drew his hand across his damp forehead, over his bewildered eyes, and could not speak for a minute. It was all some devilish trick; he could take his oath he saw every feature in the fellow’s face, the lace and buttons of his cloak and doublet, and even his long finger nails and thin yellow fingers that overhung the cross-shaft of the window, where there was now nothing but a rusty stain left.

The young gentleman who had arrived with De Lacy, stayed that night and shared with great apparent relish the homely fare of the family. He was a gay and gallant Frenchman, and the beauty of the younger lady, and her pleasantry and spirit, seemed to make his hours pass but too swiftly, and the moment of parting sad.

When he had departed early in the morning, Ultor De Lacy had a long talk with his elder daughter, while the younger was busy with her early dairy task, for among their retainers this proles generosa reckoned a “kind” little Kerry cow.

He told her that he had visited France since he had been last at Cappercullen, and how good and gracious their sovereign had been, and how he had arranged a noble alliance for her sister Una. The young gentleman was of high blood, and though not rich, had, nevertheless, his acres and his nom de terre, besides a captain’s rank in the army. He was, in short, the very gentleman with whom they had parted only that morning. On what special business he was now in Ireland there was no necessity that he should speak; but being here he had brought him hither to present him to his daughter, and found that the impression she had made was quite what was desirable.

“You, you know, dear Alice, are promised to a conventual life. Had it been otherwise—”

He hesitated for a moment.

“You are right, dear father,” she said, kissing his hand, “I am so promised, and no earthly tie or allurement has power to draw me from that holy engagement.”

“Well,” he said, returning her caress, “I do not mean to urge you upon that point. It must not, however, be until Una’s marriage has taken place. That cannot be, for many good reasons, sooner than this time twelve months; we shall then exchange this strange and barbarous abode for Paris, where are many eligible convents, in which are entertained as sisters some of the noblest ladies of France; and there, too, in Una’s marriage will be continued, though not the name, at all events the blood, the lineage, and the title which, so sure as justice ultimately governs the course of human events, will be again established, powerful and honoured in this country, the scene of their ancient glory and transitory misfortunes. Meanwhile, we must not mention this engagement to Una. Here she runs no risk of being sought or won; but the mere knowledge that her hand was absolutely pledged, might excite a capricious opposition and repining such as neither I nor you would like to see; therefore be secret.”

The same evening he took Alice with him for a ramble round the castle wall, while they talked of grave matters, and he as usual allowed her a dim and doubtful view of some of those cloud-built castles in which he habitually dwelt, and among which his jaded hopes revived.

They were walking upon a pleasant short sward of darkest green, on one side overhung by the grey castle walls, and on the other by the forest trees that here and there closely approached it, when precisely as they turned the angle of the Bell Tower, they were encountered by a person walking directly towards them. The sight of a stranger, with the exception of the one visitor introduced by her father, was in this place so absolutely unprecedented, that Alice was amazed and affrighted to such a degree that for a moment she stood stock-still.

But there was more in this apparition to excite unpleasant emotions, than the mere circumstance of its unexpectedness. The figure was very strange, being that of a tall, lean, ungainly man, dressed in a dingy suit, somewhat of a Spanish fashion, with a brown laced cloak, and faded red stockings. He had long lank legs, long arms, hands, and fingers, and a very long sickly face, with a drooping nose, and a sly, sarcastic leer, and a great purplish stain over-spreading more than half of one cheek.

As he strode past, he touched his cap with his thin, discoloured fingers, and an ugly side glance, and disappeared round the corner. The eyes of father and daughter followed him in silence.

Ultor De Lacy seemed first absolutely terror-stricken, and then suddenly inflamed with ungovernable fury. He dropped his cane on the ground, drew his rapier, and, without wasting a thought on his daughter, pursued.

He just had a glimpse of the retreating figure as it disappeared round the far angle. The plume, and the lank hair, the point of the rapier-scabbard, the flutter of the skirt of the cloak, and one red stocking and heel; and this was the last he saw of him.

When Alice reached his side, his drawn sword still in his hand, he was in a state of abject agitation.

“Thank Heaven, he’s gone!” she exclaimed.

“He’s gone,” echoed Ultor, with a strange glare.

“And you are safe,” she added, clasping his hand.

He sighed a great sigh.

“And you don’t think he’s coming back?”

“He! – who?”

“The stranger who passed us but now. Do you know him, father?”

“Yes – and – no, child – I know him not – and yet I know him too well. Would to heaven we could leave this accursed haunt tonight. Cursed be the stupid malice that first provoked this horrible feud, which no sacrifice and misery can appease, and no exorcism can quell or even suspend. The wretch has come from afar with a sure instinct to devour my last hope – to dog us into our last retreat – and to blast with his triumph the very dust and ruins of our house. What ails that stupid priest that he has given over his visits? Are my children to be left without mass or confession – the sacraments which guard as well as save – because he once loses his way in a mist, or mistakes a streak of foam in the brook for a dead man’s face? Damn him!”

“See, Alice, if he won’t come,” he resumed, “you must only write your confession to him in full – you and Una. Laurence is trusty, and will carry it – and we’ll get the bishop’s – or, if need be, the Pope’s leave for him to give you absolution. I’ll move heaven and earth, but you shall have the sacraments, poor children! – and see him. I’ve been a wild fellow in my youth, and never pretended to sanctity; but I know there’s but one safe way – and – and – keep you each a bit of this – (he opened a small silver box) – about you while you stay here – fold and sew it up reverently in a bit of the old psaltery parchment and wear it next your hearts – ’tis a fragment of the consecrated wafer – and will help, with the saints’ protection, to guard you from harm – and be strict in fasts, and constant in prayer – I can do nothing – nor devise any help. The curse has fallen, indeed, on me and mine.”

And Alice, saw, in silence, the tears of despair roll down his pale and agitated face.

This adventure was also a secret, and Una was to hear nothing of it.

CHAPTER VI

VOICES

Now Una, nobody knew why, began to lose spirit, and to grow pale. Her fun and frolic were quite gone! Even her songs ceased. She was silent with her sister, and loved solitude better. She said she was well, and quite happy, and could in no wise be got to account for the lamentable change that had stolen over her. She had grown odd too, and obstinate in trifles; and strangely reserved and cold.

Alice was very unhappy in consequence. What was the cause of this estrangement – had she offended her, and how? But Una had never before borne resentment for an hour. What could have altered her entire nature so? Could it be the shadow and chill of coming insanity?

Once or twice, when her sister urged her with tears and entreaties to disclose the secret of her changed spirits and demeanour, she seemed to listen with a sort of silent wonder and suspicion, and then she looked for a moment full upon her, and seemed on the very point of revealing all. But the earnest dilated gaze stole downward to the floor, and subsided into an odd wily smile, and she began to whisper to herself, and the smile and the whisper were both a mystery to Alice.

She and Alice slept in the same bedroom – a chamber in a projecting tower – which on their arrival, when poor Una was so merry, they had hung round with old tapestry, and decorated fantastically according to their skill and frolic. One night, as they went to bed, Una said, as if speaking to herself—

“’tis my last night in this room – I shall sleep no more with Alice.”

“And what has poor Alice done, Una, to deserve your strange unkindness?”

Una looked on her curiously, and half frightened, and then the odd smile stole over her face like a gleam of moonlight.

“My poor Alice, what have you to do with it?” she whispered.

“And why do you talk of sleeping no more with me?” said Alice.

“Why? Alice dear – no why – no reason – only a knowledge that it must be so, or Una will die.”

“Die, Una darling! – what can you mean?”

“Yes, sweet Alice, die, indeed. We must all die some time, you know, or – or undergo a change; and my time is near – very near – unless I sleep apart from you.”

“Indeed, Una, sweetheart, I think you are ill, but not near death.”

“Una knows what you think, wise Alice – but she’s not mad – on the contrary, she’s wiser than other folks.”

“She’s sadder and stranger too,” said Alice, tenderly.

“Knowledge is sorrow,” answered Una, and she looked across the room through her golden hair which she was combing – and through the window, beyond which lay the tops of the great trees, and the still foliage of the glen in the misty moonlight.

“’tis enough, Alice dear; it must be so. The bed must move hence, or Una’s bed will be low enough ere long. See, it shan’t be far though, only into that small room.”

She pointed to an inner room or closet opening from that in which they lay. The walls of the building were hugely thick, and there were double doors of oak between the chambers, and Alice thought, with a sigh, how completely separated they were going to be.

However she offered no opposition. The change was made, and the girls for the first time since childhood lay in separate chambers. A few nights afterwards Alice, awoke late in the night from a dreadful dream, in which the sinister figure which she and her father had encountered in their ramble round the castle walls, bore a principal part.

When she awoke there were still in her ears the sounds which had mingled in her dream. They were the notes of a deep, ringing, bass voice rising from the glen beneath the castle walls – something between humming and singing – listlessly unequal and intermittent, like the melody of a man whiling away the hours over his work. While she was wondering at this unwonted minstrelsy, there came a silence, and – could she believe her ears? – it certainly was Una’s clear low contralto – softly singing a bar or two from the window. Then once more silence – and then again the strange manly voice, faintly chaunting from the leafy abyss.

With a strange wild feeling of suspicion and terror, Alice glided to the window. The moon who sees so many things, and keeps all secrets, with her cold impenetrable smile, was high in the sky. But Alice saw the red flicker of a candle from Una’s window, and, she thought, the shadow of her head against the deep side wall of its recess. Then this was gone, and there were no more sights or sounds that night.

As they sat at breakfast, the small birds were singing merrily from among the sun-tipped foliage.

“I love this music,” said Alice, unusually pale and sad; “it comes with the pleasant light of morning. I remember, Una, when you used to sing, like those gay birds, in the fresh beams of the morning; that was in the old time, when Una kept no secret from poor Alice.”

“And Una knows what her sage Alice means; but there are other birds, silent all day long, and, they say, the sweetest too, that love to sing by night alone.”

So things went on – the elder girl pained and melancholy – the younger silent, changed, and unaccountable.

A little while after this, very late one night, on awaking, Alice heard a conversation being carried on in her sister’s room. There seemed to be no disguise about it. She could not distinguish the words, indeed, the walls being some six feet thick, and two great oak doors intercepting. But Una’s clear voice, and the deep bell-like tones of the unknown, made up the dialogue.

Alice sprung from her bed, threw her clothes about her, and tried to enter her sister’s room; but the inner door was bolted. The voices ceased to speak as she knocked, and Una opened it, and stood before her in her nightdress, candle in hand.

“Una – Una, darling, as you hope for peace, tell me who is here?” cried frightened Alice, with her trembling arms about her neck.

Una drew back, with her large, innocent blue eyes fixed full upon her.

“Come in, Alice,” she said, coldly.

And in came Alice, with a fearful glance around. There was no hiding place there; a chair, a table, a little bedstead, and two or three pegs in the wall to hang clothes on; a narrow window, with two iron bars across; no hearth or chimney – nothing but bare walls.

Alice looked round in amazement, and her eyes glanced with painful inquiry into those of her sister’s. Una smiled one of her peculiar sidelong smiles, and said—

“Strange dreams! I’ve been dreaming – so has Alice. She hears and sees Una’s dreams, and wonders – and well she may.”

And she kissed her sister’s cheek with a cold kiss, and lay down in her little bed, her slender hand under her head, and spoke no more.

Alice, not knowing what to think, went back to hers.

About this time Ultor De Lacy returned. He heard his elder daughter’s strange narrative with marked uneasiness, and his agitation seemed to grow rather than subside. He enjoined her, however, not to mention it to the old servant, nor in presence of anybody she might chance to see, but only to him and to the priest, if he could be persuaded to resume his duty and return. The trial, however, such as it was, could not endure very long; matters had turned out favourably. The union of his younger daughter might be accomplished within a few months, and in eight or nine weeks they should be on their way to Paris.

A night or two after her father’s arrival, Alice, in the dead of the night, heard the well-known strange deep voice speaking softly, as it seemed, close to her own window on the outside; and Una’s voice, clear and tender, spoke in answer. She hurried to her own casement, and pushed it open, kneeling in the deep embrasure, and looking with a stealthy and affrighted gaze towards her sister’s window. As she crossed the floor the voices subsided, and she saw a light withdrawn from within. The moonbeams slanted bright and clear on the whole side of the castle overlooking the glen, and she plainly beheld the shadow of a man projected on the wall as on a screen.

This black shadow recalled with a horrid thrill the outline and fashion of the figure in the Spanish dress. There were the cap and mantle, the rapier, the long thin limbs and sinister angularity. It was so thrown obliquely that the hands reached to the windowsill, and the feet stretched and stretched, longer and longer as she looked, toward the ground, and disappeared in the general darkness; and the rest, with a sudden flicker, shot downwards, as shadows will on the sudden movement of a light, and was lost in one gigantic leap down the castle wall.

“I do not know whether I dream or wake when I hear and see these sights; but I will ask my father to sit up with me, and we two surely cannot be mistaken. May the holy saints keep and guard us!” And in her terror she buried her head under the bed-clothes, and whispered her prayers for an hour.

CHAPTER VII

UNA’S LOVE

“I have been with Father Denis,” said De Lacy, next day, “and he will come tomorrow; and, thank Heaven! you may both make your confession and hear mass, and my mind will be at rest; and you’ll find poor Una happier and more like herself.”

But ’tween cup and lip there’s many a slip. The priest was not destined to hear poor Una’s shrift. When she bid her sister good-night she looked on her with her large, cold, wild eyes, till something of her old human affections seemed to gather there, and they slowly filled with tears, which dropped one after the other on her homely dress as she gazed in her sister’s face.

Alice, delighted, sprang up, and clasped her arms about her neck. “My own darling treasure, ’tis all over; you love your poor Alice again, and will be happier than ever.”

But while she held her in her embrace Una’s eyes were turned towards the window, and her lips apart, and Alice felt instinctively that her thoughts were already far away.

“Hark! – listen! – hush!” and Una, with her delighted gaze fixed, as if she saw far away beyond the castle wall, the trees, the glen, and the night’s dark curtain, held her hand raised near her ear, and waved her head slightly in time, as it seemed, to music that reached not Alice’s ear, and smiled her strange pleased smile, and then the smile slowly faded away, leaving that sly suspicious light behind it which somehow scared her sister with an uncertain sense of danger; and she sang in tones so sweet and low that it seemed but a reverie of a song, recalling, as Alice fancied, the strain to which she had just listened in that strange ecstasy, the plaintive and beautiful Irish ballad, “Shule, shule, shule, aroon,” the midnight summons of the outlawed Irish soldier to his darling to follow him.

Alice had slept little the night before. She was now overpowered with fatigue; and leaving her candle burning by her bedside, she fell into a deep sleep. From this she awoke suddenly, and completely, as will sometimes happen without any apparent cause, and she saw Una come into the room. She had a little purse of embroidery – her own work – in her hand; and she stole lightly to the bedside, with her peculiar oblique smile, and evidently thinking that her sister was asleep.

Alice was thrilled with a strange terror, and did not speak or move; and her sister, slipped her hand softly under her bolster, and withdrew it. Then Una stood for a while by the hearth, and stretched her hand up to the mantelpiece, from which she took a little bit of chalk, and Alice thought she saw her place it in the fingers of a long yellow hand that was stealthily introduced from her own chamber door to receive it; and Una paused in the dark recess of the door, and smiled over her shoulder toward her sister, and then glided into her room, closing the doors.

Almost freezing with terror, Alice rose and glided after her, and stood in her chamber, screaming—

“Una, Una, in heaven’s name what troubles you?”

But Una seemed to have been sound asleep in her bed, and raised herself with a start, and looking upon her with a peevish surprise, said—

“What does Alice seek here?”

“You were in my room, Una, dear; you seem disturbed and troubled.”

“Dreams, Alice. My dreams crossing your brain; only dreams – dreams. Get you to bed, and sleep.”

And to bed she went, but not to sleep. She lay awake more than an hour; and then Una emerged once more from her room. This time she was fully dressed, and had her cloak and thick shoes on, as their rattle on the floor plainly discovered. She had a little bundle tied up in a handkerchief in her hand, and her hood was drawn about her head; and thus equipped, as it seemed, for a journey, she came and stood at the foot of Alice’s bed, and stared on her with a look so soulless and terrible that her senses almost forsook her. Then she turned and went back into her own chamber.

She may have returned; but Alice thought not – at least she did not see her. But she lay in great excitement and perturbation; and was terrified, about an hour later, by a knock at her chamber door – not that opening into Una’s room, but upon the little passage from the stone screw staircase. She sprang from her bed; but the door was secured on the inside, and she felt relieved. The knock was repeated, and she heard someone laughing softly on the outside.

The morning came at last; that dreadful night was over. But Una! Where was Una?

Alice never saw her more. On the head of her empty bed were traced in chalk the words – Ultor De Lacy, Ultor O’Donnell. And Alice found beneath her own pillow the little purse of embroidery she had seen in Una’s hand. It was her little parting token, and bore the simple legend – “Una’s love!”

De Lacy’s rage and horror were boundless. He charged the priest, in frantic language, with having exposed his child, by his cowardice and neglect, to the machinations of the Fiend, and raved and blasphemed like a man demented.

It is said that he procured a solemn exorcism to be performed, in the hope of disenthralling and recovering his daughter. Several times, it is alleged, she was seen by the old servants. Once on a sweet summer morning, in the window of the tower, she was perceived combing her beautiful golden tresses, and holding a little mirror in her hand; and first, when she saw herself discovered, she looked affrighted, and then smiled, her slanting, cunning smile. Sometimes, too, in the glen, by moonlight, it was said belated villagers had met her, always startled first, and then smiling, generally singing snatches of old Irish ballads, that seemed to bear a sort of dim resemblance to her melancholy fate. The apparition has long ceased. But it is said that now and again, perhaps once in two or three years, late on a summer night, you may hear – but faint and far away in the recesses of the glen – the sweet, sad notes of Una’s voice, singing those plaintive melodies. This, too, of course, in time will cease, and all be forgotten.

CHAPTER VIII

SISTER AGNES AND THE PORTRAIT

When Ultor De Lacy died, his daughter Alice found among his effects a small box, containing a portrait such as I have described. When she looked on it, she recoiled in horror. There, in the plenitude of its sinister peculiarities, was faithfully portrayed the phantom which lived with a vivid and horrible accuracy in her remembrance. Folded in the same box was a brief narrative, stating that, “A.D. 1601, in the month of December, Walter De Lacy, of Cappercullen, made many prisoners at the ford of Ownhey, or Abington, of Irish and Spanish soldiers, flying from the great overthrow of the rebel powers at Kinsale, and among the number one Roderic O’Donnell, an arch traitor, and near kinsman to that other O’Donnell who led the rebels; who, claiming kindred through his mother to De Lacy, sued for his life with instant and miserable entreaty, and offered great ransom, but was by De Lacy, through great zeal for the queen, as some thought, cruelly put to death. When he went to the tower-top, where was the gallows, finding himself in extremity, and no hope of mercy, he swore that though he could work them no evil before his death, yet that he would devote himself thereafter to blast the greatness of the De Lacys, and never leave them till his work was done. He hath been seen often since, and always for that family perniciously, insomuch that it hath been the custom to show to young children of that lineage the picture of the said O’Donnell, in little, taken among his few valuables, to prevent their being misled by him unawares, so that he should not have his will, who by devilish wiles and hell-born cunning, hath steadfastly sought the ruin of that ancient house, and especially to leave that stemma generosum destitute of issue for the transmission of their pure blood and worshipful name.”

Old Miss Croker, of Ross House, who was near seventy in the year 1821, when she related this story to me, had seen and conversed with Alice de Lacy, a professed nun, under the name of Sister Agnes, in a religious house in King-street, in Dublin, founded by the famous Duchess of Tyrconnell, and had the narrative from her own lips. I thought the tale worth preserving, and have no more to say.

“Dublin University Magazine”, Dec. 1861

Madam Crowl’s Ghost And Other Tales of Mystery (1923)

SQUIRE TOBY’S WILL

A GHOST STORY

(1868)

Many persons accustomed to travel the old York and London road, in the days of stage-coaches, will remember passing, in the afternoon, say, of an autumn day, in their journey to the capital, about three miles south of the town of Applebury, and a mile and a half before you reach the old Angel Inn, a large black-and-white house, as those old-fashioned cage-work habitations are termed, dilapidated and weather-stained, with broad lattice windows glimmering all over in the evening sun with little diamond panes, and thrown into relief by a dense background of ancient elms. A wide avenue, now overgrown like a churchyard with grass and weeds, and flanked by double rows of the same dark trees, old and gigantic, with here and there a gap in their solemn files, and sometimes a fallen tree lying across on the avenue, leads up to the hall door.

Looking up its sombre and lifeless avenue from the top of the London coach, as I have often done, you are struck with so many signs of desertion and decay, – the tufted grass sprouting in the chinks of the steps and window-stones, the smokeless chimneys over which the jackdaws are wheeling, the absence of human life and all its evidence, that you conclude at once that the place is uninhabited and abandoned to decay. The name of this ancient house is Gylingden Hall. Tall hedges and old timber quickly shroud the old place from view, and about a quarter of a mile further on you pass, embowered in melancholy trees, a small and ruinous Saxon chapel, which, time out of mind, has been the burying-place of the family of Marston, and partakes of the neglect and desolation which brood over their ancient dwelling-place.

The grand melancholy of the secluded valley of Gylingden, lonely as an enchanted forest, in which the crows returning to their roosts among the trees, and the straggling deer who peep from beneath their branches, seem to hold a wild and undisturbed dominion, heightens the forlorn aspect of Gylingden Hall.

Of late years repairs have been neglected, and here and there the roof is stripped, and “the stitch in time” has been wanting. At the side of the house exposed to the gales that sweep through the valley like a torrent through its channel, there is not a perfect window left, and the shutters but imperfectly exclude the rain. The ceilings and walls are mildewed and green with damp stains. Here and there, where the drip falls from the ceiling, the floors are rotting. On stormy nights, as the guard described, you can hear the doors clapping in the old house, as far away as old Gryston bridge, and the howl and sobbing of the wind through its empty galleries.

About seventy years ago died the old Squire, Toby Marston, famous in that part of the world for his hounds, his hospitality, and his vices. He had done kind things, and he had fought duels: he had given away money and he had horsewhipped people. He carried with him some blessings and a good many curses, and left behind him an amount of debts and charges upon the estates which appalled his two sons, who had no taste for business or accounts, and had never suspected, till that wicked, open-handed, and swearing old gentleman died, how very nearly he had run the estates into insolvency.

They met at Gylingden Hall. They had the will before them, and lawyers to interpret, and information without stint, as to the encumbrances with which the deceased had saddled them. The will was so framed as to set the two brothers instantly at deadly feud.

These brothers differed in some points; but in one material characteristic they resembled one another, and also their departed father. They never went into a quarrel by halves, and once in, they did not stick at trifles.

The elder, Scroope Marston, the more dangerous man of the two, had never been a favourite of the old Squire. He had no taste for the sports of the field and the pleasures of a rustic life. He was no athlete, and he certainly was not handsome. All this the Squire resented. The young man, who had no respect for him, and outgrew his fear of his violence as he came to manhood, retorted. This aversion, therefore, in the ill-conditioned old man grew into positive hatred. He used to wish that damned pippin-squeezing, hump-backed rascal Scroope, out of the way of better men – meaning his younger son Charles; and in his cups would talk in a way which even the old and young fellows who followed his hounds, and drank his port, and could stand a reasonable amount of brutality, did not like.

Scroope Marston was slightly deformed, and he had the lean sallow face, piercing black eyes, and black lank hair, which sometimes accompany deformity.

“I’m no feyther o’ that hog-backed creature. I’m no sire of hisn, damn him! I’d as soon call that tongs son o’ mine,” the old man used to bawl, in allusion to his son’s long, lank limbs: “Charlie’s a man, but that’s a jack-an-ape. He has no good-nature; there’s nothing handy, nor manly, nor no one turn of a Marston in him.”

And when he was pretty drunk, the old Squire used to swear he should never “sit at the head o’ that board; nor frighten away folk from Gylingden Hall wi’ his damned hatchet-face – the black loon!”

“Handsome Charlie was the man for his money. He knew what a horse was, and could sit to his bottle; and the lasses were all clean mad about him. He was a Marston every inch of his six foot two.”

Handsome Charlie and he, however, had also had a row or two. The old Squire was free with his horsewhip as with his tongue, and on occasion when neither weapon was quite practicable, had been known to give a fellow “a tap o’ his knuckles.” Handsome Charlie, however, thought there was a period at which personal chastisement should cease; and one night, when the port was flowing, there was some allusion to Marion Hayward, the miller’s daughter, which for some reason the old gentleman did not like. Being “in liquor,” and having clearer ideas about pugilism than self-government, he struck out, to the surprise of all present, at Handsome Charlie. The youth threw back his head scientifically, and nothing followed but the crash of a decanter on the floor. But the old Squire’s blood was up, and he bounced from his chair. Up jumped Handsome Charlie, resolved to stand no nonsense. Drunken Squire Lilbourne, intending to mediate, fell flat on the floor, and cut his ear among the glasses. Handsome Charlie caught the thump which the old Squire discharged at him upon his open hand, and catching him by the cravat, swung him with his back to the wall. They said the old man never looked so purple, nor his eyes so goggle before; and then Handsome Charlie pinioned him tight to the wall by both arms.

“Well, I say – come, don’t you talk no more nonsense o’ that sort, and I won’t lick you,” croaked the old Squire. “You stopped that un clever, you did. Didn’t he? Come, Charlie, man, gie us your hand, I say, and sit down again, lad.” And so the battle ended; and I believe it was the last time the Squire raised his hand to Handsome Charlie.

But those days were over. Old Toby Marston lay cold and quiet enough now, under the drip of the mighty ash-tree within the Saxon ruin where so many of the old Marston race returned to dust, and were forgotten. The weather-stained top-boots and leather-breeches, the three-cornered cocked hat to which old gentlemen of that day still clung, and the well-known red waistcoat that reached below his hips, and the fierce pug face of the old Squire, were now but a picture of memory. And the brothers between whom he had planted an irreconcilable quarrel, were now in their new mourning suits, with the gloss still on, debating furiously across the table in the great oak parlour, which had so often resounded to the banter and coarse songs, the oaths and laughter of the congenial neighbours whom the old Squire of Gylingden Hall loved to assemble there.

These young gentlemen, who had grown up in Gylingden Hall, were not accustomed to bridle their tongues, nor, if need be, to hesitate about a blow. Neither had been at the old man’s funeral. His death had been sudden. Having been helped to his bed in that hilarious and quarrelsome state which was induced by port and punch, he was found dead in the morning, – his head hanging over the side of the bed, and his face very black and swollen.

Now the Squire’s will despoiled his eldest son of Gylingden, which had descended to the heir time out of mind. Scroope Marston was furious. His deep stern voice was heard inveighing against his dead father and living brother, and the heavy thumps on the table with which he enforced his stormy recriminations resounded through the large chamber. Then broke in Charles’s rougher voice, and then came a quick alternation of short sentences, and then both voices together in growing loudness and anger, and at last, swelling the tumult, the expostulations of pacific and frightened lawyers, and at last a sudden break up of the conference. Scroope broke out of the room, his pale furious face showing whiter against his long black hair, his dark fierce eyes blazing, his hands clenched, and looking more ungainly and deformed than ever in the convulsions of his fury.

Very violent words must have passed between them; for Charlie, though he was the winning man, was almost as angry as Scroope. The elder brother was for holding possession of the house, and putting his rival to legal process to oust him. But his legal advisers were clearly against it. So, with a heart boiling over with gall, up he went to London, and found the firm who had managed his father’s business fair and communicative enough. They looked into the settlements, and found that Gylingden was excepted. It was very odd, but so it was, specially excepted; so that the right of the old Squire to deal with it by his will could not be questioned.

Notwithstanding all this, Scroope, breathing vengeance and aggression, and quite willing to wreck himself provided he could run his brother down, assailed Handsome Charlie, and battered old Squire Toby’s will in the Prerogative Court and also at common law, and the feud between the brothers was knit, and every month their exasperation was heightened.

Scroope was beaten, and defeat did not soften him. Charles might have forgiven hard words; but he had been himself worsted during the long campaign in some of those skirmishes, special motions, and so forth, that constitute the episodes of a legal epic like that in which the Marston brothers figured as opposing combatants; and the blight of law costs had touched him, too, with the usual effect upon the temper of a man of embarrassed means.

Years flew, and brought no healing on their wings. On the contrary, the deep corrosion of this hatred bit deeper by time. Neither brother married. But an accident of a different kind befell the younger, Charles Marston, which abridged his enjoyments very materially.

This was a bad fall from his hunter. There were severe fractures, and there was concussion of the brain. For some time it was thought that he could not recover. He disappointed these evil auguries, however. He did recover, but changed in two essential particulars. He had received an injury in his hip, which doomed him never more to sit in the saddle. And the rollicking animal spirits which hitherto had never failed him, had now taken flight forever.

He had been for five days in a state of coma – absolute insensibility – and when he recovered consciousness he was haunted by an indescribable anxiety.

Tom Cooper, who had been butler in the palmy days of Gylingden Hall, under old Squire Toby, still maintained his post with old-fashioned fidelity, in these days of faded splendour and frugal housekeeping. Twenty years had passed since the death of his old master. He had grown lean, and stooped, and his face, dark with the peculiar brown of age, furrowed and gnarled, and his temper, except with his master, had waxed surly.

His master had visited Bath and Buxton, and came back, as he went, lame, and halting gloomily about with the aid of a stick. When the hunter was sold, the last tradition of the old life at Gylingden disappeared. The young Squire, as he was still called, excluded by his mischance from the hunting-field, dropped into a solitary way of life, and halted slowly and solitarily about the old place, seldom raising his eyes, and with an appearance of indescribable gloom.

Old Cooper could talk freely on occasion with his master; and one day he said, as he handed him his hat and stick in the hall:

“You should rouse yourself up a bit, Master Charles!”

“It’s past rousing with me, old Cooper.”

“It’s just this, I’m thinking: there’s something on your mind, and you won’t tell no one. There’s no good keeping it on your stomach. You’ll be a deal lighter if you tell it. Come, now, what is it, Master Charlie?”

The Squire looked with his round grey eyes straight into Cooper’s eyes. He felt that there was a sort of spell broken. It was like the old rule of the ghost who can’t speak till it is spoken to. He looked earnestly into old Cooper’s face for some seconds, and sighed deeply.

“It ain’t the first good guess you’ve made in your day, old Cooper, and I’m glad you’ve spoke. It’s bin on my mind, sure enough, ever since I had that fall. Come in here after me, and shut the door.”

The Squire pushed open the door of the oak parlour, and looked round on the pictures abstractedly. He had not been there for some time, and, seating himself on the table, he looked again for a while in Cooper’s face before he spoke.

“It’s not a great deal, Cooper, but it troubles me, and I would not tell it to the parson nor the doctor; for, God knows what they’d say, though there’s nothing to signify in it. But you were always true to the family, and I don’t mind if I tell you.”

“’Tis as safe with Cooper, Master Charles, as if ’twas locked in a chest, and sunk in a well.”

“It’s only this,” said Charles Marston, looking down on the end of his stick, with which he was tracing lines and circles, “all the time I was lying like dead, as you thought, after that fall, I was with the old master.” He raised his eyes to Cooper’s again as he spoke, and with an awful oath he repeated – “I was with him, Cooper!”

“He was a good man, sir, in his way,” repeated old Cooper, returning his gaze with awe. “He was a good master to me, and a good father to you, and I hope he’s happy. May God rest him!”

“Well,” said Squire Charles, “it’s only this: the whole of that time I was with him, or he was with me – I don’t know which. The upshot is, we were together, and I thought I’d never get out of his hands again, and all the time he was bullying me about some one thing; and if it was to save my life, Tom Cooper, by God, from the time I waked I never could call to mind what it was; and I think I’d give that hand to know; and if you can think of anything it might be – for God’s sake! don’t be afraid, Tom Cooper, but speak it out, for he threatened me hard, and it was surely him.”

Here ensued a silence.

“And what did you think it might be yourself, Master Charles?” said Cooper.

“I han’t thought of aught that’s likely. I’ll never hit on’t – never. I thought it might happen he knew something about that damn hump-backed villain, Scroope, that swore before Lawyer Gingham I made away with a paper of settlements – me and father; and, as I hope to be saved, Tom Cooper, there never was a bigger lie! I’d a had the law of him for them identical words, and cast him for more than he’s worth; only Lawyer Gingham never goes into nothing for me since money grew scarce in Gylingden; and I can’t change my lawyer, I owe him such a hatful of money. But he did, he swore he’d hang me yet for it. He said it in them identical words – he’d never rest till he hanged me for it, and I think it was, like enough, something about that, the old master was troubled; but it’s enough to drive a man mad. I can’t bring it to mind – I can’t remember a word he said, only he threatened awful, and looked – Lord a mercy on us! – frightful bad.”

“There’s no need he should. May the Lord a-mercy on him!” said the old butler.

“No, of course; and you’re not to tell a soul, Cooper – not a living soul, mind, that I said he looked bad, nor nothing about it.”

“God forbid!” said old Cooper, shaking his head. “But I was thinking, sir, it might ha’ been about the slight that’s bin so long put on him by having no stone over him, and never a scratch o’ a chisel to say who he is.”

“Aye! Well, I didn’t think o’ that. Put on your hat, old Cooper, and come down wi’ me; for I’ll look after that, at any rate.”

There is a bypath leading by a turnstile to the park, and thence to the picturesque old burying-place, which lies in a nook by the roadside, embowered in ancient trees. It was a fine autumnal sunset, and melancholy lights and long shadows spread their peculiar effects over the landscape as “Handsome Charlie” and the old butler made their way slowly toward the place where Handsome Charlie was himself to lie at last.

“Which of the dogs made that howling all last night?” asked the Squire, when they had got on a little way.

“’Twas a strange dog, Master Charlie, in front of the house; ours was all in the yard – a white dog wi’ a black head, he looked to be, and he was smelling round them mounting-steps the old master, God be wi’ him! set up, the time his knee was bad. When the tyke got up a’ top of them, howlin’ up at the windows, I’d a liked to shy something at him.”

“Hullo! Is that like him?” said the Squire, stopping short, and pointing with his stick at a dirty-white dog, with a large black head, which was scampering round them in a wide circle, half crouching with that air of uncertainty and deprecation which dogs so well know how to assume.

He whistled the dog up. He was a large, half-starved bulldog.

“That fellow has made a long journey – thin as a whipping-post, and stained all over, and his claws worn to the stumps,” said the Squire, musingly. “He isn’t a bad dog, Cooper. My poor father liked a good bulldog, and knew a cur from a good ’un.”

The dog was looking up into the Squire’s face with the peculiar grim visage of his kind, and the Squire was thinking irreverently how strong a likeness it presented to the character of his father’s fierce pug features when he was clutching his horsewhip and swearing at a keeper.

“If I did right I’d shoot him. He’ll worry the cattle, and kill our dogs,” said the Squire. “Hey, Cooper? I’ll tell the keeper to look after him. That fellow could pull down a sheep, and he shan’t live on my mutton.”

But the dog was not to be shaken off. He looked wistfully after the Squire, and after they had got a little way on, he followed timidly.

It was vain trying to drive him off. The dog ran round them in wide circles, like the infernal dog in “Faust”; only he left no track of thin flame behind him. These manœuvres were executed with a sort of beseeching air, which flattered and touched the object of this odd preference. So he called him up again, patted him, and then and there in a manner adopted him.

The dog now followed their steps dutifully, as if he had belonged to Handsome Charlie all his days. Cooper unlocked the little iron door, and the dog walked in close behind their heels, and followed them as they visited the roofless chapel.

The Marstons were lying under the floor of this little building in rows. There is not a vault. Each has his distinct grave enclosed in a lining of masonry. Each is surmounted by a stone kist, on the upper flag of which is enclosed his epitaph, except that of poor old Squire Toby. Over him was nothing but the grass and the line of masonry which indicate the site of the kist, whenever his family should afford him one like the rest.

“Well, it does look shabby. It’s the elder brother’s business; but if he won’t, I’ll see to it myself, and I’ll take care, old boy, to cut sharp and deep in it, that the elder son having refused to lend a hand the stone was put there by the younger.”

They strolled round this little burial-ground. The sun was now below the horizon, and the red metallic glow from the clouds, still illuminated by the departed sun, mingled luridly with the twilight. When Charlie peeped again into the little chapel, he saw the ugly dog stretched upon Squire Toby’s grave, looking at least twice his natural length, and performing such antics as made the young Squire stare. If you have ever seen a cat stretched on the floor, with a bunch of Valerian, straining, writhing, rubbing its jaws in long-drawn caresses, and in the absorption of a sensual ecstasy, you have seen a phenomenon resembling that which Handsome Charlie witnessed on looking in.

The head of the brute looked so large, its body so long and thin, and its joints so ungainly and dislocated, that the Squire, with old Cooper beside him, looked on with a feeling of disgust and astonishment, which, in a moment or two more, brought the Squire’s stick down upon him with a couple of heavy thumps. The beast awakened from his ecstasy, sprang to the head of the grave, and there on a sudden, thick and bandy as before, confronted the Squire, who stood at its foot, with a terrible grin, and eyes that glared with the peculiar green of canine fury.

The next moment the dog was crouching abjectly at the Squire’s feet.

“Well, he’s a rum ’un!” said old Cooper, looking hard at him.

“I like him,” said the Squire.

“I don’t,” said Cooper.

“But he shan’t come in here again,” said the Squire.

“I shouldn’t wonder if he was a witch,” said old Cooper, who remembered more tales of witchcraft than are now current in that part of the world.

“He’s a good dog,” said the Squire, dreamily. “I remember the time I’d a given a handful for him – but I’ll never be good for nothing again. Come along.”

And he stooped down and patted him. So up jumped the dog and looked up in his face, as if watching for some sign, ever so slight, which he might obey.

Cooper did not like a bone in that dog’s skin. He could not imagine what his master saw to admire in him. He kept him all night in the gun-room, and the dog accompanied him in his halting rambles about the place. The fonder his master grew of him, the less did Cooper and the other servants like him.

“He hasn’t a point of a good dog about him,” Cooper would growl. “I think Master Charlie be blind. And old Captain (an old red parrot, who sat chained to a perch in the oak parlour, and conversed with himself, and nibbled at his claws and bit his perch all day), – old Captain, the only living thing, except one or two of us, and the Squire himself, that remembers the old master, the minute he saw the dog, screeched as if he was struck, shakin’ his feathers out quite wild, and drops down, poor old soul, a-hangin’ by his foot, in a fit.”

But there is no accounting for fancies, and the Squire was one of those dogged persons who persist more obstinately in their whims the more they are opposed. But Charles Marston’s health suffered by his lameness. The transition from habitual and violent exercise to such a life as his privation now consigned him to, was never made without a risk to health; and a host of dyspeptic annoyances, the existence of which he had never dreamed of before, now beset him in sad earnest. Among these was the now not unfrequent troubling of his sleep with dreams and nightmares. In these his canine favourite invariably had a part and was generally a central, and sometimes a solitary figure. In these visions the dog seemed to stretch himself up the side of the Squire’s bed, and in dilated proportions to sit at his feet, with a horrible likeness to the pug features of old Squire Toby, with his tricks of wagging his head and throwing up his chin; and then he would talk to him about Scroope, and tell him “all wasn’t straight,” and that he “must make it up wi’ Scroope,” that he, the old Squire, had “served him an ill turn,” that “time was nigh up,” and that “fair was fair,” and he was “troubled where he was, about Scroope.”

Then in his dream this semi-human brute would approach his face to his, crawling and crouching up his body, heavy as lead, till the face of the beast was laid on his, with the same odious caresses and stretchings and writhings which he had seen over the old Squire’s grave. Then Charlie would wake up with a gasp and a howl, and start upright in the bed, bathed in a cold moisture, and fancy he saw something white sliding off the foot of the bed. Sometimes he thought it might be the curtain with white lining that slipped down, or the coverlet disturbed by his uneasy turnings; but he always fancied, at such moments, that he saw something white sliding hastily off the bed; and always when he had been visited by such dreams the dog next morning was more than usually caressing and servile, as if to obliterate, by a more than ordinary welcome, the sentiment of disgust which the horror of the night had left behind it.

The doctor half-satisfied the Squire that there was nothing in these dreams, which, in one shape or another, invariably attended forms of indigestion such as he was suffering from.

For a while, as if to corroborate this theory, the dog ceased altogether to figure in them. But at last there came a vision in which, more unpleasantly than before, he did resume his old place.

In his nightmare the room seemed all but dark; he heard what he knew to be the dog walking from the door round his bed slowly, to the side from which he always had come upon it. A portion of the room was uncarpeted, and he said he distinctly heard the peculiar tread of a dog, in which the faint clatter of the claws is audible. It was a light stealthy step, but at every tread the whole room shook heavily; he felt something place itself at the foot of his bed, and saw a pair of green eyes staring at him in the dark, from which he could not remove his own. Then he heard, as he thought, the old Squire Toby say – “The eleventh hour be passed, Charlie, and ye’ve done nothing – you and I ’a done Scroope a wrong!” and then came a good deal more, and then – “The time’s nigh up, it’s going to strike.” And with a long low growl, the thing began to creep up upon his feet; the growl continued, and he saw the reflection of the upturned green eyes upon the bed-clothes, as it began slowly to stretch itself up his body towards his face. With a loud scream, he waked. The light, which of late the Squire was accustomed to have in his bedroom, had accidentally gone out. He was afraid to get up, or even to look about the room for some time; so sure did he feel of seeing the green eyes in the dark fixed on him from some corner. He had hardly recovered from the first agony which nightmare leaves behind it, and was beginning to collect his thoughts, when he heard the clock strike twelve. And he bethought him of the words “the eleventh hour be passed – time’s nigh up – it’s going to strike!” and he almost feared that he would hear the voice reopening the subject.

Next morning the Squire came down looking ill.

“Do you know a room, old Cooper,” said he, “they used to call King Herod’s Chamber?”

“Aye, sir; the story of King Herod was on the walls o’t when I was a boy.”

“There’s a closet off it – is there?”

“I can’t be sure o’ that; but ’tisn’t worth your looking at, now; the hangings was rotten, and took off the walls, before you was born; and there’s nout there but some old broken things and lumber. I seed them put there myself by poor Twinks; he was blind of an eye, and footman afterwards. You’ll remember Twinks? He died here, about the time o’ the great snow. There was a deal o’ work to bury him, poor fellow!”

“Get the key, old Cooper; I’ll look at the room,” said the Squire.

“And what the devil can you want to look at it for?” said Cooper, with the old-world privilege of a rustic butler.

“And what the devil’s that to you? But I don’t mind if I tell you. I don’t want that dog in the gun-room, and I’ll put him somewhere else; and I don’t care if I put him there.”

“A bulldog in a bedroom! Oons, sir! the folks ’ill say you’re clean mad!”

“Well, let them; get you the key, and let us look at the room.”

“You’d shoot him if you did right, Master Charlie. You never heard what a noise he kept up all last night in the gun-room, walking to and fro growling like a tiger in a show; and, say what you like, the dog’s not worth his feed; he hasn’t a point of a dog; he’s a bad dog.”

“I know a dog better than you – and he’s a good dog!” said the Squire, testily.

“If you was a judge of a dog you’d hang that ’un,” said Cooper.

“I’m not a-going to hang him, so there’s an end. Go you, and get the key; and don’t be talking, mind, when you go down. I may change my mind.”

Now this freak of visiting King Herod’s room had, in truth, a totally different object from that pretended by the Squire. The voice in his nightmare had uttered a particular direction, which haunted him, and would give him no peace until he had tested it. So far from liking that dog today, he was beginning to regard it with a horrible suspicion; and if old Cooper had not stirred his obstinate temper by seeming to dictate, I dare say he would have got rid of that inmate effectually before evening.

Up to the third storey, long disused, he and old Cooper mounted. At the end of a dusty gallery, the room lay. The old tapestry, from which the spacious chamber had taken its name, had long given place to modern paper, and this was mildewed, and in some places hanging from the walls. A thick mantle of dust lay over the floor. Some broken chairs and boards, thick with dust, lay, along with other lumber, piled together at one end of the room.

They entered the closet, which was quite empty. The Squire looked round, and you could hardly have said whether he was relieved or disappointed.

“No furniture here,” said the Squire, and looked through the dusty window. “Did you say anything to me lately – I don’t mean this morning – about this room, or the closet – or anything – I forget—”

“Lor’ bless you! Not I. I han’t been thinkin’ o’ this room this forty year.”

“Is there any sort of old furniture called a buffet – do you remember?” asked the Squire.

“A buffet? why, yes – to be sure – there was a buffet, sure enough, in this closet, now you bring it to my mind,” said Cooper. “But it’s papered over.”

“And what is it?”

“A little cupboard in the wall,” answered the old man.

“Ho – I see – and there’s such a thing here, is there, under the paper? Show me whereabouts it was.”

“Well – I think it was somewhere about here,” answered he, rapping his knuckles along the wall opposite the window. “Aye, there it is,” he added, as the hollow sound of a wooden door was returned to his knock.

The Squire pulled the loose paper from the wall, and disclosed the doors of a small press, about two feet square, fixed in the wall.

“The very thing for my buckles and pistols, and the rest of my gimcracks,” said the Squire. “Come away, we’ll leave the dog where he is. Have you the key of that little press?”

No, he had not. The old master had emptied and locked it up, and desired that it should be papered over, and that was the history of it.

Down came the Squire, and took a strong turn-screw from his gun-case; and quietly he reascended to King Herod’s room, and, with little trouble, forced the door of the small press in the closet wall. There were in it some letters and cancelled leases, and also a parchment deed which he took to the window and read with much agitation. It was a supplemental deed executed about a fortnight after the others, and previously to his father’s marriage, placing Gylingden under strict settlement to the elder son, in what is called “tail male.” Handsome Charlie, in his fraternal litigation, had acquired a smattering of technical knowledge, and he perfectly well knew that the effect of this would be not only to transfer the house and lands to his brother Scroope, but to leave him at the mercy of that exasperated brother, who might recover from him personally every guinea he had ever received by way of rent, from the date of his father’s death.

It was a dismal, clouded day, with something threatening in its aspect, and the darkness, where he stood, was made deeper by the top of one of the huge old trees overhanging the window.

In a state of awful confusion he attempted to think over his position. He placed the deed in his pocket, and nearly made up his mind to destroy it. A short time ago he would not have hesitated for a moment under such circumstances; but now his health and his nerves were shattered, and he was under a supernatural alarm which the strange discovery of this deed had powerfully confirmed.

In this state of profound agitation he heard a sniffing at the closet door, and then an impatient scratch and a long low growl. He screwed his courage up, and, not knowing what to expect, threw the door open and saw the dog, not in his dream-shape, but wriggling with joy, and crouching and fawning with eager submission; and then wandering about the closet, the brute growled awfully into the corners of it, and seemed in an unappeasable agitation.

Then the dog returned and fawned and crouched again at his feet.

After the first moment was over, the sensations of abhorrence and fear began to subside, and he almost reproached himself for requiting the affection of this poor friendless brute with the antipathy which he had really done nothing to earn.

The dog pattered after him down the stairs. Oddly enough, the sight of this animal, after the first revulsion, reassured him; it was, in his eyes, so attached, so good-natured, and palpably so mere a dog.

By the hour of evening the Squire had resolved on a middle course; he would not inform his brother of his discovery, nor yet would he destroy the deed. He would never marry. He was past that time. He would leave a letter, explaining the discovery of the deed, addressed to the only surviving trustee – who had probably forgotten everything about it – and having seen out his own tenure, he would provide that all should be set right after his death. Was not that fair? at all events it quite satisfied what he called his conscience, and he thought it a devilish good compromise for his brother; and he went out, towards sunset, to take his usual walk.

Returning in the darkening twilight, the dog, as usual attending him, began to grow frisky and wild, at first scampering round him in great circles, as before, nearly at the top of his speed, his great head between his paws as he raced. Gradually more excited grew the pace and narrower his circuit, louder and fiercer his continuous growl, and the Squire stopped and grasped his stick hard, for the lurid eyes and grin of the brute threatened an attack. Turning round and round as the excited brute encircled him, and striking vainly at him with his stick, he grew at last so tired that he almost despaired of keeping him longer at bay; when on a sudden the dog stopped short and crawled up to his feet wriggling and crouching submissively.

Nothing could be more apologetic and abject; and when the Squire dealt him two heavy thumps with his stick, the dog whimpered only, and writhed and licked his feet. The Squire sat down on a prostrate tree; and his dumb companion, recovering his wonted spirits immediately, began to sniff and nuzzle among the roots. The Squire felt in his breast-pocket for the deed – it was safe; and again he pondered, in this loneliest of spots, on the question whether he should preserve it for restoration after his death to his brother, or destroy it forthwith. He began rather to lean toward the latter solution, when the long low growl of the dog not far off startled him.

He was sitting in a melancholy grove of old trees, that slants gently westward. Exactly the same odd effect of light I have before described – a faint red glow reflected downward from the upper sky, after the sun had set, now gave to the growing darkness a lurid uncertainty. This grove, which lies in a gentle hollow, owing to its circumscribed horizon on all but one side, has a peculiar character of loneliness.

He got up and peeped over a sort of barrier, accidentally formed of the trunks of felled trees laid one over the other, and saw the dog straining up the other side of it, and hideously stretched out, his ugly head looking in consequence twice the natural size. His dream was coming over him again. And now between the trunks the brute’s ungainly head was thrust, and the long neck came straining through, and the body, twining after it like a huge white lizard; and as it came striving and twisting through, it growled and glared as if it would devour him.

As swiftly as his lameness would allow, the Squire hurried from this solitary spot towards the house. What thoughts exactly passed through his mind as he did so, I am sure he could not have told. But when the dog came up with him it seemed appeased, and even in high good-humour, and no longer resembled the brute that haunted his dreams.

That night, near ten o’clock, the Squire, a good deal agitated, sent for the keeper, and told him that he believed the dog was mad, and that he must shoot him. He might shoot the dog in the gun-room, where he was – a grain of shot or two in the wainscot did not matter, and the dog must not have a chance of getting out.

The Squire gave the gamekeeper his double-barrelled gun, loaded with heavy shot. He did not go with him beyond the hall. He placed his hand on the keeper’s arm; the keeper said his hand trembled, and that he looked “as white as curds.”

“Listen a bit!” said the Squire under his breath.

They heard the dog in a state of high excitement in the room – growling ominously, jumping on the window-stool and down again, and running round the room.

“You’ll need to be sharp, mind – don’t give him a chance – slip in edgeways, d’ye see? and give him both barrels!”

“Not the first mad dog I’ve knocked over, sir,” said the man, looking very serious as he cocked the gun.

As the keeper opened the door, the dog had sprung into the empty grate. He said he “never see sich a stark, staring devil.” The beast made a twist round, as if, he thought, to jump up the chimney – “but that wasn’t to be done at no price,” – and he made a yell – not like a dog – like a man caught in a mill-crank, and before he could spring at the keeper, he fired one barrel into him. The dog leaped towards him, and rolled over, receiving the second barrel in his head, as he lay snorting at the keeper’s feet!

“I never seed the like; I never heard a screech like that!” said the keeper, recoiling. “It makes a fellow feel queer.”

“Quite dead?” asked the Squire.

“Not a stir in him, sir,” said the man, pulling him along the floor by the neck.

“Throw him outside the hall door now,” said the Squire; “and mind you pitch him outside the gate tonight – old Cooper says he’s a witch,” and the pale Squire smiled, “so he shan’t lie in Gylingden.”

Never was man more relieved than the Squire, and he slept better for a week after this than he had done for many weeks before.

It behoves us all to act promptly on our good resolutions. There is a determined gravitation towards evil, which, if left to itself, will bear down first intentions. If at one moment of superstitious fear, the Squire had made up his mind to a great sacrifice, and resolved in the matter of that deed so strangely recovered, to act honestly by his brother, that resolution very soon gave place to the compromise with fraud, which so conveniently postponed the restitution to the period when further enjoyment on his part was impossible. Then came more tidings of Scroope’s violent and minatory language, with always the same burthen – that he would leave no stone unturned to show that there had existed a deed which Charles had either secreted or destroyed, and that he would never rest till he had hanged him.

This of course was wild talk. At first it had only enraged him; but, with his recent guilty knowledge and suppression, had come fear. His danger was the existence of the deed, and little by little he brought himself to a resolution to destroy it. There were many falterings and recoils before he could bring himself to commit this crime. At length, however, he did it, and got rid of the custody of that which at any time might become the instrument of disgrace and ruin. There was relief in this, but also the new and terrible sense of actual guilt.

He had got pretty well rid of his supernatural qualms. It was a different kind of trouble that agitated him now.

But this night, he imagined, he was awakened by a violent shaking of his bed. He could see, in the very imperfect light, two figures at the foot of it, holding each a bedpost. One of these he half-fancied was his brother Scroope, but the other was the old Squire – of that he was sure – and he fancied that they had shaken him up from his sleep. Squire Toby was talking as Charlie wakened, and he heard him say:

“Put out of our own house by you! It won’t hold for long. We’ll come in together, friendly, and stay. Forewarned, wi’ yer eyes open, ye did it; and now Scroope’ll hang you! We’ll hang you together! Look at me, you devil’s limb.”

And the old Squire tremblingly stretched his face, torn with shot and bloody, and growing every moment more and more into the likeness of the dog, and began to stretch himself out and climb the bed over the foot-board; and he saw the figure at the other side, little more than a black shadow, begin also to scale the bed; and there was instantly a dreadful confusion and uproar in the room, and such a gabbling and laughing; he could not catch the words; but, with a scream, he woke, and found himself standing on the floor. The phantoms and the clamour were gone, but a crash and ringing of fragments was in his ears. The great china bowl, from which for generations the Marstons of Gylingden had been baptised, had fallen from the mantelpiece, and was smashed on the hearthstone.

“I’ve bin dreamin’ all night about Mr. Scroope, and I wouldn’t wonder, old Cooper, if he was dead,” said the Squire, when he came down in the morning.

“God forbid! I was adreamed about him, too, sir: I dreamed he was dammin’ and sinkin’ about a hole was burnt in his coat, and the old master, God be wi’ him! said – quite plain – I’d ’a swore ’twas himself – ‘Cooper, get up, ye damned land-loupin’ thief, and lend a hand to hang him – for he’s a daft cur, and no dog o’ mine.’ ’Twas the dog shot over night, I do suppose, as was runnin’ in my old head. I thought old master gied me a punch wi’ his knuckles, and says I, wakenin’ up, ‘At yer service, sir’; and for a while I couldn’t get it out o’ my head, master was in the room still.”

Letters from town soon convinced the Squire that his brother Scroope, so far from being dead, was particularly active; and Charlie’s attorney wrote to say, in serious alarm, that he had heard, accidentally, that he intended setting up a case, of a supplementary deed of settlement, of which he had secondary evidence, which would give him Gylingden. And at this menace Handsome Charlie snapped his fingers, and wrote courageously to his attorney; abiding what might follow with, however, a secret foreboding.

Scroope threatened loudly now, and swore after his bitter fashion, and reiterated his old promise of hanging that cheat at last. In the midst of these menaces and preparations, however, a sudden peace proclaimed itself: Scroope died, without time even to make provisions for a posthumous attack upon his brother. It was one of those cases of disease of the heart in which death is as sudden as by a bullet.

Charlie’s exultation was undisguised. It was shocking. Not, of course, altogether malignant. For there was the expansion consequent on the removal of a secret fear. There was also the comic piece of luck, that only the day before Scroope had destroyed his old will, which left to a stranger every farthing he possessed, intending in a day or two to execute another to the same person, charged with the express condition of prosecuting the suit against Charlie.

The result was, that all his possessions went unconditionally to his brother Charles as his heir. Here were grounds for abundance of savage elation. But there was also the deep-seated hatred of half a life of mutual and persistent aggression and revilings; and Handsome Charlie was capable of nursing a grudge, and enjoying a revenge with his whole heart.

He would gladly have prevented his brother’s being buried in the old Gylingden chapel, where he wished to lie; but his lawyers doubted his power, and he was not quite proof against the scandal which would attend his turning back the funeral, which would, he knew, be attended by some of the country gentry and others, with an hereditary regard for the Marstons.

But he warned his servants that not one of them were to attend it; promising, with oaths and curses not to be disregarded, that any one of them who did so, should find the door shut in his face on his return.

I don’t think, with the exception of old Cooper, that the servants cared for this prohibition, except as it baulked a curiosity always strong in the solitude of the country. Cooper was very much vexed that the eldest son of the old Squire should be buried in the old family chapel, and no sign of decent respect from Gylingden Hall. He asked his master, whether he would not, at least, have some wine and refreshments in the oak parlour, in case any of the country gentlemen who paid this respect to the old family should come up to the house? But the Squire only swore at him, told him to mind his own business, and ordered him to say, if such a thing happened, that he was out, and no preparations made, and, in fact, to send them away as they came. Cooper expostulated stoutly, and the Squire grew angrier; and after a tempestuous scene, took his hat and stick and walked out, just as the funeral descending the valley from the direction of the “Old Angel Inn” came in sight.

Old Cooper prowled about disconsolately, and counted the carriages as well as he could from the gate. When the funeral was over, and they began to drive away, he returned to the hall, the door of which lay open, and as usual deserted. Before he reached it quite, a mourning coach drove up, and two gentlemen in black cloaks, and with crapes to their hats, got out, and without looking to the right or the left, went up the steps into the house. Cooper followed them slowly. The carriage had, he supposed, gone round to the yard, for, when he reached the door, it was no longer there.

So he followed the two mourners into the house. In the hall he found a fellow-servant, who said he had seen two gentlemen, in black cloaks, pass through the hall, and go up the stairs without removing their hats, or asking leave of anyone. This was very odd, old Cooper thought, and a great liberty; so upstairs he went to make them out.

But he could not find them then, nor ever. And from that hour the house was troubled.

In a little time there was not one of the servants who had not something to tell. Steps and voices followed them sometimes in the passages, and tittering whispers, always minatory, scared them at corners of the galleries, or from dark recesses; so that they would return panic-stricken to be rebuked by thin Mrs. Beckett, who looked on such stories as worse than idle. But Mrs Beckett herself, a short time after, took a very different view of the matter.

She had herself begun to hear these voices, and with this formidable aggravation, that they came always when she was at her prayers, which she had been punctual in saying all her life, and utterly interrupted them. She was scared at such moments by dropping words and sentences, which grew, as she persisted, into threats and blasphemies.

These voices were not always in the room. They called, as she fancied, through the walls, very thick in that old house, from the neighbouring apartments, sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other; sometimes they seemed to holloa from distant lobbies, and came muffled, but threateningly, through the long panelled passages. As they approached they grew furious, as if several voices were speaking together. Whenever, as I said, this worthy woman applied herself to her devotions, these horrible sentences came hurrying towards the door, and, in panic, she would start from her knees, and all then would subside except the thumping of her heart against her stays, and the dreadful tremors of her nerves.

What these voices said, Mrs. Beckett never could quite remember one minute after they had ceased speaking; one sentence chased another away; gibe and menace and impious denunciation, each hideously articulate, were lost as soon as heard. And this added to the effect of these terrifying mockeries and invectives, that she could not, by any effort, retain their exact import, although their horrible character remained vividly present to her mind.

For a long time the Squire seemed to be the only person in the house absolutely unconscious of these annoyances. Mrs. Beckett had twice made up her mind within the week to leave. A prudent woman, however, who has been comfortable for more than twenty years in a place, thinks oftener than twice before she leaves it. She and old Cooper were the only servants in the house who remembered the good old housekeeping in Squire Toby’s day. The others were few, and such as could hardly be accounted regular servants. Meg Dobbs, who acted as housemaid, would not sleep in the house, but walked home, in trepidation, to her father’s, at the gate-house, under the escort of her little brother, every night. Old Mrs. Beckett, who was high and mighty with the make-shift servants of fallen Gylingden, let herself down all at once, and made Mrs. Kymes and the kitchenmaid move their beds into her large and faded room, and there, very frankly, shared her nightly terrors with them.

Old Cooper was testy and captious about these stories. He was already uncomfortable enough by reason of the entrance of the two muffled figures into the house, about which there could be no mistake. His own eyes had seen them. He refused to credit the stories of the women, and affected to think that the two mourners might have left the house and driven away, on finding no one to receive them.

Old Cooper was summoned at night to the oak parlour, where the Squire was smoking.

“I say, Cooper,” said the Squire, looking pale and angry, “what for ha’ you been frightenin’ they crazy women wi’ your plaguey stories? damn me, if you see ghosts here it’s no place for you, and it’s time you should pack. I won’t be left without servants. Here has been old Beckett, wi’ the cook and the kitchenmaid, as white as pipe-clay, all in a row, to tell me I must have a parson to sleep among them, and preach down the devil! Upon my soul, you’re a wise old body, filling their heads wi’ maggots! and Meg goes down to the lodge every night, afeared to lie in the house – all your doing, wi’ your old wives’ stories, – ye withered old Tom o’ Bedlam!”

“I’m not to blame, Master Charles. ’Tisn’t along o’ no stories o’ mine, for I’m never done tellin’ ’em it’s all vanity and vapours. Mrs. Beckett ’ill tell you that, and there’s been many a wry word betwixt us on the head o’t. Whate’er I may think,” said old Cooper, significantly, and looking askance, with the sternness of fear in the Squire’s face.

The Squire averted his eyes, and muttered angrily to himself, and turned away to knock the ashes out of his pipe on the hob, and then turning suddenly round upon Cooper again, he spoke, with a pale face, but not quite so angrily as before.

“I know you’re no fool, old Cooper, when you like. Suppose there was such a thing as a ghost here, don’t you see, it ain’t to them snipe-headed women it ’id go to tell its story. What ails you, man, that you should think aught about it, but just what I think? You had a good headpiece o’ yer own once, Cooper, don’t be you clappin’ a goosecap over it, as my poor father used to say; damn it, old boy, you mustn’t let ’em be fools, settin’ one another wild wi’ their blether, and makin’ the folk talk what they shouldn’t, about Gylingden and the family. I don’t think ye’d like that, old Cooper, I’m sure ye wouldn’t. The women has gone out o’ the kitchen, make up a bit o’ fire, and get your pipe. I’ll go to you, when I finish this one, and we’ll smoke a bit together, and a glass o’ brandy and water.”

Down went the old butler, not altogether unused to such condescensions in that disorderly and lonely household; and let not those who can choose their company, be too hard on the Squire who couldn’t.

When he had got things tidy, as he said, he sat down in that big old kitchen, with his feet on the fender, the kitchen candle burning in a great brass candlestick, which stood on the deal table at his elbow, with the brandy bottle and tumblers beside it, and Cooper’s pipe also in readiness. And these preparations completed, the old butler, who had remembered other generations and better times, fell into rumination, and so, gradually, into a deep sleep.

Old Cooper was half awakened by someone laughing low, near his head. He was dreaming of old times in the Hall, and fancied one of “the young gentlemen” going to play him a trick, and he mumbled something in his sleep, from which he was awakened by a stern deep voice, saying, “You wern’t at the funeral; I might take your life, I’ll take your ear.” At the same moment, the side of his head received a violent push, and he started to his feet. The fire had gone down, and he was chilled. The candle was expiring in the socket, and threw on the white wall long shadows, that danced up and down from the ceiling to the ground, and their black outlines he fancied resembled the two men in cloaks, whom he remembered with a profound horror.

He took the candle, with all the haste he could, getting along the passage, on whose walls the same dance of black shadows was continued, very anxious to reach his room before the light should go out. He was startled half out of his wits by the sudden clang of his master’s bell, close over his head, ringing furiously.

“Ha, ha! There it goes – yes, sure enough,” said Cooper, reassuring himself with the sound of his own voice, as he hastened on, hearing more and more distinct every moment the same furious ringing. “He’s fell asleep, like me; that’s it, and his lights is out, I lay you fifty—”

When he turned the handle of the door of the oak parlour, the Squire wildly called, “Who’s there?” in the tone of a man who expects a robber.

“It’s me, old Cooper, all right, Master Charlie, you didn’t come to the kitchen after all, sir.”

“I’m very bad, Cooper; I don’t know how I’ve been. Did you meet anything?” asked the Squire.

“No,” said Cooper.

They stared on one another.

“Come here – stay here! Don’t you leave me! Look round the room, and say is all right; and gie us your hand, old Cooper, for I must hold it.” The Squire’s was damp and cold, and trembled very much. It was not very far from daybreak now.

After a time he spoke again: “I ’a’ done many a thing I shouldn’t; I’m not fit to go, and wi’ God’s blessin’ I’ll look to it – why shouldn’t I? I’m as lame as old Billy – I’ll never be able to do any good no more, and I’ll give over drinking, and marry, as I ought to ’a done long ago – none o’ yer fine ladies, but a good homely wench; there’s Farmer Crump’s youngest daughter, a good lass, and discreet. What for shouldn’t I take her? She’d take care o’ me, and wouldn’t bring a head full o’ romances here, and mantua-makers’ trumpery, and I’ll talk with the parson, and I’ll do what’s fair wi’ everyone; and mind, I said I’m sorry for many a thing I ’a done.”

A wild cold dawn had by this time broken. The Squire, Cooper said, looked “awful bad,” as he got his hat and stick, and sallied out for a walk, instead of going to his bed, as Cooper besought him, looking so wild and distracted, that it was plain his object was simply to escape from the house. It was twelve o’clock when the Squire walked into the kitchen, where he was sure of finding some of the servants, looking as if ten years had passed over him since yesterday. He pulled a stool by the fire, without speaking a word, and sat down. Cooper had sent to Applebury for the doctor, who had just arrived, but the Squire would not go to him. “If he wants to see me, he may come here,” he muttered as often as Cooper urged him. So the doctor did come, charily enough, and found the Squire very much worse than he had expected.

The Squire resisted the order to get to his bed. But the doctor insisted under a threat of death, at which his patient quailed.

“Well, I’ll do what you say – only this – you must let old Cooper and Dick Keeper stay wi’ me. I mustn’t be left alone, and they must keep awake o’ nights; and stay a while, do you. When I get round a bit, I’ll go and live in a town. It’s dull livin’ here, now that I can’t do nout, as I used, and I’ll live a better life, mind ye; ye heard me say that, and I don’t care who laughs, and I’ll talk wi’ the parson. I like ’em to laugh, hang ’em, it’s a sign I’m doin’ right, at last.”

The doctor sent a couple of nurses from the County Hospital, not choosing to trust his patient to the management he had selected, and he went down himself to Gylingden to meet them in the evening. Old Cooper was ordered to occupy the dressing-room, and sit up at night, which satisfied the Squire, who was in a strangely excited state, very low, and threatened, the doctor said, with fever.

The clergyman came, an old, gentle, “book-learned” man, and talked and prayed with him late that evening. After he had gone the Squire called the nurses to his bedside, and said:

“There’s a fellow sometimes comes; you’ll never mind him. He looks in at the door and beckons, – a thin, hump-backed chap in mourning, wi’ black gloves on; ye’ll know him by his lean face, as brown as the wainscot: don’t ye mind his smilin’. You don’t go out to him, nor ask him in; he won’t say nout; and if he grows anger’d and looks awry at ye, don’t ye be afeared, for he can’t hurt ye, and he’ll grow tired waitin’, and go away; and for God’s sake mind ye don’t ask him in, nor go out after him!”

The nurses put their heads together when this was over, and held afterwards a whispering conference with old Cooper. “Law bless ye! – no, there’s no madman in the house,” he protested; “not a soul but what ye saw, – it’s just a trifle o’ the fever in his head – no more.”

The Squire grew worse as the night wore on. He was heavy and delirious, talking of all sorts of things – of wine, and dogs, and lawyers; and then he began to talk, as it were, to his brother Scroope. As he did so, Mrs. Oliver, the nurse, who was sitting up alone with him, heard, as she thought, a hand softly laid on the door-handle outside, and a stealthy attempt to turn it. “Lord bless us! who’s there?” she cried, and her heart jumped into her mouth, as she thought of the hump-backed man in black, who was to put in his head smiling and beckoning – “Mr. Cooper! sir! are you there?” she cried. “Come here, Mr. Cooper, please – do, sir, quick!”

Old Cooper, called up from his doze by the fire, stumbled in from the dressing-room, and Mrs. Oliver seized him tightly as he emerged.

“The man with the hump has been atryin’ the door, Mr. Cooper, as sure as I am here.” The Squire was moaning and mumbling in his fever, understanding nothing, as she spoke. “No, no! Mrs. Oliver, ma’am, it’s impossible, for there’s no sich man in the house: what is Master Charlie sayin’?”

“He’s saying Scroope every minute, whatever he means by that, and – and – hisht! – listen – there’s the handle again,” and, with a loud scream, she added – “Look at his head and neck in at the door!” and in her tremor she strained old Cooper in an agonizing embrace.

The candle was flaring, and there was a wavering shadow at the door that looked like the head of a man with a long neck, and a longish sharp nose, peeping in and drawing back.

“Don’t be a damn fool, ma’am!” cried Cooper, very white, and shaking her with all his might. “It’s only the candle, I tell you – nothing in life but that. Don’t you see?” and he raised the light; “and I’m sure there was no one at the door, and I’ll try, if you let me go.”

The other nurse was asleep on a sofa, and Mrs. Oliver called her up in a panic, for company, as old Cooper opened the door. There was no one near it, but at the angle of the gallery was a shadow resembling that which he had seen in the room. He raised the candle a little, and it seemed to beckon with a long hand as the head drew back. “Shadow from the candle!” exclaimed Cooper aloud, resolved not to yield to Mrs. Oliver’s panic; and, candle in hand, he walked to the corner. There was nothing. He could not forbear peeping down the long gallery from this point, and as he moved the light, he saw precisely the same sort of shadow, a little further down, and as he advanced the same withdrawal, and beckon. “Gammon!” said he; “it is nout but the candle.” And on he went, growing half angry and half frightened at the persistency with which this ugly shadow – a literal shadow he was sure it was – presented itself. As he drew near the point where it now appeared, it seemed to collect itself, and nearly dissolve in the central panel of an old carved cabinet which he was now approaching.

In the centre panel of this is a sort of boss carved into a wolf’s head. The light fell oddly upon this, and the fugitive shadow seemed to be breaking up, and re-arranging itself as oddly. The eyeball gleamed with a point of reflected light, which glittered also upon the grinning mouth, and he saw the long, sharp nose of Scroope Marston, and his fierce eye looking at him, he thought, with a steadfast meaning.

Old Cooper stood gazing upon this sight, unable to move, till he saw the face, and the figure that belonged to it, begin gradually to emerge from the wood. At the same time he heard voices approaching rapidly up a side gallery, and Cooper, with a loud “Lord a-mercy on us!” turned and ran back again, pursued by a sound that seemed to shake the old house like a mighty gust of wind.

Into his master’s room burst old Cooper, half wild with fear, and clapped the door and turned the key in a twinkling, looking as if he had been pursued by murderers.

“Did you hear it?” whispered Cooper, now standing near the dressing-room door. They all listened, but not a sound from without disturbed the utter stillness of night. “God bless us! I doubt it’s my old head that’s gone crazy!” exclaimed Cooper.

He would tell them nothing but that he was himself “an old fool,” to be frightened by their talk, and that “the rattle of a window, or the dropping o’ a pin” was enough to scare him now; and so he helped himself through that night with brandy, and sat up talking by his master’s fire.

The Squire recovered slowly from his brain fever, but not perfectly. A very little thing, the doctor said, would suffice to upset him. He was not yet sufficiently strong to remove for change of scene and air, which were necessary for his complete restoration.

Cooper slept in the dressing-room, and was now his only nightly attendant. The ways of the invalid were odd: he liked, half sitting up in his bed, to smoke his churchwarden o’ nights, and made old Cooper smoke, for company, at the fireside. As the Squire and his humble friend indulged in it, smoking is a taciturn pleasure, and it was not until the Master of Gylingden had finished his third pipe that he essayed conversation, and when he did, the subject was not such as Cooper would have chosen.

“I say, old Cooper, look in my face, and don’t be afeared to speak out,” said the Squire, looking at him with a steady, cunning smile; “you know all this time, as well as I do, who’s in the house. You needn’t deny – hey? – Scroope and my father?”

“Don’t you be talking like that, Charlie,” said old Cooper, rather sternly and frightened, after a long silence; still looking in his face, which did not change.

“What’s the good o’ shammin’, Cooper? Scroope’s took the hearin’ o’ yer right ear – you know he did. He’s looking angry. He’s nigh took my life wi’ this fever. But he’s not done wi’ me yet, and he looks awful wicked. Ye saw him – ye know ye did.”

Cooper was awfully frightened, and the odd smile on the Squire’s lips frightened him still more. He dropped his pipe, and stood gazing in silence at his master, and feeling as if he were in a dream.

“If ye think so, ye should not be smiling like that,” said Cooper, grimly.

“I’m tired, Cooper, and it’s as well to smile as t’other thing; so I’ll even smile while I can. You know what they mean to do wi’ me. That’s all I wanted to say. Now, lad, go on wi’ yer pipe – I’m goin’ asleep.”

So the Squire turned over in his bed, and lay down serenely, with his head on the pillow. Old Cooper looked at him, and glanced at the door, and then half-filled his tumbler with brandy, and drank it off, and felt better, and got to his bed in the dressing-room.

In the dead of night he was suddenly awakened by the Squire, who was standing, in his dressing-gown and slippers, by his bed.

“I’ve brought you a bit o’ a present. I got the rents o’ Hazelden yesterday, and ye’ll keep that for yourself – it’s a fifty – and give t’ other to Nelly Carwell, tomorrow; I’ll sleep the sounder; and I saw Scroope since; he’s not such a bad ’un after all, old fellow! He’s got a crape over his face – for I told him I couldn’t bear it; and I’d do many a thing for him now. I never could stand shilly-shally. Good-night, old Cooper!”

And the Squire laid his trembling hand kindly on the old man’s shoulder, and returned to his own room. “I don’t half like how he is. Doctor don’t come half often enough. I don’t like that queer smile o’ his, and his hand was as cold as death. I hope in God his brain’s not a-turnin’!”

With these reflections, he turned to the pleasanter subject of his present, and at last fell asleep.

In the morning, when he went into the Squire’s room, the Squire had left his bed. “Never mind; he’ll come back, like a bad shillin’,” thought old Cooper, preparing the room as usual. But he did not return. Then began an uneasiness, succeeded by a panic, when it began to be plain that the Squire was not in the house. What had become of him? None of his clothes, but his dressing-gown and slippers, were missing. Had he left the house, in his present sickly state, in that garb? and, if so, could he be in his right senses; and was there a chance of his surviving a cold, damp night, so passed, in the open air?

Tom Edwards was up to the house, and told them, that, walking a mile or so that morning, at four o’clock – there being no moon – along with Farmer Nokes, who was driving his cart to market, in the dark, three men walked, in front of the horse, not twenty yards before them, all the way from near Gylingden Lodge to the burial-ground, the gate of which was opened for them from within, and the three men entered, and the gate was shut. Tom Edwards thought they were gone in to make preparation for a funeral of some member of the Marston family. But the occurrence seemed to Cooper, who knew there was no such thing, horribly ominous.

He now commenced a careful search, and at last bethought him of the lonely upper storey, and King Herod’s chamber. He saw nothing changed there, but the closet door was shut, and, dark as was the morning, something, like a large white knot sticking out over the door, caught his eye.

The door resisted his efforts to open it for a time; some great weight forced it down against the floor; at length, however, it did yield a little, and a heavy crash, shaking the whole floor, and sending an echo flying through all the silent corridors, with a sound like receding laughter, half stunned him.

When he pushed open the door, his master was lying dead upon the floor. His cravat was drawn halter-wise tight round his throat, and had done its work well. The body was cold, and had been long dead.

In due course the coroner held his inquest, and the jury pronounced, “that the deceased, Charles Marston, had died by his own hand, in a state of temporary insanity.” But old Cooper had his own opinion about the Squire’s death, though his lips were sealed, and he never spoke about it. He went and lived for the residue of his days in York, where there are still people who remember him, a taciturn and surly old man, who attended church regularly, and also drank a little, and was known to have saved some money.

“Temple Bar” magazine, Jan. 1868

Madam Crowl’s Ghost And Other Tales of Mystery (1923)

THE HAUNTED BARONET

(1870)

CHAPTER I

THE GEORGE AND DRAGON

The pretty little town of Golden Friars – standing by the margin of the lake, hemmed round by an amphitheatre of purple mountain, rich in tint and furrowed by ravines, high in air, when the tall gables and narrow windows of its ancient graystone houses, and the tower of the old church, from which every evening the curfew still rings, show like silver in the moonbeams, and the black elms that stand round throw moveless shadows upon the short level grass – is one of the most singular and beautiful sights I have ever seen.

There it rises, “as from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand,” looking so light and filmy, that you could scarcely believe it more than a picture reflected on the thin mist of night.

On such a still summer night the moon shone splendidly upon the front of the George and Dragon, the comfortable graystone inn of Golden Friars, with the grandest specimen of the old inn-sign, perhaps, left in England. It looks right across the lake; the road that skirts its margin running by the steps of the hall door, opposite to which, at the other side of the road, between two great posts, and framed in a fanciful wrought-iron border splendid with gilding, swings the famous sign of St. George and the Dragon, gorgeous with colour and gold.

In the great room of the George and Dragon, three or four of the old habitués of that cosy lounge were refreshing a little after the fatigues of the day.

This is a comfortable chamber, with an oak wainscot; and whenever in summer months the air is sharp enough, as on the present occasion, a fire helped to light it up; which fire, being chiefly wood, made a pleasant broad flicker on panel and ceiling, and yet did not make the room too hot.

On one side sat Doctor Torvey, the doctor of Golden Friars, who knew the weak point of every man in the town, and what medicine agreed with each inhabitant – a fat gentleman, with a jolly laugh and an appetite for all sorts of news, big and little, and who liked a pipe, and made a tumbler of punch at about this hour, with a bit of lemon-peel in it. Beside him sat William Peers, a thin old gentleman, who had lived for more than thirty years in India, and was quiet and benevolent, and the last man in Golden Friars who wore a pigtail. Old Jack Amerald, an ex-captain of the navy, with his short stout leg on a chair, and its wooden companion beside it, sipped his grog, and bawled in the old-fashioned navy way, and called his friends his “hearties.” In the middle, opposite the hearth, sat deaf Tom Hollar, always placid, and smoked his pipe, looking serenely at the fire. And the landlord of the George and Dragon every now and then strutted in, and sat down in the high-backed wooden armchair, according to the old-fashioned republican ways of the place, and took his share in the talk gravely, and was heartily welcome.

“And so Sir Bale is coming home at last,” said the Doctor. “Tell us any more you heard since.”

“Nothing,” answered Richard Turnbull, the host of the George. “Nothing to speak of; only ’tis certain sure, and so best; the old house won’t look so dowly now.”

“Twyne says the estate owes a good capful o’ money by this time, hey?” said the Doctor, lowering his voice and winking.

“Weel, they do say he’s been nout at dow. I don’t mind saying so to you, mind, sir, where all’s friends together; but he’ll get that right in time.”

“More like to save here than where he is,” said the Doctor with another grave nod.

“He does very wisely,” said Mr. Peers, having blown out a thin stream of smoke, “and creditably, to pull up in time. He’s coming here to save a little, and perhaps he’ll marry; and it is the more creditable, if, as they say, he dislikes the place, and would prefer staying where he is.”

And having spoken thus gently, Mr. Peers resumed his pipe cheerfully.

“No, he don’t like the place; that is, I’m told he didn’t,” said the innkeeper.

“He hates it,” said the Doctor with another dark nod.

“And no wonder, if all’s true I’ve heard,” cried old Jack Amerald. “Didn’t he drown a woman and her child in the lake?”

“Hollo! my dear boy, don’t let them hear you say that; you’re all in the clouds.”

“By Jen!” exclaimed the landlord after an alarmed silence, with his mouth and eyes open, and his pipe in his hand, “why, sir, I pay rent for the house up there. I’m thankful – dear knows, I am thankful – we’re all to ourselves!”

Jack Amerald put his foot on the floor, leaving his wooden leg in its horizontal position, and looked round a little curiously.

“Well, if it wasn’t him, it was someone else. I’m sure it happened up at Mardykes. I took the bearings on the water myself from Glads Scaur to Mardykes Jetty, and from the George and Dragon sign down here – down to the white house under Forrick Fells. I could fix a buoy over the very spot. Someone here told me the bearings, I’d take my oath, where the body was seen; and yet no boat could ever come up with it; and that was queer, you know, so I clapt it down in my log.”

“Aye, sir, there was some flummery like that, Captain,” said Turnbull; “for folk will be gabbin’. But ’twas his grandsire was talked o’, not him; and ’twould play the hangment wi’ me doun here, if ’twas thought there was stories like that passin’ in the George and Dragon.”

“Well, his grandfather; ’twas all one to him, I take it.”

“There never was no proof, Captain, no more than smoke; and the family up at Mardykes wouldn’t allow the king to talk o’ them like that, sir; for though they be lang dead that had most right to be angered in the matter, there’s none o’ the name but would be half daft to think ’twas still believed, and he full out as mich as any. Not that I need care more than another, though they do say he’s a bit frowsy and short-waisted; for he can’t shouther me out o’ the George while I pay my rent, till nine hundred and ninety-nine year be rin oot; and a man, be he ne’er sa het, has time to cool before then. But there’s no good quarrellin’ wi’ teathy folk; and it may lie in his way to do the George mony an ill turn, and mony a gude one; an’ it’s only fair to say it happened a long way before he was born, and there’s no good in vexin’ him; and I lay ye a pound, Captain, the Doctor hods wi’ me.”

The Doctor, whose business was also sensitive, nodded; and then he said, “But for all that, the story’s old, Dick Turnbull – older than you or I, my jolly good friend.”

“And best forgotten,” interposed the host of the George.

“Aye, best forgotten; but that it’s not like to be,” said the Doctor, plucking up courage. “Here’s our friend the Captain has heard it; and the mistake he has made shows there’s one thing worse than its being quite remembered, and that is, its being half remembered. We can’t stop people talking; and a story like that will see us all off the hooks, and be in folks’ mouths, still, as strong as ever.”

“Aye; and now I think on it, ’twas Dick Harman that has the boat down there – an old tar like myself – that told me that yarn. I was trying for pike, and he pulled me over the place, and that’s how I came to hear it. I say, Tom, my hearty, serve us out another glass of brandy, will you?” shouted the Captain’s voice as the waiter crossed the room; and that florid and grizzled naval hero clapped his leg again on the chair by its wooden companion, which he was wont to call his jury-mast.

“Well, I do believe it will be spoke of longer than we are like to hear,” said the host, “and I don’t much matter the story, if it baint told o’ the wrong man.” Here he touched his tumbler with the spoon, indicating by that little ring that Tom, who had returned with the Captain’s grog, was to replenish it with punch. “And Sir Bale is like to be a friend to this house. I don’t see no reason why he shouldn’t. The George and Dragon has bin in our family ever since the reign of King Charles the Second. It was William Turnbull in that time, which they called it the Restoration, he taking the lease from Sir Tony Mardykes that was then. They was but knights then. They was made baronets first in the reign of King George the Second; you may see it in the list of baronets and the nobility. The lease was made to William Turnbull, which came from London; and he built the stables, which they was out o’ repair, as you may read to this day in the lease; and the house has never had but one sign since – the George and Dragon, it is pretty well known in England – and one name to its master. It has been owned by a Turnbull from that day to this, and they have not been counted bad men.” A murmur of applause testified the assent of his guests. “They has been steady churchgoin’ folk, and brewed good drink, and maintained the best o’ characters, hereaways and farther off too, though ’tis I, Richard Turnbull, that says it; and while they pay their rent, no man has power to put them out; for their title’s as good to the George and Dragon, and the two fields, and the croft, and the grazing o’ their kyne on the green, as Sir Bale Mardykes to the Hall up there and estate. So ’tis nout to me, except in the way o’ friendliness, what the family may think o’ me; only the George and they has always been kind and friendly, and I don’t want to break the old custom.”

“Well said, Dick!” exclaimed Doctor Torvey; “I own to your conclusion; but there ain’t a soul here but ourselves – and we’re all friends, and you are your own master – and, hang it, you’ll tell us that story about the drowned woman, as you heard it from your father long ago.”

“Aye, do, and keep us to our liquor, my hearty!” cried the Captain.

Mr. Peers looked his entreaty; and deaf Mr. Hollar, having no interest in the petition, was at least a safe witness, and, with his pipe in his lips, a cosy piece of furniture.

Richard Turnbull had his punch beside him; he looked over his shoulder. The door was closed, the fire was cheery, and the punch was fragrant, and all friendly faces about him. So said he:

“Gentlemen, as you’re pleased to wish it, I don’t see no great harm in it; and at any rate, ’twill prevent mistakes. It is more than ninety years since. My father was but a boy then; and many a time I have heard him tell it in this very room.”

And looking into his glass he mused, and stirred his punch slowly.

CHAPTER II

THE DROWNED WOMAN

“It ain’t much of a homminy,” said the host of the George. “I’ll not keep you long over it, gentlemen. There was a handsome young lady, Miss Mary Feltram o’ Cloostedd by name. She was the last o’ that family; and had gone very poor. There’s but the walls o’ the house left now; grass growing in the hall, and ivy over the gables; there’s no one livin’ has ever hard tell o’ smoke out o’ they chimblies. It stands on t’other side o’ the lake, on the level wi’ a deal o’ ald trees behint and aside it at the gap o’ the clough, under the pike o’ Maiden Fells. Ye may see it wi’ a spyin’-glass from the boatbield at Mardykes Hall.”

“I’ve been there fifty times,” said the Doctor.

“Well there was dealin’s betwixt the two families; and there’s good and bad in every family; but the Mardykes, in them days, was a wild lot. And when old Feltram o’ Cloostedd died, and the young lady his daughter was left a ward o’ Sir Jasper Mardykes – an ill day for her, poor lass! – twenty year older than her he was, an’ more; and nothin’ about him, they say, to make anyone like or love him, ill-faur’d and little and dow.”

“Dow – that’s gloomy,” Doctor Torvey instructed the Captain aside.

“But they do say, they has an old blud-stean ring in the family that has a charm in’t; and happen how it might, the poor lass fell in love wi’ him. Some said they was married. Some said it hang’d i’ the bell-ropes, and never had the priest’s blessing; but anyhow, married or no, there was talk enough amang the folk, and out o’ doors she would na budge. And there was two wee bairns; and she prayed him hard to confess the marriage, poor thing! But ’twas a bootless bene, and he would not allow they should bear his name, but their mother’s; he was a hard man, and hed the bit in his teeth, and went his ain gait. And having tired of her, he took in his head to marry a lady of the Barnets, and it behoved him to be shut o’ her and her children; and so she nor them was seen no more at Mardykes Hall. And the eldest, a boy, was left in care of my grandfather’s father here in the George.”

“That queer Philip Feltram that’s travelling with Sir Bale so long is a descendant of his?” said the Doctor.

“Grandson,” observed Mr. Peers, removing his pipe for a moment; “and is the last of that stock.”

“Well, no one could tell where she had gone to. Some said to distant parts, some said to the madhouse, some one thing, some another; but neither she nor the bairn was ever seen or spoke to by the folk at Mardykes in life again. There was one Mr. Wigram that lived in them times down at Moultry, and had sarved, like the Captain here, in the king’s navy in his day; and early of a morning down he comes to the town for a boat, sayin’ he was looking towards Snakes Island through his spyin’-glass, and he seen a woman about a hundred and fifty yards outside of it; the Captain here has heard the bearings right enough. From her hips upwards she was stark and straight out o’ the water, and a baby in her arms. Well, no one else could see it, nor he neither, when they went down to the boat. But next morning he saw the same thing, and the boatman saw it too; and they rowed for it, both pulling might and main; but after a mile or so they could see it no more, and gave over. The next that saw it was the vicar, I forget his name now – but he was up the lake to a funeral at Mortlock Church; and coming back with a bit of a sail up, just passin’ Snakes Island, what should they hear on a sudden but a wowl like a death-cry, shrill and bleak, as made the very blood hoot in their veins; and looking along the water not a hundred yards away, saw the same grizzled sight in the moonlight; so they turned the tiller, and came near enough to see her face – blea it was, and drenched wi’ water – and she was above the lake to her middle, stiff as a post, holdin’ the weeny bairn out to them, and flyrin’ [smiling scornfully] on them as they drew nigh her. They were half-frighted, not knowing what to make of it; but passing as close as the boatman could bring her side, the vicar stretched over the gunwale to catch her, and she bent forward, pushing the dead bab forward; and as she did, on a sudden she gave a yelloch that scared them, and they saw her no more. ’Twas no livin’ woman, for she couldn’t rise that height above the water, as they well knew when they came to think; and knew it was a dobby they saw; and ye may be sure they didn’t spare prayer and blessin’, and went on their course straight before the wind; for neither would a-took the worth o’ all the Mardykes to look sich a freetin’ i’ the face again. ’Twas seen another time by market-folk crossin’ fra Gyllenstan in the selfsame place; and Snakes Island got a bad neam, and none cared to go nar it after nightfall.”

“Do you know anything of that Feltram that has been with him abroad?” asked the Doctor.

“They say he’s no good at anything – a harmless mafflin; he was a long gaumless gawky when he went awa,” said Richard Turnbull. “The Feltrams and the Mardykes was sib, ye know; and that made what passed in the misfortune o’ that young lady spoken of all the harder; and this young man ye speak of is a grandson o’ the lad that was put here in care o’ my grandfather.”

“Great-grandson. His father was grandson,” said Mr. Peers; “he held a commission in the army and died in the West Indies. This Philip Feltram is the last o’ that line – illegitimate, you know, it is held – and the little that remained of the Feltram property went nearly fourscore years ago to the Mardykes, and this Philip is maintained by Sir Bale; it is pleasant, notwithstanding all the stories one hears, gentlemen, that the only thing we know of him for certain should be so creditable to his kindness.”

“To be sure,” acquiesced Mr. Turnbull.

While they talked the horn sounded, and the mail-coach drew up at the door of the George and Dragon to set down a passenger and his luggage.

Dick Turnbull rose and went out to the hall with careful bustle, and Doctor Torvey followed as far as the door, which commanded a view of it, and saw several trunks cased in canvas pitched into the hall, and by careful Tom and a boy lifted one on top of the other, behind the corner of the banister. It would have been below the dignity of his cloth to go out and read the labels on these, or the Doctor would have done otherwise, so great was his curiosity.

CHAPTER III

PHILIP FELTRAM

The new guest was now in the hall of the George, and Doctor Torvey could hear him talking with Mr. Turnbull. Being himself one of the dignitaries of Golden Friars, the Doctor, having regard to first impressions, did not care to be seen in his post of observation; and closing the door gently, returned to his chair by the fire, and in an undertone informed his cronies that there was a new arrival in the George, and he could not hear, but would not wonder if he were taking a private room; and he seemed to have trunks enough to build a church with.

“Don’t be too sure we haven’t Sir Bale on board,” said Amerald, who would have followed his crony the Doctor to the door – for never was retired naval hero of a village more curious than he – were it not that his wooden leg made a distinct pounding on the floor that was inimical, as experience had taught him, to mystery.

“That can’t be,” answered the Doctor; “Charley Twyne knows everything about it, and has a letter every second day; and there’s no chance of Sir Bale before the tenth; this is a tourist, you’ll find. I don’t know what the d – l keeps Turnbull; he knows well enough we are all naturally willing to hear who it is.”

“Well, he won’t trouble us here, I bet ye;” and catching deaf Mr. Hollar’s eye, the Captain nodded, and pointed to the little table beside him, and made a gesture imitative of the rattling of a dice-box; at which that quiet old gentleman also nodded sunnily; and up got the Captain and conveyed the backgammon-box to the table, near Hollar’s elbow, and the two worthies were soon sinc-ducing and catre-acing, with the pleasant clatter that accompanies that ancient game. Hollar had thrown sizes and made his double point, and the honest Captain, who could stand many things better than Hollar’s throwing such throws so early in the evening, cursed his opponent’s luck and sneered at his play, and called the company to witness, with a distinctness which a stranger to smiling Hollar’s deafness would have thought hardly civil; and just at this moment the door opened, and Richard Turnbull showed his new guest into the room, and ushered him to a vacant seat near the other corner of the table before the fire.

The stranger advanced slowly and shyly, with something a little deprecatory in his air, to which a lathy figure, a slight stoop, and a very gentle and even heartbroken look in his pale long face, gave a more marked character of shrinking and timidity.

He thanked the landlord aside, as it were, and took his seat with a furtive glance round, as if he had no right to come in and intrude upon the happiness of these honest gentlemen.

He saw the Captain scanning him from under his shaggy grey eyebrows while he was pretending to look only at his game; and the Doctor was able to recount to Mrs. Torvey when he went home every article of the stranger’s dress.

It was odd and melancholy as his peaked face.

He had come into the room with a short black cloak on, and a rather tall foreign felt hat, and a pair of shiny leather gaiters or leggings on his thin legs; and altogether presented a general resemblance to the conventional figure of Guy Fawkes.

Not one of the company assembled knew the appearance of the Baronet. The Doctor and old Mr. Peers remembered something of his looks; and certainly they had no likeness, but the reverse, to those presented by the newcomer. The Baronet, as now described by people who had chanced to see him, was a dark man, not above the middle size, and with a certain decision in his air and talk; whereas this person was tall, pale, and in air and manner feeble. So this broken trader in the world’s commerce, with whom all seemed to have gone wrong, could not possibly be he.

Presently, in one of his stealthy glances, the Doctor’s eye encountered that of the stranger, who was by this time drinking his tea – a thin and feminine liquor little used in that room.

The stranger did not seem put out; and the Doctor, interpreting his look as a permission to converse, cleared his voice, and said urbanely,

“We have had a little frost by night, down here, sir, and a little fire is no great harm – it is rather pleasant, don’t you think?”

The stranger bowed acquiescence with a transient wintry smile, and looked gratefully on the fire.

“This place is a good deal admired, sir, and people come a good way to see it; you have been here perhaps before?”

“Many years ago.”

Here was another pause.

“Places change imperceptibly – in detail, at least – a good deal,” said the Doctor, making an effort to keep up a conversation that plainly would not go on of itself; “and people too; population shifts – there’s an old fellow, sir, they call Death.”

“And an old fellow they call the Doctor, that helps him,” threw in the Captain humorously, allowing his attention to get entangled in the conversation, and treating them to one of his tempestuous ha-ha-ha’s.

“We are expecting the return of a gentleman who would be a very leading member of our little society down here,” said the Doctor, not noticing the Captain’s joke. “I mean Sir Bale Mardykes. Mardykes Hall is a pretty object from the water, sir, and a very fine old place.”

The melancholy stranger bowed slightly, but rather in courtesy to the relator, it seemed, than that the Doctor’s lore interested him much.

“And on the opposite side of the lake,” continued Doctor Torvey, “there is a building that contrasts very well with it – the old house of the Feltrams – quite a ruin now, at the mouth of the glen – Cloostedd House, a very picturesque object.”

“Exactly opposite,” said the stranger dreamily, but whether in the tone of acquiescence or interrogatory, the Doctor could not be quite sure.

“That was one of our great families down here that has disappeared. It has dwindled down to nothing.”

“Duce ace,” remarked Mr. Hollar, who was attending to his game.

“While others have mounted more suddenly and amazingly still,” observed gentle Mr. Peers, who was great upon county genealogies.

“Sizes!” thundered the Captain, thumping the table with an oath of disgust.

“And Snakes Island is a very pretty object; they say there used to be snakes there,” said the Doctor, enlightening the visitor.

“Ah! that’s a mistake,” said the dejected guest, making his first original observation. “It should be spelt Snaiks. In the old papers it is called Sen-aiks Island from the seven oaks that grew in a clump there.”

“Hey? that’s very curious, egad! I daresay,” said the Doctor, set right thus by the stranger, and eyeing him curiously.

“Very true, sir,” observed Mr. Peers; “three of those oaks, though, two of them little better than stumps, are there still; and Clewson of Heckleston has an old document—”

Here, unhappily, the landlord entered the room in a fuss, and walking up to the stranger, said, “The chaise is at the door, Mr. Feltram, and the trunks up, sir.”

Mr. Feltram rose quietly and took out his purse, and said,

“I suppose I had better pay at the bar?”

“As you like best, sir,” said Richard Turnbull.

Mr. Feltram bowed all round to the gentlemen, who smiled, ducked or waved their hands; and the Doctor fussily followed him to the hall door, and welcomed him back to Golden Friars – there was real kindness in this welcome – and proffered his broad brown hand, which Mr. Feltram took; and then he plunged into his chaise, and the door being shut, away he glided, chaise, horses, and driver, like shadows, by the margin of the moonlighted lake, towards Mardykes Hall.

And after a few minutes’ stand upon the steps, looking along the shadowy track of the chaise, they returned to the glow of the room, in which a pleasant perfume of punch still prevailed; and beside Mr. Philip Feltram’s deserted teathings, the host of the George enlightened his guests by communicating freely the little he had picked up. The principal fact he had to tell was, that Sir Bale adhered strictly to his original plan, and was to arrive on the tenth. A few days would bring them to that, and the nine-days wonder run its course and lose its interest. But in the meantime, all Golden Friars was anxious to see what Sir Bale Mardykes was like.

CHAPTER IV

THE BARONET APPEARS

As the candles burn blue and the air smells of brimstone at the approach of the Evil One, so, in the quiet and healthy air of Golden Friars, a depressing and agitating influence announced the coming of the long-absent Baronet.

From abroad, no good whatever had been at any time heard of him, and a great deal that was, in the ears of simple folk living in that unsophisticated part of the world, vaguely awful.

Stories that travel so far, however, lose something of their authority, as well as definiteness, on the way; there was always room for charity to suggest a mistake or exaggeration; and if good men turned up their hands and eyes after a new story, and ladies of experience, who knew mankind, held their heads high and looked grim and mysterious at mention of his name, nevertheless an interval of silence softened matters a little, and the sulphureous perfume dissipated itself in time.

Now that Sir Bale Mardykes had arrived at the Hall, there were hurried consultations held in many households. And though he was tried and sentenced by drumhead over some austere hearths, as a rule the law of gravitation prevailed, and the greater house drew the lesser about it, and county people within the visiting radius paid their respects at the Hall.

The Reverend Martin Bedel, the then vicar of Golden Friars, a stout short man, with a mulberry-coloured face and small grey eyes, and taciturn habits, called and entered the drawing-room at Mardykes Hall, with his fat and garrulous wife on his arm.

The drawing-room has a great projecting Tudor window looking out on the lake, with its magnificent background of furrowed and purple mountains.

Sir Bale was not there, and Mrs. Bedel examined the pictures, and ornaments, and the books, making such remarks as she saw fit; and then she looked out of the window, and admired the prospect. She wished to stand well with the Baronet, and was in a mood to praise everything.

You may suppose she was curious to see him, having heard for years such strange tales of his doings.

She expected the hero of a brilliant and wicked romance; and listened for the step of the truant Lovelace who was to fulfil her idea of manly beauty and fascination.

She sustained a slight shock when he did appear.

Sir Bale Mardykes was, as she might easily have remembered, a middle-aged man – and he looked it. He was not even an imposing-looking man for his time of life: he was of about the middle height, slightly made, and dark featured. She had expected something of the gaiety and animation of Versailles, and an evident cultivation of the art of pleasing. What she did see was a remarkable gravity, not to say gloom, of countenance – the only feature of which that struck her being a pair of large dark-grey eyes, that were cold and earnest. His manners had the ease of perfect confidence; and his talk and air were those of a person who might have known how to please, if it were worth the trouble, but who did not care twopence whether he pleased or not.

He made them each a bow, courtly enough, but there was no smile – not even an affectation of cordiality. Sir Bale, however, was chatty, and did not seem to care much what he said, or what people thought of him; and there was a suspicion of sarcasm in what he said that the rustic literality of good Mrs. Bedel did not always detect.

“I believe I have not a clergyman but you, sir, within any reasonable distance?”

“Golden Friars is the nearest,” said Mrs. Bedel, answering, as was her pleasure on all practicable occasions, for her husband. “And southwards, the nearest is Wyllarden – and by a bird’s flight that is thirteen miles and a half, and by the road more than nineteen – twenty, I may say, by the road. Ha, ha, ha! it is a long way to look for a clergyman.”

“Twenty miles of road to carry you thirteen miles across, hey? The road-makers lead you a pretty dance here; those gentlemen know how to make money, and like to show people the scenery from a variety of points. No one likes a straight road but the man who pays for it, or who, when he travels, is brute enough to wish to get to his journey’s end.”

“That is so true, Sir Bale; one never cares if one is not in a hurry. That’s what Martin thinks – don’t we, Martin? – And then, you know, coming home is the time you are in a hurry – when you are thinking of your cup of tea and the children; and then, you know, you have the fall of the ground all in your favour.”

“It’s well to have anything in your favour in this place. And so there are children?”

“A good many,” said Mrs. Bedel, with a proud and mysterious smile, and a nod; “you wouldn’t guess how many.”

“Not I; I only wonder you did not bring them all.”

“That’s very good-natured of you, Sir Bale, but all could not come at one bout; there are – tell him, Martin – ha, ha, ha! there are eleven.”

“It must be very cheerful down at the vicarage,” said Sir Bale graciously; and turning to the vicar he added, “But how unequally blessings are divided! You have eleven, and I not one – that I’m aware of.”

“And then, in that direction straight before you, you have the lake, and then the fells; and five miles from the foot of the mountain at the other side, before you reach Fottrell – and that is twenty-five miles by the road—”

“Dear me! how far apart they are set! My gardener told me this morning that asparagus grows very thinly in this part of the world. How thinly clergymen grow also down here – in one sense,” he added politely, for the vicar was stout.

“We were looking out of the window – we amused ourselves that way before you came – and your view is certainly the very best anywhere round this side; your view of the lake and the fells – what mountains they are, Sir Bale!”

“’Pon my soul, they are! I wish I could blow them asunder with a charge of duck-shot, and I shouldn’t be stifled by them long. But I suppose, as we can’t get rid of them, the next best thing is to admire them. We are pretty well married to them, and there is no use in quarrelling.”

“I know you don’t think so, Sir Bale, ha, ha, ha! You wouldn’t take a good deal and spoil Mardykes Hall.”

“You can’t get a mouthful or air, or see the sun of a morning, for those frightful mountains,” he said with a peevish frown at them.

“Well, the lake at all events – that you must admire, Sir Bale?”

“No ma’am, I don’t admire the lake. I’d drain the lake if I could – I hate the lake. There’s nothing so gloomy as a lake pent up among barren mountains. I can’t conceive what possessed my people to build our house down here, at the edge of a lake; unless it was the fish, and precious fish it is – pike! I don’t know how people digest it – I can’t. I’d as soon think of eating a watchman’s pike.”

“I thought that having travelled so much abroad, you would have acquired a great liking for that kind of scenery, Sir Bale; there is a great deal of it on the Continent, ain’t there?” said Mrs. Bedel. “And the boating.”

“Boating, my dear Mrs. Bedel, is the dullest of all things; don’t you think so? Because a boat looks very pretty from the shore, we fancy the shore must look very pretty from a boat; and when we try it, we find we have only got down into a pit and can see nothing rightly. For my part I hate boating, and I hate the water; and I’d rather have my house, like Haworth, at the edge of a moss, with good wholesome peat to look at, and an open horizon – savage and stupid and bleak as all that is – than be suffocated among impassable mountains, or upset in a black lake and drowned like a kitten. O, there’s luncheon in the next room; won’t you take some?”

CHAPTER V

MRS. JULAPER’S ROOM

Sir Bale Mardykes being now established in his ancestral house, people had time to form conclusions respecting him. It must be allowed he was not popular. There was, perhaps, in his conduct something of the caprice of contempt. At all events his temper and conduct were uncertain, and his moods sometimes violent and insulting.

With respect to but one person was his conduct uniform, and that was Philip Feltram. He was a sort of aide-de-camp near Sir Bale’s person, and chargeable with all the commissions and offices which could not be suitably intrusted to a mere servant. But in many respects he was treated worse than any servant of the Baronet’s. Sir Bale swore at him, and cursed him; laid the blame of everything that went wrong in house, stable, or field upon his shoulders; railed at him, and used him, as people said, worse than a dog.

Why did Feltram endure this contumelious life? What could he do but endure it? was the answer. What was the power that induced strong soldiers to put off their jackets and shirts, and present their hands to be tied up, and tortured for hours, it might be, under the scourge, with an air of ready volition? The moral coercion of despair; the result of an unconscious calculation of chances which satisfies them that it is ultimately better to do all that, bad as it is, than try the alternative. These unconscious calculations are going on every day with each of us, and the results embody themselves in our lives; and no one knows that there has been a process and a balance struck, and that what they see, and very likely blame, is by the fiat of an invisible but quite irresistible power.

A man of spirit would rather break stones on the highway than eat that bitter bread, was the burden of every man’s song on Feltram’s bondage. But he was not so sure that even the stone-breaker’s employment was open to him, or that he could break stones well enough to retain it on a fair trial. And he had other ideas of providing for himself, and a different alternative in his mind.

Good-natured Mrs. Julaper, the old housekeeper at Mardykes Hall, was kind to Feltram, as to all others who lay in her way and were in affliction.

She was one of those good women whom Nature provides to receive the burden of other people’s secrets, as the reeds did long ago, only that no chance wind could steal them away, and send them singing into strange ears.

You may still see her snuggery in Mardykes Hall, though the housekeeper’s room is now in a different part of the house.

Mrs. Julaper’s room was in the oldest quarter of that old house. It was wainscoted, in black panels, up to the ceiling, which was stuccoed over in the fanciful diagrams of James the First’s time. Several dingy portraits, banished from time to time from other statelier rooms, found a temporary abode in this quiet spot, where they had come finally to settle and drop out of remembrance. There is a lady in white satin and a ruff; a gentleman whose legs have faded out of view, with a peaked beard, and a hawk on his wrist. There is another in a black periwig lost in the dark background, and with a steel cuirass, the gleam of which out of the darkness strikes the eye, and a scarf is dimly discoverable across it. This is that foolish Sir Guy Mardykes, who crossed the Border and joined Dundee, and was shot through the temple at Killiecrankie and whom more prudent and whiggish scions of the Mardykes family removed forthwith from his place in the Hall, and found a retirement here, from which he has not since emerged.

At the far end of this snug room is a second door, on opening which you find yourself looking down upon the great kitchen, with a little balcony before you, from which the housekeeper used to issue her commands to the cook, and exercise a sovereign supervision.

There is a shelf on which Mrs Julaper had her Bible, her Whole Duty of Man, and her Pilgrim’s Progress; and, in a file beside them, her books of housewifery, and among them volumes of MS. recipes, cookery-books, and some too on surgery and medicine, as practised by the Ladies Bountiful of the Elizabethan age, for which an antiquarian would nowadays give an eye or a hand.

Gentle half-foolish Philip Feltram would tell the story of his wrongs, and weep and wish he was dead; and kind Mrs. Julaper, who remembered him a child, would comfort him with cold pie and cherry-brandy, or a cup of coffee, or some little dainty.

“O, ma’am, I’m tired of my life. What’s the good of living, if a poor devil is never let alone, and called worse names than a dog? Would not it be better, Mrs. Julaper, to be dead? Wouldn’t it be better, ma’am? I think so; I think it night and day. I’m always thinking the same thing. I don’t care, I’ll just tell him what I think, and have it off my mind. I’ll tell him I can’t live and bear it longer.”

“There now, don’t you be frettin’; but just sip this, and remember you’re not to judge a friend by a wry word. He does not mean it, not he. They all had a rough side to their tongue now and again; but no one minded that. I don’t, nor you needn’t, no more than other folk; for the tongue, be it never so bitin’, it can’t draw blood, mind ye, and hard words break no bones; and I’ll make a cup o’ tea – ye like a cup o’ tea – and we’ll take a cup together, and ye’ll chirp up a bit, and see how pleasant and ruddy the sun shines on the lake this evening.”

She was patting him gently on the shoulder, as she stood slim and stiff in her dark silk by his chair, and her rosy little face smiled down on him. She was, for an old woman, wonderfully pretty still. What a delicate skin she must have had! The wrinkles were etched upon it with so fine a needle, you scarcely could see them a little way off; and as she smiled her cheeks looked fresh and smooth as two ruddy little apples.

“Look out, I say,” and she nodded towards the window, deep set in the thick wall. “See how bright and soft everything looks in that pleasant light; that’s better, child, than the finest picture man’s hand ever painted yet, and God gives it us for nothing; and how pretty Snakes Island glows up in that light!”

The dejected man, hardly raising his head, followed with his eyes the glance of the old woman, and looked mournfully through the window.

“That island troubles me, Mrs. Julaper.”

“Everything troubles you, my poor goosecap. I’ll pull your lug for ye, child, if ye be so dowly;” and with a mimic pluck the good-natured old housekeeper pinched his ear and laughed.

“I’ll go to the still-room now, where the water’s boiling, and I’ll make a cup of tea; and if I find ye so dow when I come back, I’ll throw it all out o’ the window, mind.”

It was indeed a beautiful picture that Feltram saw in its deep frame of old masonry. The near part of the lake was flushed all over with the low western light; the more distant waters lay dark in the shadow of the mountains; and against this shadow of purple the rocks on Snakes Island, illuminated by the setting sun, started into sharp clear yellow.

But this beautiful view had no charm – at least, none powerful enough to master the latent horror associated with its prettiest feature – for the weak and dismal man who was looking at it; and being now alone, he rose and leant on the window, and looked out, and then with a kind of shudder clutching his hands together, and walking distractedly about the room.

Without his perceiving, while his back was turned, the housekeeper came back; and seeing him walking in this distracted way, she thought to herself, as he leant again upon the window:

“Well, it is a burning shame to worrit any poor soul into that state. Sir Bale was always down on someone or something, man or beast; there always was something he hated, and could never let alone. It was not pretty; it was his nature. Happen, poor fellow, he could not help it; but so it was.”

A maid came in and set the teathings down; and Mrs. Julaper drew her sad guest over by the arm, and made him sit down, and she said: “What has a man to do, frettin’ in that way? By Jen, I’m ashamed o’ ye, Master Philip! Ye like three lumps o’ sugar, I think, and – look cheerful, ye must! – a good deal o’ cream?”

“You’re so kind, Mrs. Julaper, you’re so cheery. I feel quite comfortable after awhile when I’m with you; I feel quite happy,” and he began to cry.

She understood him very well by this time and took no notice, but went on chatting gaily, and made his tea as he liked it; and he dried his tears hastily, thinking she had not observed.

So the clouds began to clear. This innocent fellow liked nothing better than a cup of tea and a chat with gentle and cheery old Mrs. Julaper, and a talk in which the shadowy old times which he remembered as a child emerged into sunlight and lived again.

When he began to feel better, drawn into the kindly old times by the tinkle of that harmless old woman’s tongue, he said:

“I sometimes think I would not so much mind – I should not care so much – if my spirits were not so depressed, and I so agitated. I suppose I am not quite well.”

“Well, tell me what’s wrong, child, and it’s odd but I have a recipe on the shelf there that will do you good.”

“It is not a matter of that sort I mean; though I’d rather have you than any doctor, if I needed medicine, to prescribe for me.”

Mrs. Julaper smiled in spite of herself, well pleased; for her skill in pharmacy was a point on which the good lady prided herself, and was open to flattery, which, without intending it, the simple fellow administered.

“No, I’m well enough; I can’t say I ever was better. It is only, ma’am, that I have such dreams – you have no idea.”

“There are dreams and dreams, my dear: there’s some signifies no more than the babble of the lake down there on the pebbles, and there’s others that has a meaning; there’s dreams that is but vanity, and there’s dreams that is good, and dreams that is bad. Lady Mardykes – heavens be her bed this day! that’s his grandmother I mean – was very sharp for reading dreams. Take another cup of tea. Dear me! what a noise the crows keep aboon our heads, going home! and how high they wing it! – that’s a sure sign of fine weather. An’ what do you dream about? Tell me your dream, and I may show you it’s a good one, after all. For many a dream is ugly to see and ugly to tell, and a good dream, with a happy meaning, for all that.”

CHAPTER VI

THE INTRUDER

“Well, Mrs. Julaper, dreams I’ve dreamed like other people, old and young; but this, ma’am, has taken a fast hold of me,” said Mr. Feltram dejectedly, leaning back in his chair and looking down with his hands in his pockets. “I think, Mrs. Julaper, it is getting into me. I think it’s like possession.”

“Possession, child! what do you mean?”

“I think there is something trying to influence me. Perhaps it is the way fellows go mad; but it won’t let me alone. I’ve seen it three times, think of that!”

“Well, dear, and what have ye seen?” she asked, with an uneasy cheerfulness, smiling, with eyes fixed steadily upon him; for the idea of a madman – even gentle Philip in that state – was not quieting.

“Do you remember the picture, full-length, that had no frame – the lady in the white-satin saque – she was beautiful, funeste,” he added, talking more to himself; and then more distinctly to Mrs. Julaper again – “in the white-satin saque; and with the little mob cap and blue ribbons to it, and a bouquet in her fingers; that was – that – you know who she was?”

“That was your great-grandmother, my dear,” said Mrs. Julaper, lowering her eyes. “It was a dreadful pity it was spoiled. The boys in the pantry had it for a year there on the table for a tray, to wash the glasses on and the like. It was a shame; that was the prettiest picture in the house, with the gentlest, rosiest face.”

“It ain’t so gentle or rosy now, I can tell you,” said Philip. “As fixed as marble; with thin lips, and a curve at the nostril. Do you remember the woman that was found dead in the clough, when I was a boy, that the gipsies murdered, it was thought, – a cruel-looking woman?”

“Agoy! Master Philip, dear! ye would not name that terrible-looking creature with the pretty, fresh, kindly face!”

“Faces change, you see; no matter what she’s like; it’s her talk that frightens me. She wants to make use of me; and, you see, it is like getting a share in my mind, and a voice in my thoughts, and a command over me gradually; and it is just one idea, as straight as a line of light across the lake – see what she’s come to. O Lord, help me!”

“Well, now, don’t you be talkin’ like that. It is just a little bit dowly and troubled, because the master says a wry word now and then; and so ye let your spirits go down, don’t ye see, and all sorts o’ fancies comes into your head.”

“There’s no fancy in my head,” he said with a quick look of suspicion; “only you asked me what I dreamed. I don’t care if all the world knew. I dreamed I went down a flight of steps under the lake, and got a message. There are no steps near Snakes Island, we all know that,” and he laughed chillily. “I’m out of spirits, as you say; and – and – O dear! I wish – Mrs. Julaper – I wish I was in my coffin, and quiet.”

“Now that’s very wrong of you, Master Philip; you should think of all the blessings you have, and not be makin’ mountains o’ molehills; and those little bits o’ temper Sir Bale shows, why, no one minds ’em – that is, to take ’em to heart like you do, don’t ye see?”

“I daresay; I suppose, Mrs. Julaper, you are right. I’m unreasonable often, I know,” said gentle Philip Feltram. “I daresay I make too much of it; I’ll try. I’m his secretary, and I know I’m not so bright as he is, and it is natural he should sometimes be a little impatient; I ought to be more reasonable, I’m sure. It is all that thing that has been disturbing me – I mean fretting, and, I think, I’m not quite well; and – and letting myself think too much of vexations. It’s my own fault, I’m sure, Mrs. Julaper; and I know I’m to blame.”

“That’s quite right, that’s spoken like a wise lad; only I don’t say you’re to blame, nor no one; for folk can’t help frettin’ sometimes, no more than they can help a headache – none but a mafflin would say that – and I’ll not deny but he has dowly ways when the fit’s on him, and he frumps us all round, if such be his humour. But who is there hasn’t his faults? We must bear and forbear, and take what we get and be cheerful. So chirp up, my lad; Philip, didn’t I often ring the a’d rhyme in your ear long ago?

“Be always as merry as ever you can,

For no one delights in a sorrowful man.

“So don’t ye be gettin’ up off your chair like that, and tramping about the room wi’ your hands in your pockets, looking out o’ this window, and staring out o’ that, and sighing and crying, and looking so black-ox-trodden, ’twould break a body’s heart to see you. Ye must be cheery; and happen you’re hungry, and don’t know it. I’ll tell the cook to grill a hot bit for ye.”

“But I’m not hungry, Mrs. Julaper. How kind you are! dear me, Mrs. Julaper, I’m not worthy of it; I don’t deserve half your kindness. I’d have been heartbroken long ago, but for you.”

“And I’ll make a sup of something hot for you; you’ll take a rummer-glass of punch – you must.”

“But I like the tea better; I do, indeed, Mrs. Julaper.”

“Tea is no drink for a man when his heart’s down. It should be something with a leg in it, lad; something hot that will warm your courage for ye, and set your blood a-dancing, and make ye talk brave and merry; and will you have a bit of a broil first? No? Well then, you’ll have a drop o’ punch? – ye sha’n’t say no.”

And so, all resistance overpowered, the consolation of Philip Feltram proceeded.

A gentler spirit than poor Feltram, a more good-natured soul than the old housekeeper, were nowhere among the children of earth.

Philip Feltram, who was reserved enough elsewhere, used to come into her room and cry, and take her by both hands piteously, standing before her and looking down in her face, while tears ran deviously down his cheeks.

“Did you ever know such a case? was there ever a fellow like me? did you ever know such a thing? You know what I am, Mrs. Julaper, and who I am. They call me Feltram; but Sir Bale knows as well as I that my true name is not that. I’m Philip Mardykes; and another fellow would make a row about it, and claim his name and his rights, as she is always croaking in my ear I ought. But you know that is not reasonable. My grandmother was married; she was the true Lady Mardykes; think what it was to see a woman like that turned out of doors, and her children robbed of their name. O, ma’am, you can’t think it; unless you were me, you couldn’t – you couldn’t – you couldn’t!”

“Come, come, Master Philip, don’t you be taking on so; and ye mustn’t be talking like that, d’ye mind? You know he wouldn’t stand that; and it’s an old story now, and there’s naught can be proved concerning it; and what I think is this – I wouldn’t wonder the poor lady was beguiled. But anyhow she surely thought she was his lawful wife; and though the law may hev found a flaw somewhere – and I take it ’twas so – yet sure I am she was an honourable lady. But where’s the use of stirring that old sorrow? or how can ye prove aught? and the dead hold their peace, you know; dead mice, they say, feels no cold; and dead folks are past fooling. So don’t you talk like that; for stone walls have ears, and ye might say that ye couldn’t unsay; and death’s day is doom’s day. So leave all in the keeping of God; and, above all, never lift hand when ye can’t strike.”

“Lift my hand! O, Mrs. Julaper, you couldn’t think that; you little know me; I did not mean that; I never dreamed of hurting Sir Bale. Good heavens! Mrs. Julaper, you couldn’t think that! It all comes of my poor impatient temper, and complaining as I do, and my misery; but O, Mrs. Julaper, you could not think I ever meant to trouble him by law, or any other annoyance! I’d like to see a stain removed from my family, and my name restored; but to touch his property, O, no! – O, no! that never entered my mind, by heaven! that never entered my mind, Mrs. Julaper. I’m not cruel; I’m not rapacious; I don’t care for money; don’t you know that, Mrs. Julaper? O, surely you won’t think me capable of attacking the man whose bread I have eaten so long! I never dreamed of it; I should hate myself. Tell me you don’t believe it; O, Mrs. Julaper, say you don’t!”

And the gentle feeble creature burst into tears and good Mrs. Julaper comforted him with kind words; and he said,

“Thank you, ma’am; thank you. God knows I would not hurt Bale, nor give him one uneasy hour. It is only this: that I’m – I’m so miserable; and I’m only casting in my mind where to turn to, and what to do. So little a thing would be enough, and then I shall leave Mardykes. I’ll go; not in any anger, Mrs. Julaper – don’t think that; but I can’t stay, I must be gone.”

“Well, now, there’s nothing yet, Master Philip, to fret you like that. You should not be talking so wild-like. Master Bale has his sharp word and his short temper now and again; but I’m sure he likes you. If he didn’t, he’d a-said so to me long ago. I’m sure he likes you well.”

“Hollo! I say, who’s there? Where the devil’s Mr. Feltram?” called the voice of the baronet, at a fierce pitch, along the passage.

“La! Mr. Feltram, it’s him! Ye’d better run to him,” whispered Mrs. Julaper.

“Damn me! does nobody hear? Mrs. Julaper! Hollo! ho! house, there! ho! Damn me, will nobody answer?”

And Sir Bale began to slap the wainscot fast and furiously with his walking-cane with a clatter like a harlequin’s lath in a pantomime.

Mrs. Julaper, a little paler than usual, opened her door, and stood with the handle in her hand, making a little curtsey, enframed in the door-case; and Sir Bale, being in a fume, when he saw her, ceased whacking the panels of the corridor, and stamped on the floor, crying,

“Upon my soul, ma’am, I’m glad to see you! Perhaps you can tell me where Feltram is?”

“He is in my room, Sir Bale. Shall I tell him you want him, please?”

“Never mind; thanks,” said the Baronet. “I’ve a tongue in my head;” marching down the passage to the housekeeper’s room, with his cane clutched hard, glaring savagely, and with his teeth fast set, like a fellow advancing to beat a vicious horse that has chafed his temper.

CHAPTER VII

THE BANK NOTE

Sir Bale brushed by the housekeeper as he strode into her sanctuary, and there found Philip Feltram awaiting him dejectedly, but with no signs of agitation.

If one were to judge by the appearance the master of Mardykes presented, very grave surmises as to impending violence would have suggested themselves; but though he clutched his cane so hard that it quivered in his grasp, he had no notion of committing the outrage of a blow. The Baronet was unusually angry notwithstanding, and stopping short about three steps away, addressed Feltram with a pale face and gleaming eyes. It was quite plain that there was something very exciting upon his mind.

“I’ve been looking for you, Mr. Feltram; I want a word or two, if you have done your – your – whatever it is.” He whisked the point of his stick towards the modest tea-tray. “I should like five minutes in the library.”

The Baronet was all this time eyeing Feltram with a hard suspicious gaze, as if he expected to read in his face the shrinkings and trepidations of guilt; and then turning suddenly on his heel he led the way to his library – a good long march, with a good many turnings. He walked very fast, and was not long in getting there. And as Sir Bale reached the hearth, on which was smouldering a great log of wood, and turned about suddenly, facing the door, Philip Feltram entered.

The Baronet looked oddly and stern – so oddly, it seemed to Feltram, that he could not take his eyes off him, and returned his grim and somewhat embarrassed gaze with a stare of alarm and speculation.

And so doing, his step was shortened, and grew slow and slower, and came quite to a stop before he had got far from the door – a wide stretch of that wide floor still intervening between him and Sir Bale, who stood upon the hearthrug, with his heels together and his back to the fire, cane in hand, like a drill-sergeant, facing him.

“Shut that door, please; that will do; come nearer now. I don’t want to bawl what I have to say. Now listen.”

The Baronet cleared his voice and paused, with his eyes upon Feltram.

“It is only two or three days ago,” said he, “that you said you wished you had a hundred pounds. Am I right?”

“Yes; I think so.”

“Think? you know it, sir, devilish well. You said that you wished to get away. I have nothing particular to say against that, more especially now. Do you understand what I say?”

“Understand, Sir Bale? I do, sir – quite.”

“I daresay quite” he repeated with an angry sneer. “Here, sir, is an odd coincidence: you want a hundred pounds, and you can’t earn it, and you can’t borrow it – there’s another way, it seems – but I have got it – a Bank of England note of one hundred pounds – locked up in that desk;” and he poked the end of his cane against the brass lock of it viciously. “There it is, and there are the papers you work at; and there are two keys – I’ve got one and you have the other – and devil another key in or out of the house has anyone living. Well, do you begin to see? Don’t mind. I don’t want any damned lying about it.”

Feltram was indeed beginning to see that he was suspected of something very bad, but exactly what, he was not yet sure; and being a man of that unhappy temperament which shrinks from suspicion, as others do from detection, he looked very much put out indeed.

“Ha, ha! I think we do begin to see,” said Sir Bale savagely. “It’s a bore, I know, troubling a fellow with a story that he knows before; but I’ll make mine short. When I take my key, intending to send the note to pay the crown and quit-rents that you know – you – you – no matter – you know well enough must be paid, I open it so – and so – and look there, where I left it, for my note; and the note’s gone – you understand, the note’s gone!”

Here was a pause, during which, under the Baronet’s hard insulting eye, poor Feltram winced, and cleared his voice, and essayed to speak, but said nothing.

“It’s gone, and we know where. Now, Mr. Feltram, I did not steal that note, and no one but you and I have access to this desk. You wish to go away, and I have no objection to that – but damn me if you take away that note with you; and you may as well produce it now and here, as hereafter in a worse place.”

“O, my good heaven!” exclaimed poor Feltram at last. “I’m very ill.”

“So you are, of course. It takes a stiff emetic to get all that money off a fellow’s stomach; and it’s like parting with a tooth to give up a banknote. Of course you’re ill, but that’s no sign of innocence, and I’m no fool. You had better give the thing up quietly.”

“May my Maker strike me—”

“So He will, you damned rascal, if there’s justice in heaven, unless you produce the money. I don’t want to hang you. I’m willing to let you off if you’ll let me, but I’m cursed if I let my note off along with you; and unless you give it up forthwith, I’ll get a warrant and have you searched, pockets, bag, and baggage.”

“Lord! am I awake?” exclaimed Philip Feltram.

“Wide awake, and so am I,” replied Sir Bale. “You don’t happen to have got it about you?”

“God forbid, sir! O, Sir – O, Sir Bale – why, Bale, Bale, it’s impossible! You can’t believe it. When did I ever wrong you? You know me since I was not higher than the table, and – and—”

He burst into tears.

“Stop your snivelling, sir, and give up the note. You know devilish well I can’t spare it; and I won’t spare you if you put me to it. I’ve said my say.”

Sir Bale signed towards the door; and like a somnambulist, with dilated gaze and pale as death, Philip Feltram, at his wit’s end, went out of the room. It was not till he had again reached the housekeeper’s door that he recollected in what direction he was going. His shut hand was pressed with all his force to his heart, and the first breath he was conscious of was a deep wild sob or two that quivered from his heart as he looked from the lobby-window upon a landscape which he did not see.

All he had ever suffered before was mild in comparison with this dire paroxysm. Now, for the first time, was he made acquainted with his real capacity for pain, and how near he might be to madness and yet retain intellect enough to weigh every scruple, and calculate every chance and consequence, in his torture.

Sir Bale, in the meantime, had walked out a little more excited than he would have allowed. He was still convinced that Feltram had stolen the note, but not quite so certain as he had been. There were things in his manner that confirmed, and others that perplexed, Sir Bale.

The Baronet stood upon the margin of the lake, almost under the evening shadow of the house, looking towards Snakes Island. There were two things about Mardykes he specially disliked.

One was Philip Feltram, who, right or wrong, he fancied knew more than was pleasant of his past life.

The other was the lake. It was a beautiful piece of water, his eye, educated at least in the excellences of landscape-painting, acknowledged. But although he could pull a good oar, and liked other lakes, to this particular sheet of water there lurked within him an insurmountable antipathy. It was engendered by a variety of associations.

There is a faculty in man that will acknowledge the unseen. He may scout and scare religion from him; but if he does, superstition perches near. His boding was made up of omens, dreams, and such stuff as he most affected to despise, and there fluttered at his heart a presentiment and disgust.

His foot was on the gunwale of the boat, that was chained to its ring at the margin; but he would not have crossed that water in it for any reason that man could urge.

What was the mischief that sooner or later was to befall him from that lake, he could not define; but that some fatal danger lurked there, was the one idea concerning it that had possession of his fancy.

He was now looking along its still waters, towards the copse and rocks of Snakes Island, thinking of Philip Feltram; and the yellow level sunbeams touched his dark features, that bore a saturnine resemblance to those of Charles II, and marked sharply their firm grim lines, and left his deep-set eyes in shadow.

Who has the happy gift to seize the present, as a child does, and live in it? Who is not often looking far off for his happiness, as Sidney Smith says, like a man looking for his hat when it is upon his head? Sir Bale was brooding over his double hatred, of Feltram and of the lake. It would have been better had he struck down the raven that croaked upon his shoulder, and listened to the harmless birds that were whistling all round among the branches in the golden sunset.

CHAPTER VIII

FELTRAM’S PLAN

This horror of the beautiful lake, which other people thought so lovely, was, in that mind which affected to scoff at the unseen, a distinct creation of downright superstition.

The nursery tales which had scared him in his childhood were founded on the tragedy of Snakes Island, and haunted him with an unavowed persistence still. Strange dreams untold had visited him, and a German conjuror, who had made some strangely successful vaticinations, had told him that his worst enemy would come up to him from a lake. He had heard very nearly the same thing from a fortuneteller in France; and once at Lucerne, when he was waiting alone in his room for the hour at which he had appointed to go upon the lake, all being quiet, there came to the window, which was open, a sunburnt, lean, wicked face. Its ragged owner leaned his arm on the window-frame, and with his head in the room, said in his patois, “Ho! waiting are you? You’ll have enough of the lake one day. Don’t you mind watching; they’ll send when you’re wanted;” and twisting his yellow face into a malicious distortion, he went on.

This thing had occurred so suddenly, and chimed-in so oddly with his thoughts, which were at that moment at distant Mardykes and the haunted lake, that it disconcerted him. He laughed, he looked out of the window. He would have given that fellow money to tell him why he said that. But there was no good in looking for the scamp; he was gone.

A memory not preoccupied with that lake and its omens, and a presentiment about himself, would not have noted such things. But his mind they touched indelibly; and he was ashamed of his childish slavery, but could not help it.

The foundation of all this had been laid in the nursery, in the winter’s tales told by its fireside, and which seized upon his fancy and his fears with a strange congeniality.

There is a large bedroom at Mardykes Hall, which tradition assigns to the lady who had perished tragically in the lake. Mrs. Julaper was sure of it; for her aunt, who died a very old woman twenty years before, remembered the time of the lady’s death, and when she grew to woman’s estate had opportunity in abundance; for the old people who surrounded her could remember forty years farther back, and tell everything connected with the old house in beautiful Miss Feltram’s time.

This large old-fashioned room, commanding a view of Snakes Island, the fells, and the lake – somewhat vast and gloomy, and furnished in a stately old fashion – was said to be haunted, especially when the wind blew from the direction of Golden Friars, the point from which it blew on the night of her death in the lake; or when the sky was overcast, and thunder rolled among the lofty fells, and lightning gleamed on the wide sheet of water.

It was on a night like this that a lady visitor, who long after that event occupied, in entire ignorance of its supernatural character, that large room; and being herself a lady of a picturesque turn, and loving the grander melodrama of Nature, bid her maid leave the shutters open, and watched the splendid effects from her bed, until, the storm being still distant, she fell asleep.

It was travelling slowly across the lake, and it was the deep-mouthed clangour of its near approach that startled her, at dead of night, from her slumber, to witness the same phenomena in the tremendous loudness and brilliancy of their near approach.

At this magnificent spectacle she was looking with the awful ecstasy of an observer in whom the sense of danger is subordinated to that of the sublime, when she saw suddenly at the window a woman, whose long hair and dress seemed drenched with water. She was gazing in with a look of terror, and was shaking the sash of the window with vehemence. Having stood there for a few seconds, and before the lady, who beheld all this from her bed, could make up her mind what to do, the storm-beaten figure, wringing her hands, seemed to throw herself backward, and was gone.

Possessed with the idea that she had seen some poor woman overtaken in the storm, who, failing to procure admission there, had gone round to some of the many doors of the mansion, and obtained an entry there, she again fell asleep.

It was not till the morning, when she went to her window to look out upon the now tranquil scene, that she discovered what, being a stranger to the house, she had quite forgotten, that this room was at a great height – some thirty feet – from the ground.

Another story was that of good old Mr. Randal Rymer, who was often a visitor at the house in the late Lady Mardykes’ day. In his youth he had been a campaigner; and now that he was a preacher he maintained his hardy habits, and always slept, summer and winter, with a bit of his window up. Being in that room in his bed, and after a short sleep lying awake, the moon shining softly through the window, there passed by that aperture into the room a figure dressed, it seemed to him, in grey that was nearly white. It passed straight to the hearth, where was an expiring wood fire; and cowering over it with outstretched hands, it appeared to be gathering what little heat was to be had. Mr. Rymer, amazed and awestruck, made a movement in his bed; and the figure looked round, with large eyes that in the moonlight looked like melting snow, and stretching its long arms up the chimney, they and the figure itself seemed to blend with the smoke, and so pass up and away.

Sir Bale, I have said, did not like Feltram. His father, Sir William, had left a letter creating a trust, it was said, in favour of Philip Feltram. The document had been found with the will, addressed to Sir Bale in the form of a letter.

“That is mine,” said the Baronet, when it dropped out of the will; and he slipped it into his pocket, and no one ever saw it after.

But Mr. Charles Twyne, the attorney of Golden Friars, whenever he got drunk, which was pretty often, used to tell his friends with a grave wink that he knew a thing or two about that letter. It gave Philip Feltram two hundred a year, charged on Harfax. It was only a direction. It made Sir Bale a trustee, however; and having made away with the “letter,” the Baronet had been robbing Philip Feltram ever since.

Old Twyne was cautious, even in his cups, in his choice of an audience, and was a little enigmatical in his revelations. For he was afraid of Sir Bale, though he hated him for employing a lawyer who lived seven miles away, and was a rival. So people were not quite sure whether Mr. Twyne was telling lies or truth, and the principal fact that corroborated his story was Sir Bale’s manifest hatred of his secretary. In fact, Sir Bale’s retaining him in his house, detesting him as he seemed to do, was not easily to be accounted for, except on the principle of a tacit compromise – a miserable compensation for having robbed him of his rights.

The battle about the banknote proceeded. Sir Bale certainly had doubts, and vacillated; for moral evidence made powerfully in favour of poor Feltram, though the evidence of circumstance made as powerfully against him. But Sir Bale admitted suspicion easily, and in weighing probabilities would count a virtue very lightly against temptation and opportunity; and whatever his doubts might sometimes be, he resisted and quenched them, and never let that ungrateful scoundrel Philip Feltram so much as suspect their existence.

For two days Sir Bale had not spoken to Feltram. He passed by on stair and passage, carrying his head high, and with a thundrous countenance, rolling conclusions and revenges in his soul.

Poor Feltram all this time existed in one long agony. He would have left Mardykes, were it not that he looked vaguely to some just power – to chance itself – against this hideous imputation. To go with this indictment ringing in his ears, would amount to a confession and flight.

Mrs. Julaper consoled him with might and main. She was a sympathetic and trusting spirit, and knew poor Philip Feltram, in her simplicity, better than the shrewdest profligate on earth could have known him. She cried with him in his misery. She was fired with indignation by these suspicions, and still more at what followed.

Sir Bale showed no signs of relenting. It might have been that he was rather glad of so unexceptionable an opportunity of getting rid of Feltram, who, people thought, knew something which it galled the Baronet’s pride that he should know.

The Baronet had another shorter and sterner interview with Feltram in his study. The result was, that unless he restored the missing note before ten o’clock next morning, he should leave Mardykes.

To leave Mardykes was no more than Philip Feltram, feeble as he was of will, had already resolved. But what was to become of him? He did not very much care, if he could find any calling, however humble, that would just give him bread.

There was an old fellow and his wife (an ancient dame,) who lived at the other side of the lake, on the old territories of the Feltrams, and who, from some tradition of loyalty, perhaps, were fond of poor Philip Feltram. They lived somewhat high up on the fells – about as high as trees would grow – and those which were clumped about their rude dwelling were nearly the last you passed in your ascent of the mountain. These people had a multitude of sheep and goats, and lived in their airy solitude a pastoral and simple life, and were childless. Philip Feltram was hardy and active, having passed his early days among that arduous scenery. Cold and rain did not trouble him; and these people being wealthy in their way, and loving him, would be glad to find him employment of that desultory pastoral kind which would best suit him.

This vague idea was the only thing resembling a plan in his mind.

When Philip Feltram came to Mrs. Julaper’s room, and told her that he had made up his mind to leave the house forthwith – to cross the lake to the Cloostedd side in Tom Marlin’s boat, and then to make his way up the hill alone to Trebeck’s lonely farmstead, Mrs. Julaper was overwhelmed.

“Ye’ll do no such thing tonight, anyhow. You’re not to go like that. Ye’ll come into the small room here, where he can’t follow; and we’ll sit down and talk it over a bit, and ye’ll find ’twill all come straight; and this will be no night, anyhow, for such a march. Why, man, ’twould take an hour and more to cross the lake, and then a long uphill walk before ye could reach Trebeck’s place; and if the night should fall while you were still on the mountain, ye might lose your life among the rocks. It can’t be ’tis come to that yet; and the call was in the air, I’m told, all yesterday, and distant thunder today, travelling this way over Blarwyn Fells; and ’twill be a night no one will be out, much less on the mountain side.”

CHAPTER IX

THE CRAZY PARSON

Mrs. Julaper had grown weatherwise, living for so long among this noble and solitary scenery, where people must observe Nature or else nothing – where signs of coming storm or change are almost local, and record themselves on particular cliffs and mountain-peaks, or in the mists, or in mirrored tints of the familiar lake, and are easily learned or remembered. At all events, her presage proved too true.

The sun had set an hour and more. It was dark; and an awful thunderstorm, whose march, like the distant reverberations of an invading army, had been faintly heard beyond the barriers of Blarwyn Fells throughout the afternoon, was near them now, and had burst in deep-mouthed battle among the ravines at the other side, and over the broad lake, that glared like a sheet of burnished steel under its flashes of dazzling blue. Wild and fitful blasts sweeping down the hollows and cloughs of the fells of Golden Friars agitated the lake, and bent the trees low, and whirled away their sere leaves in melancholy drift in their tremendous gusts. And from the window, looking on a scene enveloped in more than the darkness of the night, you saw in the pulsations of the lightning, before “the speedy gleams the darkness swallowed,” the tossing trees and the flying foam and eddies on the lake.

In the midst of the hurlyburly, a loud and long knocking came at the hall door of Mardykes. How long it had lasted before a chance lull made it audible I do not know.

There was nothing picturesquely poor, any more than there were evidences of wealth, anywhere in Sir Bale Mardykes’ household. He had no lack of servants, but they were of an inexpensive and homely sort; and the hall door being opened by the son of an old tenant on the estate – the tempest beating on the other side of the house, and comparative shelter under the gables at the front – he saw standing before him, in the agitated air, a thin old man, who muttering, it might be, a benediction, stepped into the hall, and displayed long silver tresses, just as the storm had blown them, ascetic and eager features, and a pair of large light eyes that wandered wildly. He was dressed in threadbare black; a pair of long leather gaiters, buckled high above his knee, protecting his thin shanks through moss and pool; and the singularity of his appearance was heightened by a wide-leafed felt hat, over which he had tied his handkerchief, so as to bring the leaf of it over his ears, and to secure it from being whirled from his head by the storm.

This odd and storm-beaten figure – tall, and a little stooping, as well as thin – was not unknown to the servant, who saluted him with something of fear as well as of respect as he bid him reverently welcome, and asked him to come in and sit by the fire.

“Get you to your master, and tell him I have a message to him from one he has not seen for two-and-forty years.”

As the old man, with his harsh old voice, thus spoke, he unknotted his handkerchief and bet the raindrops from his hat upon his knee.

The servant knocked at the library door, where he found Sir Bale.

“Well, what’s the matter?” cried Sir Bale sharply, from his chair before the fire, with angry eyes looking over his shoulder.

“Here’s ’t sir cumman, Sir Bale,” he answered.

“Sir,” or “the Sir,” is still used as the clergyman’s title in the Northumbrian counties.

“What sir?”

“Sir Hugh Creswell, if you please, Sir Bale.”

“Ho! – mad Creswell? – O, the crazy parson. Well, tell Mrs. Julaper to let him have some supper – and – and to let him have a bed in some suitable place. That’s what he wants. These mad fellows know what they are about.”

“No, Sir Bale Mardykes, that is not what he wants,” said the loud wild voice of the daft sir over the servant’s shoulder. “Often has Mardykes Hall given me share of its cheer and its shelter and the warmth of its fire; and I bless the house that has been an inn to the wayfarer of the Lord. But tonight I go up the lake to Pindar’s Bield, [bield = shelter] three miles on; and there I rest and refresh – not here.”

“And why not here, Mr. Creswell?” asked the Baronet; for about this crazy old man, who preached in the fields, and appeared and disappeared so suddenly in the orbit of his wide and unknown perambulations of those northern and border counties, there was that sort of superstitious feeling which attaches to the mysterious and the good – an idea that it was lucky to harbour and dangerous to offend him. No one knew whence he came or whither he went. Once in a year, perhaps, he might appear at a lonely farmstead door among the fells, salute the house, enter, and be gone in the morning. His life was austere; his piety enthusiastic, severe, and tinged with the craze which inspired among the rustic population a sort of awe.

“I’ll not sleep at Mardykes tonight; neither will I eat, nor drink, nor sit me down – no, nor so much as stretch my hands to the fire. As the man of God came out of Judah to king Jeroboam, so come I to you, sent by a vision, to bear a warning; and as he said, ‘If thou wilt give me half thy house, I will not go in with thee, neither will I eat bread nor drink water in this place,’ so also say I.”

“Do as you please,” said Sir Bale, a little sulkily. “Say your say; and you are welcome to stay or go, if go you will on so mad a night as this.”

“Leave us,” said Creswell, beckoning the servant back with his thin hands; “what I have to say is to your master.”

The servant went, in obedience to a gesture from Sir Bale, and shut the door.

The old man drew nearer to the Baronet, and lowering his loud stern voice a little, and interrupting his discourse from time to time, to allow the near thunder-peals to subside, he said,

“Answer me, Sir Bale – what is this that has chanced between you and Philip Feltram?”

The Baronet, under the influence of that blunt and peremptory demand, told him shortly and sternly enough.

“And of all these facts you are sure, else ye would not blast your early companion and kinsman with the name of thief?”

“I am sure,” said Sir Bale grimly.

“Unlock that cabinet,” said the old man with the long white locks.

“I’ve no objection,” said Sir Bale; and he did unlock an old oak cabinet that stood, carved in high relief with strange figures and gothic grotesques, against the wall, opposite the fireplace. On opening it there were displayed a system of little drawers and pigeon-holes such as we see in more modern escritoires.

“Open that drawer with the red mark of a seal upon it,” continued Hugh Creswell, pointing to it with his lank finger.

Sir Bale did so; and to his momentary amazement, and even consternation, there lay the missing note, which now, with one of those sudden caprices of memory which depend on the laws of suggestion and association, he remembered having placed there with his own hand.

“That is it,” said old Creswell with a pallid smile, and fixing his wild eyes on the Baronet. The smile subsided into a frown, and said he: “Last night I slept near Haworth Moss; and your father came to me in a dream, and said: ‘My son Bale accuses Philip of having stolen a banknote from his desk. He forgets that he himself placed it in his cabinet. Come with me.’ I was, in the spirit, in this room; and he led me to this cabinet, which he opened; and in that drawer he showed me that note. ‘Go,’ said he, ‘and tell him to ask Philip Feltram’s pardon, else he will but go in weakness to return in power;’ and he said that which it is not lawful to repeat. My message is told. Now a word from myself,” he added sternly. “The dead, through my lips, has spoken, and under God’s thunder and lightning his words have found ye. Why so uppish wi’ Philip Feltram? See how ye threaped, and yet were wrong. He’s no tazzle – he’s no taggelt. Ask his pardon. Ye must change, or he will no taggelt. Go, in weakness, come in power: mark ye the words. ’Twill make a peal that will be heard in toon and desert, in the swirls o’ the mountain, through pikes and valleys, and mak’ a waaly man o’ thee.”

The old man with these words, uttered in the broad northern dialect of his common speech, strode from the room and shut the door. In another minute he was forth into the storm, pursuing what remained of his long march to Pindar’s Bield. [bield = shelter]

“Upon my soul!” said Sir Bale, recovering from his sort of stun which the sudden and strange visit had left, “that’s a cool old fellow! Come to rate me and teach me my own business in my own house!” and he rapped out a fierce oath. “Change his mind or no, here he sha’n’t stay tonight – not an hour.”

Sir Bale was in the lobby in a moment, and thundered to his servants:

“I say, put that fool out of the door – put him out by the shoulder, and never let him put his foot inside it more!”

But the old man’s yea was yea, and his nay nay. He had quite meant what he said; and, as I related, was beyond the reach of the indignity of extrusion.

Sir Bale on his return shut his door as violently as if it were in the face of the old prophet.

“Ask Feltram’s pardon, by Jove! For what? Why, any jury on earth would have hanged him on half the evidence; and I, like a fool, was going to let him off with his liberty and my hundred pound-note! Ask his pardon indeed!”

Still there were misgivings in his mind; a consciousness that he did owe explanation and apology to Feltram, and an insurmountable reluctance to undertake either. The old dislike – a contempt mingled with fear – not any fear of his malevolence, a fear only of his carelessness and folly; for, as I have said, Feltram knew many things, it was believed, of the Baronet’s Continental and Asiatic life, and had even gently remonstrated with him upon the dangers into which he was running. A simple fellow like Philip Feltram is a dangerous depository of a secret. This Baronet was proud, too; and the mere possession of his secrets by Feltram was an involuntary insult, which Sir Bale could not forgive. He wished him far away; and except for the recovery of his banknote, which he could ill spare, he was sorry that this suspicion was cleared up.

The thunder and storm were unabated; it seemed indeed that they were growing wilder and more awful.

He opened the window-shutter and looked out upon that sublimest of scenes; and so intense and magnificent were its phenomena, that Sir Bale, for a while, was absorbed in this contemplation.

When he turned about, the sight of his hundred-pound note, still between his finger and thumb, made him smile grimly.

The more he thought of it, the clearer it was that he could not leave matters exactly as they were. Well, what should he do? He would send for Mrs. Julaper, and tell her vaguely that he had changed his mind about Feltram, and that he might continue to stay at Mardykes Hall as usual. That would suffice. She could speak to Feltram.

He sent for her; and soon, in the lulls of the great uproar without, he could hear the jingle of Mrs. Julaper’s keys and her light tread upon the lobby.

“Mrs. Julaper,” said the Baronet, in his dry careless way, “Feltram may remain; your eloquence has prevailed. What have you been crying about?” he asked, observing that his housekeeper’s usually cheerful face was, in her own phrase, “all cried.”

“It is too late, sir; he’s gone.”

“And when did he go?” asked Sir Bale, a little put out. “He chose an odd evening, didn’t he? So like him!”

“He went about half an hour ago; and I’m very sorry, sir; it’s a sore sight to see the poor lad going from the place he was reared in, and a hard thing, sir; and on such a night, above all.”

“No one asked him to go tonight. Where is he gone to?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure; he left my room, sir, when I was upstairs; and Janet saw him pass the window not ten minutes after Mr. Creswell left the house.”

“Well, then, there’s no good, Mrs. Julaper, in thinking more about it; he has settled the matter his own way; and as he so ordains it – amen, say I. Goodnight.”

CHAPTER X

ADVENTURE IN TOM MARLIN’S BOAT

Philip Feltram was liked very well – a gentle, kindly, and very timid creature, and, before he became so heartbroken, a fellow who liked a joke or a pleasant story, and could laugh heartily. Where will Sir Bale find so unresisting and respectful a butt and retainer? and whom will he bully now?

Something like remorse was worrying Sir Bale’s heart a little; and the more he thought on the strange visit of Hugh Creswell that night, with its unexplained menace, the more uneasy he became.

The storm continued; and even to him there seemed something exaggerated and inhuman in the severity of his expulsion on such a night. It was his own doing, it was true; but would people believe that? and would he have thought of leaving Mardykes at all if it had not been for his kinsman’s severity? Nay, was it not certain that if Sir Bale had done as Hugh Creswell had urged him, and sent for Feltram forthwith, and told him how all had been cleared up, and been a little friendly with him, he would have found him still in the house? – for he had not yet gone for ten minutes after Creswell’s departure, and thus, all that was to follow might have been averted. But it was too late now, and Sir Bale would let the affair take its own course.

Below him, outside the window at which he stood ruminating, he heard voices mingling with the storm. He could with tolerable certainty perceive, looking into the obscurity, that there were three men passing close under it, carrying some very heavy burden among them.

He did not know what these three black figures in the obscurity were about. He saw them pass round the corner of the building toward the front, and in the lulls of the storm could hear their gruff voices talking.

We have all experienced what a presentiment is, and we all know with what an intuition the faculty of observation is sometimes heightened. It was such an apprehension as sometimes gives its peculiar horror to a dream – a sort of knowledge that what those people were about was in a dreadful way connected with his own fate.

He watched for a time, thinking that they might return; but they did not. He was in a state of uncomfortable suspense.

“If they want me, they won’t have much trouble in finding me, nor any scruple, egad, in plaguing me; they never have.”

Sir Bale returned to his letters, a score of which he was that night getting off his conscience – an arrear which would not have troubled him had he not ceased, for two or three days, altogether to employ Philip Feltram, who had been accustomed to take all that sort of drudgery off his hands.

All the time he was writing now he had a feeling that the shadows he had seen pass under his window were machinating some trouble for him, and an uneasy suspense made him lift his eyes now and then to the door, fancying sounds and footsteps; and after a resultless wait he would say to himself, “If anyone is coming, why the devil don’t he come?” and then he would apply himself again to his letters.

But on a sudden he heard good Mrs. Julaper’s step trotting along the lobby, and the tiny ringing of her keys.

Here was news coming; and the Baronet stood up looking at the door, on which presently came a hurried rapping; and before he had answered, in the midst of a long thunderclap that suddenly broke, rattling over the house, the good woman opened the door in great agitation, and cried with a tremulous uplifting of her hands.

“O, Sir Bale! O, la, sir! here’s poor dear Philip Feltram come home dead!”

Sir Bale stared at her sternly for some seconds.

“Come, now, do be distinct,” said Sir Bale; “what has happened?”

“He’s lying on the sofer in the old still-room. You never saw – my God! – O, sir – what is life?”

“Damn it, can’t you cry by-and-by, and tell me what’s the matter now?”

“A bit o’ fire there, as luck would have it; but what is hot or cold now? La, sir, they’re all doin’ what they can; he’s drowned, sir, and Tom Warren is on the gallop down to Golden Friars for Doctor Torvey.”

“Is he drowned, or is it only a ducking? Come, bring me to the place. Dead men don’t usually want a fire, or consult doctors. I’ll see for myself.”

So Sir Bale Mardykes, pale and grim, accompanied by the light-footed Mrs. Julaper, strode along the passages, and was led by her into the old still-room, which had ceased to be used for its original purpose. All the servants in the house were now collected there, and three men also who lived by the margin of the lake; one of them thoroughly drenched, with rivulets of water still trickling from his sleeves, water along the wrinkles and pockets of his waistcoat and from the feet of his trousers, and pumping and oozing from his shoes, and streaming from his hair down the channels of his cheeks like a continuous rain of tears.

The people drew back a little as Sir Bale entered with a quick step and a sharp pallid frown on his face. There was a silence as he stooped over Philip Feltram, who lay on a low bed next the wall, dimly lighted by two or three candles here and there about the room.

He laid his hand, for a moment, on his cold wet breast.

Sir Bale knew what should be done in order to give a man in such a case his last chance for life. Everybody was speedily put in motion. Philip’s drenched clothes were removed, hot blankets enveloped him, warming-pans and hot bricks lent their aid; he was placed at the prescribed angle, so that the water flowed freely from his mouth. The old expedient for inducing artificial breathing was employed, and a lusty pair of bellows did duty for his lungs.

But these helps to life, and suggestions to nature, availed not. Forlorn and peaceful lay the features of poor Philip Feltram; cold and dull to the touch; no breath through the blue lips; no sight in the fishlike eyes; pulseless and cold in the midst of all the hot bricks and warming-pans about him.

At length, everything having been tried, Sir Bale, who had been directing, placed his hand within the clothes, and laid it silently on Philip’s shoulder and over his heart; and after a little wait, he shook his head, and looking down on his sunken face, he said,

“I am afraid he’s gone. Yes, he’s gone, poor fellow! And bear you this in mind, all of you; Mrs. Julaper there can tell you more about it. She knows that it was certainly in no compliance with my wish that he left the house tonight: it was his own obstinate perversity, and perhaps – I forgive him for it – a wish in his unreasonable resentment to throw some blame upon this house, as having refused him shelter on such a night; than which imputation nothing can be more utterly false. Mrs. Julaper there knows how welcome he was to stay the night; but he would not; he had made up his mind, it seems, without telling any person. Had he told you, Mrs. Julaper?”

“No, sir,” sobbed Mrs. Julaper from the centre of a pockethandkerchief in which her face was buried.

“Not a human being: an angry whim of his own. Poor Feltram! and here’s the result,” said the Baronet. “We have done our best – done everything. I don’t think the doctor, when he comes, will say that anything has been omitted; but all won’t do. Does anyone here know how it happened?”

Two men knew very well – the man who had been ducked, and his companion, a younger man, who was also in the still-room, and had lent a hand in carrying Feltram up to the house.

Tom Marlin had a queer old stone tenement by the edge of the lake just under Mardykes Hall. Some people said it was the stump of an old tower that had once belonged to Mardykes Castle, of which in the modern building scarcely a relic was discoverable.

This Tom Marlin had an ancient right of fishing in the lake, where he caught pike enough for all Golden Friars; and keeping a couple of boats, he made money beside by ferrying passengers over now and then. This fellow, with a furrowed face and shaggy eyebrows, bald at top, but with long grizzled locks falling upon his shoulders, said,

“He wer wi’ me this mornin’, sayin’ he’d want t’ boat to cross the lake in, but he didn’t say what hour; and when it came on to thunder and blow like this, ye guess I did not look to see him tonight. Well, my wife was just lightin’ a pigtail – tho’ light enough and to spare there was in the lift already – when who should come clatterin’ at the latch-pin in the blow o’ thunder and wind but Philip, poor lad, himself; and an ill hour for him it was. He’s been some time in ill fettle, though he was never frowsy, not he, but always kind and dooce, and canty once, like anither; and he asked me to tak the boat across the lake at once to the Clough o’ Cloostedd at t’other side. The woman took the pet and wodn’t hear o’t; and, ‘Dall me, if I go tonight,’ quoth I. But he would not be put off so, not he; and dingdrive he went to it, cryin’ and putrein’ ye’d a-said, poor fellow, he was wrang i’ his garrets a’most. So at long last I bethought me, there’s nout o’ a sea to the north o’ Snakes Island, so I’ll pull him by that side – for the storm is blowin’ right up by Golden Friars, ye mind – and when we get near the point, thinks I, he’ll see wi’ his een how the lake is, and gie it up. For I liked him, poor lad; and seein’ he’d set his heart on’t, I wouldn’t vex nor frump him wi’ a no. So down we three – myself, and Bill there, and Philip Feltram – come to the boat; and we pulled out, keeping Snakes Island atwixt us and the wind. ’Twas smooth water wi’ us, for ’twas a scug there, but white enough was all beyont the point; and passing the finger-stone, not forty fathom from the shore o’ the island, Bill and me pullin’ and he sittin’ in the stern, poor lad, up he rises, a bit rabblin’ to himself, wi’ his hands lifted so.

“‘Look ahead!’ says I, thinkin’ something was comin’ atort us.

“But ’twasn’t that. The boat was quiet, for while we looked, oo’er our shouthers, oo’er her bows, we didn’t pull, so she lay still; and lookin’ back again on Philip, he was rabblin’ on all the same.

“‘It’s nobbut a prass wi’ himsel’, poor lad,’ thinks I.

“But that wasn’t it neither; for I sid something white come out o’ t’ water, by the gunwale, like a hand. By Jen! and he leans oo’er and tuk it; and he sagged like, and so it drew him in, under the mere, before I cud du nout. There was nout to thraa tu him, and no time; down he went, and I followed; and thrice I dived before I found him, and brought him up by the hair at last; and there he is, poor lad! and all one if he lay at the bottom o’ t’ mere.”

As Tom Marlin ended his narrative – often interrupted by the noise of the tempest without, and the peals of thunder that echoed awfully above, like the chorus of a melancholy ballad – the sudden clang of the hall door bell, and a more faintly-heard knocking, announced a new arrival.

CHAPTER XI

SIR BALE’S DREAM

It was Doctor Torvey who entered the old still-room now, buttoned-up to the chin in his greatcoat, and with a muffler of many colours wrapped partly over that feature.

“Well! – hey? So poor Feltram’s had an accident?”

The Doctor was addressing Sir Bale, and getting to the bedside as he pulled off his gloves.

“I see you’ve been keeping him warm – that’s right; and a considerable flow of water from his mouth; turn him a little that way. Hey? O, ho!” said the Doctor, as he placed his hand upon Philip, and gently stirred his limbs. “It’s more than an hour since this happened. I’m afraid there’s very little to be done now;” and in a lower tone, with his hand on poor Philip Feltram’s arm, and so down to his fingers, he said in Sir Bale Mardykes’ ear, with a shake of his head,

“Here, you see, poor fellow, here’s the cadaveric stiffness; it’s very melancholy, but it’s all over, he’s gone; there’s no good trying any more. Come here, Mrs. Julaper. Did you ever see anyone dead? Look at his eyes, look at his mouth. You ought to have known that, with half an eye. And you know,” he added again confidentially in Sir Bale’s ear, “trying any more now is all my eye.”

Then after a few more words with the Baronet, and having heard his narrative, he said from time to time, “Quite right; nothing could be better; capital practice, sir,” and so forth. And at the close of all this, amid the sobs of kind Mrs. Julaper and the general whimpering of the humbler handmaids, the Doctor standing by the bed, with his knuckles on the coverlet, and a glance now and then on the dead face beside him, said – by way of “quieting men’s minds,” as the old tract-writers used to say – a few words to the following effect:

“Everything has been done here that the most experienced physician could have wished. Everything has been done in the best way. I don’t know anything that has not been done, in fact. If I had been here myself, I don’t know – hot bricks – salt isn’t a bad thing. I don’t know, I say, that anything of any consequence has been omitted.” And looking at the body, “You see,” and he drew the fingers a little this way and that, letting them return, as they stiffly did, to their former attitude, “you may be sure that the poor gentleman was quite dead by the time he arrived here. So, since he was laid there, nothing has been lost by delay. And, Sir Bale, if you have any directions to send to Golden Friars, sir, I shall be most happy to undertake your message.”

“Nothing, thanks; it is a melancholy ending, poor fellow! You must come to the study with me, Doctor Torvey, and talk a little bit more; and – very sad, doctor – and you must have a glass of sherry, or some port – the port used not to be bad here; I don’t take it – but very melancholy it is – bring some port and sherry; and, Mrs. Julaper, you’ll be good enough to see that everything that should be done here is looked to; and let Marlin and the men have supper and something to drink. You have been too long in your wet clothes, Marlin.”

So, with gracious words all round, he led the Doctor to the library where he had been sitting, and was affable and hospitable, and told him his own version of all that had passed between him and Philip Feltram, and presented himself in an amiable point of view, and pleased the Doctor with his port and flatteries – for he could not afford to lose anyone’s good word just now; and the Doctor was a bit of a gossip, and in most houses in that region, in one character or another, every three months in the year.

So in due time the Doctor drove back to Golden Friars, with a high opinion of Sir Bale, and higher still of his port, and highest of all of himself: in the best possible humour with the world, not minding the storm that blew in his face, and which he defied in good-humoured mock-heroics spoken in somewhat thick accents, and regarding the thunder and lightning as a lively gala of fireworks; and if there had been a chance of finding his cronies still in the George and Dragon, he would have been among them forthwith, to relate the tragedy of the night, and tell what a good fellow, after all, Sir Bale was; and what a fool, at best, poor Philip Feltram.

But the George was quiet for that night. The thunder rolled over voiceless chambers; and the lights had been put out within the windows, on whose multitudinous small panes the lightning glared. So the Doctor went home to Mrs. Torvey, whom he charmed into good-humoured curiosity by the tale of wonder he had to relate.

Sir Bale’s qualms were symptomatic of something a little less sublime and more selfish than conscience. He was not sorry that Philip Feltram was out of the way. His lips might begin to babble inconveniently at any time, and why should not his mouth be stopped? and what stopper so effectual as that plug of clay which fate had introduced? But he did not want to be charged with the odium of the catastrophe. Every man cares something for the opinion of his fellows. And seeing that Feltram had been well liked, and that his death had excited a vehement commiseration, Sir Bale did not wish it to be said that he had made the house too hot to hold him, and had so driven him to extremity.

Sir Bale’s first agitation had subsided. It was now late, he had written many letters, and he was tired. It was not wonderful, then, that having turned his lounging-chair to the fire, he should have fallen asleep in it, as at last he did.

The storm was passing gradually away by this time. The thunder was now echoing among the distant glens and gorges of Daulness Fells, and the angry roar and gusts of the tempest were subsiding into the melancholy soughing and piping that soothe like a lullaby.

Sir Bale therefore had his unpremeditated sleep very comfortably, except that his head was hanging a little uneasily; which, perhaps, helped him to this dream.

It was one of those dreams in which the continuity of the waking state that immediately preceded it seems unbroken; for he thought that he was sitting in the chair which he occupied, and in the room where he actually was. It seemed to him that he got up, took a candle in his hand, and went through the passages to the old still-room where Philip Feltram lay. The house seemed perfectly still. He could hear the chirp of the crickets faintly from the distant kitchen, and the tick of the clock sounded loud and hollow along the passage. In the old still-room, as he opened the door, was no light, except what was admitted from the candle he carried. He found the body of poor Philip Feltram just as he had left it – his gentle face, saddened by the touch of death, was turned upwards, with white lips: with traces of suffering fixed in its outlines, such as caused Sir Bale, standing by the bed, to draw the coverlet over the dead man’s features, which seemed silently to upbraid him. “Gone in weakness!” said Sir Bale, repeating the words of the “daft sir,” Hugh Creswell; as he did so, a voice whispered near him, with a great sigh, “Come in power!” He looked round, in his dream, but there was no one; the light seemed to fail, and a horror slowly overcame him, especially as he thought he saw the figure under the coverlet stealthily beginning to move. Backing towards the door, for he could not take his eyes off it, he saw something like a huge black ape creep out at the foot of the bed; and springing at him, it gripped him by the throat, so that he could not breathe; and a thousand voices were instantly round him, holloaing, cursing, laughing in his ears; and in this direful plight he waked.

Was it the ring of those voices still in his ears, or a real shriek, and another, and a long peal, shriek after shriek, swelling madly through the distant passages, that held him still, freezing in the horror of his dream?

CHAPTER XII

MARCELLA BLIGH AND JUDITH WALE
KEEP WATCH

After his bottle of port with Sir Bale, the Doctor had gone down again to the room where poor Philip Feltram lay.

Mrs. Julaper had dried her eyes, and was busy by this time; and two old women were making all their arrangements for a night-watch by the body, which they had washed, and, as their phrase goes, “laid out” in the humble bed where it had lain while there was still a hope that a spark sufficient to rekindle the fire of life might remain. These old women had points of resemblance: they were lean, sallow, and wonderfully wrinkled, and looked each malign and ugly enough for a witch.

Marcella Bligh’s thin hooked nose was now like the beak of a bird of prey over the face of the drowned man, upon whose eyelids she was placing pennypieces, to keep them from opening; and her one eye was fixed on her work, its sightless companion showing white in its socket, with an ugly leer.

Judith Wale was lifting the pail of hot water with which they had just washed the body. She had long lean arms, a hunched back, a great sharp chin sunk on her hollow breast, and small eyes restless as a ferret’s; and she clattered about in great bowls of shoes, old and clouted, that were made for a foot as big as two of hers.

The Doctor knew these two old women, who were often employed in such dismal offices.

“How does Mrs. Bligh? See me with half an eye? Hey – that’s rhyme, isn’t it? – And, Judy lass – why, I thought you lived nearer the town – here making poor Mr. Feltram’s last toilet. You have helped to dress many a poor fellow for his last journey. Not a bad notion of drill either – they stand at attention stiff and straight enough in the sentry-box. Your recruits do you credit, Mrs. Wale.”

The Doctor stood at the foot of the bed to inspect, breathing forth a vapour of very fine old port, his hands in his pockets, speaking with a lazy thickness, and looking so comfortable and facetious, that Mrs. Julaper would have liked to turn him out of the room.

But the Doctor was not unkind, only extremely comfortable. He was a good-natured fellow, and had thought and care for the living, but not a great deal of sentiment for the dead, whom he had looked in the face too often to be much disturbed by the spectacle.

“You’ll have to keep that bandage on. You should be sharp; you should know all about it, girl, by this time, and not let those muscles stiffen. I need not tell you the mouth shuts as easily as this snuffbox, if you only take it in time. – I suppose, Mrs. Julaper, you’ll send to Jos Fringer for the poor fellow’s outfit. Fringer is a very proper man – there ain’t a properer und-aker in England. I always re-mmend Fringer – in Church-street in Golden Friars. You know Fringer, I daresay.”

“I can’t say, sir, I’m sure. That will be as Sir Bale may please to direct,” answered Mrs. Julaper.

“You’ve got him very straight – straighter than I thought you could; but the large joints were not so stiff. A very little longer wait, and you’d hardly have got him into his coffin. He’ll want a ver-r-ry long one, poor lad. Short cake is life, ma’am. Sad thing this. They’ll open their eyes, I promise you, down in the town. ’Twill be cool enough, I’d shay, affer all th-thunr-thunnle, you know. I think I’ll take a nip, Mrs. Joolfr, if you wouldn’t mine makin’ me out a thimmle-ful bran-band-bran-rand-andy, eh, Mishs Joolfr?”

And the Doctor took a chair by the fire; and Mrs. Julaper, with a dubious conscience and dry hospitality, procured the brandy-flask and wineglass, and helped the physician in a thin hesitating stream, which left him ample opportunity to cry “Hold – enough!” had he been so minded. But that able physician had no confidence, it would seem, in any dose under a bumper, which he sipped with commendation, and then fell asleep with the firelight on his face – to tender-hearted Mrs. Julaper’s disgust – and snored with a sensual disregard of the solemnity of his situation; until with a profound nod, or rather dive, toward the fire, he awoke, got up and shook his ears with a kind of start, and standing with his back to the fire, asked for his muffler and horse; and so took his leave also of the weird sisters, who were still pottering about the body, with croak and whisper, and nod and ogle. He took his leave also of good Mrs. Julaper, who was completing arrangements with teapot and kettle, spiced elderberry wine, and other comforts, to support them through their proposed vigil. And finally, in a sort of way, he took his leave of the body, with a long businesslike stare, from the foot of the bed, with his short hands stuffed into his pockets. And so, to Mrs. Julaper’s relief, this unseemly doctor, speaking thickly, departed.

And now, the Doctor being gone, and all things prepared for the “wake” to be observed by withered Mrs. Bligh of the one eye, and yellow Mrs. Wale of the crooked back, the house grew gradually still. The thunder had by this time died into the solid boom of distant battle, and the fury of the gale had subsided to the long sobbing wail that is charged with so eerie a melancholy. Within all was stirless, and the two old women, each a “Mrs.” by courtesy, who had not much to thank Nature or the world for, sad and cynical, and in a sort outcasts told off by fortune to these sad and grisly services, sat themselves down by the fire, each perhaps feeling unusually at home in the other’s society; and in this soured and forlorn comfort, trimming their fire, quickening the song of the kettle to a boil, and waxing polite and chatty; each treating the other with that deprecatory and formal courtesy which invites a return in kind, and both growing strangely happy in this little world of their own, in the unusual and momentary sense of an importance and consideration which were delightful.

The old still-room of Mardykes Hall is an oblong room wainscoted. From the door you look its full length to the wide stone-shafted Tudor window at the other end. At your left is the ponderous mantelpiece, supported by two spiral stone pillars; and close to the door at the right was the bed in which the two crones had just stretched poor Philip Feltram, who lay as still as an uncoloured waxwork, with a heavy pennypiece on each eye, and a bandage under his jaw, making his mouth look stern. And the two old ladies over their tea by the fire conversed agreeably, compared their rheumatisms and other ailments wordily, and talked of old times, and early recollections, and of sickbeds they had attended, and corpses that “you would not know, so pined and windered” were they; and others so fresh and canny, you’d say the dead had never looked so bonny in life.

Then they began to talk of people who grew tall in their coffins, of others who had been buried alive, and of others who walked after death. Stories as true as holy writ.

“Were you ever down by Hawarth, Mrs. Bligh – hard by Dalworth Moss?” asked crook-backed Mrs. Wale, holding her spoon suspended over her cup.

“Neea whaar sooa far south, Mrs. Wale, ma’am; but ma father was off times down thar cuttin’ peat.”

“Ah, then ye’ll not a kenned farmer Dykes that lived by the Lin-tree Scaur. ’Twere I that laid him out, poor aad fellow, and a dow man he was when aught went cross wi’ him; and he cursed and sweared, twad gar ye dodder to hear him. They said he was a hard man wi’ some folk; but he kep a good house, and liked to see plenty, and many a time when I was swaimous about my food, he’d clap t’ meat on ma plate, and mak’ me eat ma fill. Na, na – there was good as well as bad in farmer Dykes. It was a year after he deed, and Tom Ettles was walking home, down by the Birken Stoop one night, and not a soul nigh, when he sees a big ball, as high as his knee, whirlin’ and spangin’ away before him on the road. What it were he could not think; but he never consayted there was a freet or a bo thereaway; so he kep near it, watching every spang and turn it took, till it ran into the gripe by the roadside. There was a gravel pit just there, and Tom Ettles wished to take another gliff at it before he went on. But when he keeked into the pit, what should he see but a man atoppa a horse that could not get up or on: and says he, ‘I think ye be at a dead-lift there, gaffer.’ And wi’ the word, up looks the man, and who shud it be but farmer Dykes himsel; and Tom Ettles saw him plain eneugh, and kenned the horse too for Black Captain, the farmer’s aad beast, that broke his leg and was shot two years and more before the farmer died. ‘Aye,’ says farmer Dykes, lookin’ very bad; ‘forsett-and-backsett, ye’ll tak me oot, Tom Ettles, and clap ye doun behint me quick, or I’ll claw ho’d o’ thee.’ Tom felt his hair risin’ stiff on his heed, and his tongue so fast to the roof o’ his mouth he could scarce get oot a word; but says he, ‘If Black Jack can’t do it o’ noo, he’ll ne’er do’t and carry double.’ ‘I ken my ain business best,’ says Dykes. ‘If ye gar me gie ye a look, ’twill gie ye the creepin’s while ye live; so git ye doun, Tom;’ and with that the dobby lifts its neaf, and Tom saw there was a red light round horse and man, like the glow of a peat fire. And says Tom, ‘In the name o’ God, ye’ll let me pass;’ and with the word the gooast draws itsel’ doun, all a-creaked, like a man wi’ a sudden pain; and Tom Ettles took to his heels more deed than alive.”

They had approached their heads, and the story had sunk to that mysterious murmur that thrills the listener, when in the brief silence that followed they heard a low odd laugh near the door.

In that direction each lady looked aghast, and saw Feltram sitting straight up in the bed, with the white bandage in his hand, and as it seemed, for one foot was below the coverlet, near the floor, about to glide forth.

Mrs. Bligh, uttering a hideous shriek, clutched Mrs. Wale, and Mrs. Wale, with a scream as dreadful, gripped Mrs. Bligh; and quite forgetting their somewhat formal politeness, they reeled and tugged, wrestling towards the window, each struggling to place her companion between her and the “dobby,” and both uniting in a direful peal of yells.

This was the uproar which had startled Sir Bale from his dream, and was now startling the servants from theirs.

CHAPTER XIII

THE MIST ON THE MOUNTAIN

Doctor Torvey was sent for early next morning, and came full of wonder, learning and scepticism. Seeing is believing, however; and there was Philip Feltram living, and soon to be, in all bodily functions, just as usual.

“Upon my soul, Sir Bale, I couldn’t have believed it, if I had not seen it with my eyes,” said the Doctor impressively, while sipping a glass of sherry in the “breakfast parlour,” as the great panelled and pictured room next the dining-room was called. “I don’t think there is any similar case on record – no pulse, no more than the poker; no respiration, by Jove, no more than the chimney-piece; as cold as a lead image in the garden there. Well, you’ll say all that might possibly be fallacious; but what will you say to the cadaveric stiffness? Old Judy Wale can tell you; and my friend Marcella – Monocula would be nearer the mark – Mrs. Bligh, she knows all those common, and I may say up to this, infallible, signs of death, as well as I do. There is no mystery about them; they’ll depose to the literality of the symptoms. You heard how they gave tongue. Upon my honour, I’ll send the whole case up to my old chief, Sir Hervey Hansard, to London. You’ll hear what a noise it will make among the profession. There never was – and it ain’t too much to say there never will be – another case like it.”

During this lecture, and a great deal more, Sir Bale leaned back in his chair, with his legs extended, his heels on the ground, and his arms folded, looking sourly up in the face of a tall lady in white satin, in a ruff, and with a bird on her hand, who smiled down superciliously from her frame on the Baronet. Sir Bale seemed a little bit high and dry with the Doctor.

“You physicians are unquestionably,” he said, “a very learned profession.”

The Doctor bowed.

“But there’s just one thing you know nothing about—”

“Eh? What’s that?” inquired Doctor Torvey.

“Medicine,” answered Sir Bale. “I was aware you never knew what was the matter with a sick man; but I didn’t know, till now, that you couldn’t tell when he was dead.”

“Ha, ha! – well – ha, ha! – yes – well, you see, you – ha, ha! – you certainly have me there. But it’s a case without a parallel – it is, upon my honour. You’ll find it will not only be talked about, but written about; and, whatever papers appear upon it, will come to me; and I’ll take care, Sir Bale, you shall have an opportunity of reading them.”

“Of which I shan’t avail myself,” answered Sir Bale. “Take another glass of sherry, Doctor.”

The Doctor made his acknowledgements and filled his glass, and looked through the wine between him and the window.

“Ha, ha! – see there, your port, Sir Bale, gives a fellow such habits – looking for the beeswing, by Jove. It isn’t easy, in one sense at least, to get your port out of a fellow’s head when once he has tasted it.”

But if the honest Doctor meant a hint for a glass of that admirable bin, it fell pointless; and Sir Bale had no notion of making another libation of that precious fluid in honour of Doctor Torvey.

“And I take it for granted,” said Sir Bale, “that Feltram will do very well; and, should anything go wrong, I can send for you – unless he should die again; and in that case I think I shall take my own opinion.”

So he and the Doctor parted.

Sir Bale, although he did not consult the Doctor on his own case, was not particularly well. “That lonely place, those frightful mountains, and that damp black lake” – which features in the landscape he cursed all round – “are enough to give any man blue devils; and when a fellow’s spirits go, he’s all gone. That’s why I’m dyspeptic – that and those damned debts – and the post, with its flight of croaking and screeching letters from London. I wish there was no post here. I wish it was like Sir Amyrald’s time, when they shot the York mercer that came to dun him, and no one ever took anyone to task about it; and now they can pelt you at any distance they please through the post; and fellows lose their spirits and their appetite and any sort of miserable comfort that is possible in this odious abyss.”

Was there gout in Sir Bale’s case, or “vapours”? I know not what the faculty would have called it; but Sir Bale’s mode of treatment was simply to work off the attack by long and laborious walking.

This evening his walk was upon the Fells of Golden Friars – long after the landscape below was in the eclipse of twilight, the broad bare sides and angles of these gigantic uplands were still lighted by the misty western sun.

There is no such sense of solitude as that which we experience upon the silent and vast elevations of great mountains. Lifted high above the level of human sounds and habitations, among the wild expanses and colossal features of Nature, we are thrilled in our loneliness with a strange fear and elation – an ascent above the reach of life’s vexations or companionship, and the tremblings of a wild and undefined misgiving. The filmy disc of the moon had risen in the east, and was already faintly silvering the shadowy scenery below, while yet Sir Bale stood in the mellow light of the western sun, which still touched also the summits of the opposite peaks of Morvyn Fells.

Sir Bale Mardykes did not, as a stranger might, in prudence, hasten his descent from the heights at which he stood while yet a gleam of daylight remained to him. For he was, from his boyhood, familiar with those solitary regions; and, beside this, the thin circle of the moon, hung in the eastern sky, would brighten as the sunlight sank, and hang like a lamp above his steps.

There was in the bronzed and resolute face of the Baronet, lighted now in the parting beams of sunset, a resemblance to that of Charles the Second – not our “merry” ideal, but the more energetic and saturnine face which the portraits have preserved to us.

He stood with folded arms on the side of the slope, admiring, in spite of his prejudice, the unusual effects of a view so strangely lighted – the sunset tints on the opposite peaks, lost in the misty twilight, now deepening lower down into a darker shade, through which the outlines of the stone gables and tower of Golden Friars and the light of fire or candle in their windows were dimly visible.

As he stood and looked, his more distant sunset went down, and sudden twilight was upon him, and he began to remember the beautiful Homeric picture of a landscape coming out, rock and headland, in the moonlight.

There had hung upon the higher summits, at his right, a heavy fold of white cloud, which on a sudden broke, and, like the smoke of artillery, came rolling down the slopes toward him. Its principal volume, however, unfolded itself in a mighty flood down the side of the mountain towards the lake; and that which spread towards and soon enveloped the ground on which he stood was by no means so dense a fog. A thick mist enough it was; but still, to a distance of twenty or thirty yards, he could discern the outline of a rock or scaur, but not beyond it.

There are few sensations more intimidating than that of being thus enveloped on a lonely mountainside, which, like this one, here and there breaks into precipice.

There is another sensation, too, which affects the imagination. Overtaken thus on the solitary expanse, there comes a new chill and tremor as this treacherous medium surrounds us, through which unperceived those shapes which fancy conjures up might approach so near and bar our path.

From the risk of being reduced to an actual standstill he knew he was exempt. The point from which the wind blew, light as it was, assured him of that. Still the mist was thick enough seriously to embarrass him. It had overtaken him as he was looking down upon the lake; and he now looked to his left, to try whether in that direction it was too thick to permit a view of the nearest landmarks. Through this white film he saw a figure standing only about five-and-twenty steps away, looking down, as it seemed, in precisely the same direction as he, quite motionless, and standing like a shadow projected upon the smoky vapour. It was the figure of a slight tall man, with his arm extended, as if pointing to a remote object, which no mortal eye certainly could discern through the mist. Sir Bale gazed at this figure, doubtful whether he were in a waking dream, unable to conjecture whence it had come; and as he looked, it moved, and was almost instantly out of sight.

He descended the mountain cautiously. The mist was now thinner, and through the haze he was beginning to see objects more distinctly, and, without danger, to proceed at a quicker pace. He had still a long walk by the uplands towards Mardykes Hall before he descended to the level of the lake.

The mist was still quite thick enough to circumscribe his view and to hide the general features of the landscape; and well was it, perhaps, for Sir Bale that his boyhood had familiarised him with the landmarks on the mountainside.

He had made nearly four miles on his solitary homeward way, when, passing under a ledge of rock which bears the name of the Cat’s Skaitch, he saw the same figure in the short cloak standing within some thirty or forty yards of him – the thin curtain of mist, through which the moonlight touched it, giving to it an airy and unsubstantial character.

Sir Bale came to a standstill. The man in the short cloak nodded and drew back, and was concealed by the angle of the rock.

Sir Bale was now irritated, as men are after a start, and shouting to the stranger to halt, he “slapped” after him, as the northern phrase goes, at his best pace. But again he was gone, and nowhere could he see him, the mist favouring his evasion.

Looking down the fells that overhang Mardykes Hall, the mountainside dips gradually into a glen, which, as it descends, becomes precipitous and wooded. A footpath through this ravine conducts the wayfarer to the level ground that borders the lake; and by this dark pass Sir Bale Mardykes strode, in comparatively clear air, along the rocky path dappled with moonlight.

As he emerged upon the lower ground he again encountered the same figure. It approached. It was Philip Feltram.

CHAPTER XIV

A NEW PHILIP FELTRAM

The Baronet had not seen Feltram since his strange escape from death. His last interview with him had been stern and threatening; Sir Bale dealing with appearances in the spirit of an incensed judge, Philip Feltram lamenting in the submission of a helpless despair.

Feltram was full in the moonlight now, standing erect, and smiling cynically on the Baronet.

There was that in the bearing and countenance of Feltram that disconcerted him more than the surprise of the sudden meeting.

He had determined to meet Feltram in a friendly way, whenever that not very comfortable interview became inevitable. But he was confused by the suddenness of Feltram’s appearance; and the tone, cold and stern, in which he had last spoken to him came first, and he spoke in it after a brief silence.

“I fancied, Mr. Feltram, you were in your bed; I little expected to find you here. I think the Doctor gave very particular directions, and said that you were to remain perfectly quiet.”

“But I know more than the Doctor,” replied Feltram, still smiling unpleasantly.

“I think, sir, you would have been better in your bed,” said Sir Bale loftily.

“Come, come, come, come!” exclaimed Philip Feltram contemptuously.

“It seems to me,” said Sir Bale, a good deal astonished, “you rather forget yourself.”

“Easier to forget oneself, Sir Bale, than to forgive others, at times,” replied Philip Feltram in his unparalleled mood.

“That’s the way fools knock themselves up,” continued Sir Bale. “You’ve been walking ever so far – away to the Fells of Golden Friars. It was you whom I saw there. What damned folly! What brought you there?”

“To observe you,” he replied.

“And have you walked the whole way there and back again? How did you get there?”

“Pooh! how did I come – how did you come – how did the fog come? From the lake, I suppose. We all come up, and then down.” So spoke Philip Feltram, with serene insolence.

“You are pleased to talk nonsense,” said Sir Bale.

“Because I like it – with a meaning.”

Sir Bale looked at him, not knowing whether to believe his eyes and ears. He did not know what to make of him.

“I had intended speaking to you in a conciliatory way; you seem to wish to make that impossible” – Philip Feltram’s face wore its repulsive smile; – “and in fact I don’t know what to make of you, unless you are ill; and ill you well may be. You can’t have walked much less than twelve miles.”

“Wonderful effort for me!” said Feltram with the same sneer.

“Rather surprising for a man so nearly drowned,” answered Sir Bale Mardykes.

“A dip: you don’t like the lake, sir; but I do. And so it is: as Antaeus touched the earth, so I the water, and rise refreshed.”

“I think you’d better get in and refresh there. I meant to tell you that all the unpleasantness about that banknote is over.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. It has been recovered by Mr. Creswell, who came here last night. I’ve got it, and you’re not to blame,” said Sir Bale.

“But someone is to blame,” observed Mr. Feltram, smiling still.

“Well, you are not, and that ends it,” said the Baronet peremptorily.

“Ends it? Really, how good! how very good!”

Sir Bale looked at him, for there was something ambiguous and even derisive in the tone of Feltram’s voice.

But before he could quite make up his mind, Feltram spoke again.

“Everything is settled about you and me?”

“There is nothing to prevent your staying at Mardykes now,” said Sir Bale graciously.

“I shall be with you for two years, and then I go on my travels,” answered Feltram, with a saturnine and somewhat wild look around him.

“Is he going mad?” thought the Baronet.

“But before I go, I’m to put you in a way of paying off your mortgages. That is my business here.”

Sir Bale looked at him sharply. But now there was not the unpleasant smile, but the darkened look of a man in secret pain.

“You shall know it all by and by.”

And without more ceremony, and with a darkening face, Philip Feltram made his way under the boughs of the thick oaks that grew there, leaving on Sir Bale’s mind an impression that he had been watching someone at a distance, and had gone in consequence of a signal.

In a few seconds he followed in the same direction, halloaing after Feltram; for he did not like the idea of his wandering about the country by moonlight, or possibly losing his life among the precipices, and bringing a new discredit upon his house. But no answer came; nor could he in that thick copse gain sight of him again.

When Sir Bale reached Mardykes Hall he summoned Mrs. Julaper, and had a long talk with her. But she could not say that there appeared anything amiss with Philip Feltram; only he seemed more reserved, and as if he was brooding over something he did not intend to tell.

“But, you know, Sir Bale, what happened might well make a thoughtful man of him. If he’s ever to think of Death, it should be after looking him so hard in the face; and I’m not ashamed to say, I’m glad to see he has grace to take the lesson, and I hope his experiences may be sanctified to him, poor fellow! Amen.”

“Very good song, and very well sung,” said Sir Bale; “but it doesn’t seem to me that he has been improved, Mrs. Julaper. He seems, on the contrary, in a queer temper and anything but a heavenly frame of mind; and I thought I’d ask you, because if he is ill – I mean feverish – it might account for his eccentricities, as well as make it necessary to send after him, and bring him home, and put him to bed. But I suppose it is as you say, – his adventure has upset him a little, and he’ll sober in a day or two, and return to his old ways.”

But this did not happen. A change, more comprehensive than at first appeared, had taken place, and a singular alteration was gradually established.

He grew thin, his eyes hollow, his face gradually forbidding.

His ways and temper were changed: he was a new man with Sir Bale; and the Baronet after a time, people said, began to grow afraid of him. And certainly Feltram had acquired an extraordinary influence over the Baronet, who a little while ago had regarded and treated him with so much contempt.

CHAPTER XV

THE PURSE OF GOLD

The Baronet was very slightly known in his county. He had led a reserved and inhospitable life. He was pressed upon by heavy debts; and being a proud man, held aloof from society and its doings. He wished people to understand that he was nursing his estate; but somehow the estate did not thrive at nurse. In the country other people’s business is admirably well known; and the lord of Mardykes was conscious, perhaps, that his neighbours knew as well he did, that the utmost he could do was to pay the interest charged upon it, and to live in a frugal way enough.

The lake measures some four or five miles across, from the little jetty under the walls of Mardykes Hall to Cloostedd.

Philip Feltram, changed and morose, loved a solitary row upon the lake; and sometimes, with no one to aid him in its management, would take the little sailboat and pass the whole day upon those lonely waters.

Frequently he crossed to Cloostedd; and mooring the boat under the solemn trees that stand reflected in that dark mirror, he would disembark and wander among the lonely woodlands, as people thought, cherishing in those ancestral scenes the memory of ineffaceable injuries, and the wrath and revenge that seemed of late to darken his countenance, and to hold him always in a moody silence.

One autumnal evening Sir Bale Mardykes was sourly ruminating after his solitary meal. A very red sun was pouring its last low beams through the valley at the western extremity of the lake, across its elsewhere sombre waters, and touching with a sudden and blood-red tint the sail of the skiff in which Feltram was returning from his lonely cruise.

“Here comes my domestic water-fiend,” sneered Sir Bale, as he lay back in his cumbrous armchair. “Cheerful place, pleasant people, delicious fate! The place alone has been enough to set that fool out of his little senses, damn him!”

Sir Bale averted his eyes, and another subject not pleasanter entered his mind. He was thinking of the races that were coming off next week at Heckleston Downs, and what sums of money might be made there, and how hard it was that he should be excluded by fortune from that brilliant lottery.

“Ah, Mrs. Julaper, is that you?”

Mrs. Julaper, who was still at the door, curtsied, and said, “I came, Sir Bale, to see whether you’d please to like a jug of mulled claret, sir.”

“Not I, my dear. I’ll take a mug of beer and my pipe; that homely solace better befits a ruined gentleman.”

“H’m, sir; you’re not that, Sir Bale; you’re no worse than half the lords and great men that are going. I would not hear another say that of you, sir.”

“That’s very kind of you, Mrs. Julaper; but you won’t call me out for backbiting myself, especially as it is true, damn true, Mrs. Julaper! Look ye; there never was a Mardykes here before but he could lay his hundred or his thousand pounds on the winner of the Heckleston Cup; and what could I bet? Little more than that mug of beer I spoke of. It was my great-grandfather who opened the course on the Downs of Heckleston, and now I can’t show there! Well, what must I do? Grin and bear it, that’s all. If you please, Mrs. Julaper, I will have that jug of claret you offered. I want spice and hot wine to keep me alive; but I’ll smoke my pipe first, and in an hour’s time it will do.”

When Mrs. Julaper was gone, he lighted his pipe, and drew near the window, through which he looked upon the now fading sky and the twilight landscape.

He smoked his pipe out, and by that time it had grown nearly dark. He was still looking out upon the faint outlines of the view, and thinking angrily what a little bit of luck at the races would do for many a man who probably did not want it half so much as he. Vague and sombre as his thoughts were, they had, like the darkening landscape outside, shape enough to define their general character. Bitter and impious they were – as those of egotistic men naturally are in suffering. And after brooding, and muttering by fits and starts, he said:

“How many tens and hundreds of thousands of pounds will change hands at Heckleston next week; and not a shilling in all the change and shuffle will stick to me! How many a fellow would sell himself, like Dr. Faustus, just for the knowledge of the name of the winner! But he’s no fool, and does not buy his own.”

Something caught his eye; something moving on the wall. The fire was lighted, and cast a flickering and gigantic shadow upward; the figure of a man standing behind Sir Bale Mardykes, on whose shoulder he placed a lean hand. Sir Bale turned suddenly about, and saw Philip Feltram. He was looking dark and stern, and did not remove his hand from his shoulder as he peered into the Baronet’s face with his deep-set mad eyes.

“Ha, Philip, upon my soul!” exclaimed Sir Bale, surprised. “How time flies! It seems only this minute since I saw the boat a mile and a half away from the shore. Well – yes; there has been time; it is dark now. Ha, ha! I assure you, you startled me. Won’t you take something? Do. Shall I touch the bell?”

“You have been troubled about those mortgages. I told you I should pay them off, I thought.”

Here there was a pause, and Sir Bale looked hard in Feltram’s face. If he had been in his ordinary spirits, or perhaps in some of his haunts less solitary than Mardykes, he would have laughed; but here he had grown unlike himself, gloomy and credulous, and was, in fact, a nervous man.

Sir Bale smiled, and shook his head dismally.

“It is very kind of you, Feltram; the idea shows a kindly disposition. I know you would do me a kindness if you could.”

As Sir Bale, each looking in the other’s eyes, repeated in this sentence the words “kind,” “kindly,” “kindness,” a smile lighted Feltram’s face with at each word an intenser light; and Sir Bale grew sombre in its glare; and when he had done speaking, Feltram’s face also on a sudden darkened.

“I have found a fortuneteller in Cloostedd Wood. Look here.”

And he drew from his pocket a leathern purse, which he placed on the table in his hand; and Sir Bale heard the pleasant clink of coin in it.

“A fortuneteller! You don’t mean to say she gave you that?” said Sir Bale.

Feltram smiled again, and nodded.

“It was the custom to give the fortuneteller a trifle. It is a great improvement making her fee you,” observed Sir Bale, with an approach to his old manner.

“He put that in my hand with a message,” said Feltram.

“He? O, then it was a male fortuneteller!”

“Gipsies go in gangs, men and women. He might lend, though she told fortunes,” said Feltram.

“It’s the first time I ever heard of gipsies lending money;” and he eyed the purse with a whimsical smile.

With his lean fingers still holding it, Feltram sat down at the table. His face contracted as if in cunning thought, and his chin sank upon his breast as he leaned back.

“I think,” continued Sir Bale, “ever since they were spoiled, the Egyptians have been a little shy of lending, and leave that branch of business to the Hebrews.”

“What would you give to know, now, the winner at Heckleston races?” said Feltram suddenly, raising his eyes.

“Yes; that would be worth something,” answered Sir Bale, looking at him with more interest than the incredulity he affected would quite warrant.

“And this money I have power to lend you, to make your game.”

“Do you mean that really?” said Sir Bale, with a new energy in tone, manner, and features.

“That’s heavy; there are some guineas there,” said Feltram with a dark smile, raising the purse in his hand a little, and letting it drop upon the table with a clang.

“There is something there, at all events,” said Sir Bale.

Feltram took the purse by the bottom, and poured out on the table a handsome pile of guineas.

“And do you mean to say you got all that from a gipsy in Cloostedd Wood?”

“A friend, who is – myself,” answered Philip Feltram.

“Yourself! Then it is yours – you lend it?” said the Baronet, amazed; for there was no getting over the heap of guineas, and the wonder was pretty equal whence they had come.

“Myself, and not myself,” said Feltram oracularly; “as like as voice and echo, man and shadow.”

Had Feltram in some of his solitary wanderings and potterings lighted upon hidden treasure? There was a story of two Feltrams of Cloostedd, brothers, who had joined the king’s army and fought at Marston Moor, having buried in Cloostedd Wood a great deal of gold and plate and jewels. They had, it was said, intrusted one tried servant with the secret; and that servant remained at home. But by a perverse fatality the three witnesses had perished within a month: the two brothers at Marston Moor; and the confidant, of fever, at Cloostedd. From that day forth treasure-seekers had from time to time explored the woods of Cloostedd; and many a tree of mark was dug beside, and the earth beneath many a stone and scar and other landmark in that solitary forest was opened by night, until hope gradually died out, and the tradition had long ceased to prompt to action, and had become a story and nothing more.

The image of the nursery-tale had now recurred to Sir Bale after so long a reach of years; and the only imaginable way, in his mind, of accounting for penniless Philip Feltram having all that gold in his possession was that, in some of his lonely wanderings, chance had led him to the undiscovered hoard of the two Feltrams who had died in the great civil wars.

“Perhaps those gipsies you speak of found the money where you found them; and in that case, as Cloostedd Forest, and all that is in it is my property, their sending it to me is more like my servant’s handing me my hat and stick when I’m going out, than making me a present.”

“You will not be wise to rely upon the law, Sir Bale, and to refuse the help that comes unasked. But if you like your mortgages as they are, keep them; and if you like my terms as they are, take them; and when you have made up your mind, let me know.”

Philip Feltram dropped the heavy purse into his capacious coat-pocket, and walked, muttering, out of the room.

CHAPTER XVI

THE MESSAGE FROM CLOOSTEDD

“Come back, Feltram; come back, Philip!” cried Sir Bale hastily. “Let us talk, can’t we? Come and talk this odd business over a little; you must have mistaken what I meant; I should like to hear all about it.”

“All is not much, sir,” said Philip Feltram, entering the room again, the door of which he had half closed after him. “In the forest of Cloostedd I met today some people, one of whom can foretell events, and told me the names of the winners of the first three races at Heckleston, and gave me this purse, with leave to lend you so much money as you care to stake upon the races. I take no security; you shan’t be troubled; and you’ll never see the lender, unless you seek him out.”

“Well, those are not bad terms,” said Sir Bale, smiling wistfully at the purse, which Feltram had again placed upon the table.

“No, not bad,” repeated Feltram, in the harsh low tone in which he now habitually spoke.

“You’ll tell me what the prophet said about the winners; I should like to hear their names.”

“The names I shall tell you if you walk out with me,” said Feltram.

“Why not here?” asked Sir Bale.

“My memory does not serve me here so well. Some people, in some places, though they be silent, obstruct thought. Come, let us speak,” said Philip Feltram, leading the way.

Sir Bale, with a shrug, followed him.

By this time it was dark. Feltram was walking slowly towards the margin of the lake; and Sir Bale, more curious as the delay increased, followed him, and smiled faintly as he looked after his tall, gaunt figure, as if, even in the dark, expressing a ridicule which he did not honestly feel, and the expression of which, even if there had been light, there was no one near enough to see.

When he reached the edge of the lake, Feltram stooped, and Sir Bale thought that his attitude was that of one who whispers to and caresses a reclining person. What he fancied was a dark figure lying horizontally in the shallow water, near the edge, turned out to be, as he drew near, no more than a shadow on the elsewhere lighter water; and with his change of position it had shifted and was gone, and Philip Feltram was but dabbling his hand this way and that in the water, and muttering faintly to himself. He rose as the Baronet drew near, and standing upright, said,

“I like to listen to the ripple of the water among the grass and pebbles; the tongue and lips of the lake are lapping and whispering all along. It is the merest poetry; but you are so romantic, you excuse me.”

There was an angry curve in Feltram’s eyebrows, and a cynical smile, and something in the tone which to the satirical Baronet was almost insulting. But even had he been less curious, I don’t think he would have betrayed his mortification; for an odd and unavowed influence which he hated was gradually establishing in Feltram an ascendency which sometimes vexed and sometimes cowed him.

“You are not to tell,” said Feltram, drawing near him in the dusk. “The secret is yours when you promise.”

“Of course I promise,” said Sir Bale. “If I believed it, you don’t think I could be such an ass as to tell it; and if I didn’t believe it, I’d hardly take the trouble.”

Feltram stooped, and dipping the hollow of his hand in the water, he raised it full, and said he, “Hold out your hand – the hollow of your hand – like this. I divide the water for a sign – share to me and share to you.” And he turned his hand, so as to pour half the water into the hollow palm of Sir Bale, who was smiling, with some uneasiness mixed in his mockery.

“Now, you promise to keep all secrets respecting the teller and the finder, be that who it may?”

“Yes, I promise,” said Sir Bale.

“Now do as I do,” said Feltram. And he shed the water on the ground, and with his wet fingers touched his forehead and his breast; and then he joined his hand with Sir Bale’s, and said, “Now you are my safe man.”

Sir Bale laughed. “That’s the game they call ‘grand mufti,’” said he.

“Exactly; and means nothing,” said Feltram, “except that someday it will serve you to remember by. And now the names. Don’t speak; listen – you may break the thought else. The winner of the first is Beeswing; of the second, Falcon; and of the third, Lightning.”

He had stood for some seconds in silence before he spoke; his eyes were closed; he seemed to bring up thought and speech with difficulty, and spoke faintly and drowsily, both his hands a little raised, and the fingers extended, with the groping air of a man who moves in the dark. In this odd way, slowly, faintly, with many a sigh and scarcely audible groan, he gradually delivered his message and was silent. He stood, it seemed, scarcely half awake, muttering indistinctly and sighing to himself. You would have said that he was exhausted and suffering, like a man at his last hour resigning himself to death.

At length he opened his eyes, looked round a little wildly and languidly, and with another great sigh sat down on a large rock that lies by the margin of the lake, and sighed heavily again and again. You might have fancied that he was a second time recovering from drowning.

Then he got up, and looked drowsily round again, and sighed like a man worn out with fatigue, and was silent.

Sir Bale did not care to speak until he seemed a little more likely to obtain an answer. When that time came, he said, “I wish, for the sake of my believing, that your list was a little less incredible. Not one of the horses you name is the least likely; not one of them has a chance.”

“So much the better for you; you’ll get what odds you please. You had better seize your luck; on Tuesday Beeswing runs,” said Feltram. “When you want money for the purpose, I’m your banker – here is your bank.”

He touched his breast, where he had placed the purse, and then he turned and walked swiftly away.

Sir Bale looked after him till he disappeared in the dark. He fluctuated among many surmises about Feltram. Was he insane, or was he practising an imposture? or was he fool enough to believe the predictions of some real gipsies? and had he borrowed this money, which in Sir Bale’s eyes seemed the greatest miracle in the matter, from those thriving shepherd mountaineers, the old Trebecks, who, he believed, were attached to him? Feltram had, he thought, borrowed it as if for himself; and having, as Sir Bale in his egotism supposed, “a sneaking regard” for him, had meant the loan for his patron, and conceived the idea of his using his revelations for the purpose of making his fortune. So, seeing no risk, and the temptation being strong, Sir Bale resolved to avail himself of the purse, and use his own judgment as to what horse to back.

About eleven o’clock Feltram, unannounced, walked, with his hat still on, into Sir Bale’s library, and sat down at the opposite side of his table, looking gloomily into the Baronet’s face for a time.

“Shall you want the purse?” he asked at last.

“Certainly; I always want a purse,” said Sir Bale energetically.

“The condition is, that you shall back each of the three horses I have named. But you may back them for much or little, as you like, only the sum must not be less than five pounds in each hundred which this purse contains. That is the condition, and if you violate it, you will make some powerful people very angry, and you will feel it. Do you agree?”

“Of course; five pounds in the hundred – certainly; and how many hundreds are there?”

“Three.”

“Well, a fellow with luck may win something with three hundred pounds, but it ain’t very much.”

“Quite enough, if you use it aright.”

“Three hundred pounds,” repeated the Baronet, as he emptied the purse, which Feltram had just placed in his hand, upon the table; and contemplating them with grave interest, he began telling them off in little heaps of five-and-twenty each. He might have thanked Feltram, but he was thinking more of the guineas than of the grisly donor.

“Aye,” said he, after a second counting, “I think there are exactly three hundred. Well, so you say I must apply three times five – fifteen of these. It is an awful pity backing those queer horses you have named; but if I must make the sacrifice, I must, I suppose?” he added, with a hesitating inquiry in the tone.

“If you don’t, you’ll rue it,” said Feltram coldly, and walked away.

“Penny in pocket’s a merry companion,” says the old English proverb, and Sir Bale felt in better spirits and temper than he had for many a day as he replaced the guineas in the purse.

It was long since he had visited either the racecourse or any other place of amusement. Now he might face his kind without fear that his pride should be mortified, and dabble in the fascinating agitations of the turf once more.

“Who knows how this little venture may turn out?” he thought. “It is time the luck should turn. My last summer in Germany, my last winter in Paris – d———n me, I’m owed something. It’s time I should win a bit.”

Sir Bale had suffered the indolence of a solitary and discontented life imperceptibly to steal upon him. It would not do to appear for the first time on Heckleston Lea with any of those signs of negligence which, in his case, might easily be taken for poverty. All his appointments, therefore, were carefully looked after; and on the Monday following, he, followed by his groom, rode away for the Saracen’s Head at Heckleston, where he was to put up, for the races that were to begin on the day following, and presented as handsome an appearance as a peer in those days need have cared to show.

CHAPTER XVII

ON THE COURSE –
BEESWING, FALCON, AND LIGHTNING

As he rode towards Golden Friars, through which his route lay, in the early morning light, in which the mists of night were clearing, he looked back towards Mardykes with a hope of speedy deliverance from that hated imprisonment, and of a return to the continental life in which he took delight. He saw the summits and angles of the old building touched with the cheerful beams, and the grand old trees, and at the opposite side the fells dark, with their backs towards the east; and down the side of the wooded and precipitous clough of Feltram, the light, with a pleasant contrast against the beetling purple of the fells, was breaking in the faint distance. On the lake he saw the white speck that indicated the sail of Philip Feltram’s boat, now midway between Mardykes and the wooded shores of Cloostedd.

“Going on the same errand,” thought Sir Bale, “I should not wonder. I wish him the same luck. Yes, he’s going to Cloostedd Forest. I hope he may meet his gipsies there – the Trebecks, or whoever they are.”

And as a momentary sense of degradation in being thus beholden to such people smote him, “Well,” thought he, “who knows? Many a fellow will make a handsome sum of a poorer purse than this at Heckleston. It will be a light matter paying them then.”

Through Golden Friars he rode. Some of the spectators who did not like him, wondered audibly at the gallant show, hoped it was paid for, and conjectured that he had ridden out in search of a wife. On the whole, however, the appearance of their Baronet in a smarter style than usual was popular, and accepted as a change to the advantage of the town.

Next morning he was on the racecourse of Heckleston, renewing old acquaintance and making himself as agreeable as he could – an object, among some people, of curiosity and even interest. Leaving the carriage-sides, the hoods and bonnets, Sir Bale was soon among the betting men, deep in more serious business.

How did he make his book? He did not break his word. He backed Beeswing, Falcon, and Lightning. But it must be owned not for a shilling more than the five guineas each, to which he stood pledged. The odds were forty-five to one against Beeswing, sixty to one against Lightning, and fifty to one against Falcon.

“A pretty lot to choose!” exclaimed Sir Bale, with vexation. “As if I had money so often, that I should throw it away!”

The Baronet was testy thinking over all this, and looked on Feltram’s message as an impertinence and the money as his own.

Let us now see how Sir Bale Mardykes’ pocket fared.

Sulkily enough at the close of the week he turned his back on Heckleston racecourse, and took the road to Golden Friars.

He was in a rage with his luck, and by no means satisfied with himself; and yet he had won something. The result of the racing had been curious. In the three principal races the favourites had been beaten: one by an accident, another on a technical point, and the third by fair running. And what horses had won? The names were precisely those which the “fortuneteller” had predicted.

Well, then, how was Sir Bale in pocket as he rode up to his ancestral house of Mardykes, where a few thousand pounds would have been very welcome? He had won exactly 775 guineas; and had he staked a hundred instead of five on each of the names communicated by Feltram, he would have won 15,500 guineas.

He dismounted before his hall door, therefore, with the discontent of a man who had lost nearly 15,000 guineas. Feltram was upon the steps, and laughed dryly.

“What do you laugh at?” asked Sir Bale tartly.

“You’ve won, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I’ve won; I’ve won a trifle.”

“On the horses I named?”

“Well, yes; it so turned out, by the merest accident.”

Feltram laughed again dryly, and turned away.

Sir Bale entered Mardykes Hall, and was surly. He was in a much worse mood than before he had ridden to Heckleston. But after a week or so ruminating upon the occurrence, he wondered that Feltram spoke no more of it. It was undoubtedly wonderful. There had been no hint of repayment yet, and he had made some hundreds by the loan; and, contrary to all likelihood, the three horses named by the unknown soothsayer had won. Who was this gipsy? It would be worth bringing the soothsayer to Mardykes, and giving his people a camp on the warren, and all the poultry they could catch, and a pig or a sheep every now and then. Why, that seer was worth the philosopher’s stone, and could make Sir Bale’s fortune in a season. Someone else would be sure to pick him up if he did not.

So, tired of waiting for Feltram to begin, he opened the subject one day himself. He had not seen him for two or three days; and in the wood of Mardykes he saw his lank figure standing among the thick trees, upon a little knoll, leaning on a staff which he sometimes carried with him in his excursions up the mountains.

“Feltram!” shouted Sir Bale.

Feltram turned and beckoned. Sir Bale muttered, but obeyed the signal.

“I brought you here, because you can from this point with unusual clearness today see the opening of the Clough of Feltram at the other side, and the clump of trees, where you will find the way to reach the person about whom you are always thinking.”

“Who said I am always thinking about him?” said the Baronet angrily; for he felt like a man detected in a weakness, and resented it.

“I say it, because I know it; and you know it also. See that clump of trees standing solitary in the hollow? Among them, to the left, grows an ancient oak. Cut in its bark are two enormous letters H – F; so large and bold, that the rugged furrows of the oak bark fail to obscure them, although they are ancient and spread by time. Standing against the trunk of this great tree, with your back to these letters, you are looking up the Glen or Clough of Feltram, that opens northward, where stands Cloostedd Forest spreading far and thick. Now, how do you find our fortuneteller?”

“That is exactly what I wish to know,” answered Sir Bale; “because, although I can’t, of course, believe that he’s a witch, yet he has either made the most marvellous fluke I’ve heard of, or else he has got extraordinary sources of information; or perhaps he acts partly on chance, partly on facts. Be it which you please, I say he’s a marvellous fellow; and I should like to see him, and have a talk with him; and perhaps he could arrange with me. I should be very glad to make an arrangement with him to give me the benefit of his advice about any matter of the same kind again.”

“I think he’s willing to see you; but he’s a fellow with a queer fancy and a pig-head. He’ll not come here; you must go to him; and approach him his own way too, or you may fail to find him. On these terms he invites you.”

Sir Bale laughed.

“He knows his value, and means to make his own terms.”

“Well, there’s nothing unfair in that; and I don’t see that I should dispute it. How is one to find him?”

“Stand, as I told you, with your back to those letters cut in the oak. Right before you lies an old Druidic altar-stone. Cast your eye over its surface, and on some part of it you are sure to see a black stain about the size of a man’s head. Standing, as I suppose you, against the oak, that stain, which changes its place from day to day, will give you the line you must follow through the forest in order to light upon him. Take carefully from it such trees or objects as will guide you; and when the forest thickens, do the best you can to keep to the same line. You are sure to find him.”

“You’ll come, Feltram. I should lose myself in that wilderness, and probably fail to discover him,” said Sir Bale; “and I really wish to see him.”

“When two people wish to meet, it is hard if they don’t. I can go with you a bit of the way; I can walk a little through the forest by your side, until I see the small flower that grows peeping here and there, that always springs where those people walk; and when I begin to see that sign, I must leave you. And, first, I’ll take you across the lake.”

“By Jove, you’ll do no such thing!” said Sir Bale hastily.

“But that is the way he chooses to be approached,” said Philip Feltram.

“I have a sort of feeling about that lake; it’s the one childish spot that is left in my imagination. The nursery is to blame for it – old stories and warnings; and I can’t think of that. I should feel I had invoked an evil omen if I did. I know it is all nonsense; but we are queer creatures, Feltram. I must only ride there.”

“Why, it is five-and-twenty miles round the lake to that; and after all were done, he would not see you. He knows what he’s worth, and he’ll have his own way,” answered Feltram. “The sun will soon set. See that withered branch, near Snakes Island, that looks like fingers rising from the water? When its points grow tipped with red, the sun has but three minutes to live.”

“That is a wonder which I can’t see; it is too far away.”

“Yes, the lake has many signs; but it needs sight to see them,” said Feltram.

“So it does,” said the Baronet; “more than most men have got. I’ll ride round, I say; and I make my visit, for this time, my own way.”

“You’ll not find him, then; and he wants his money. It would be a pity to vex him.”

“It was to you he lent the money,” said Sir Bale.

“Yes.”

“Well, you are the proper person to find him out and pay him,” urged Sir Bale.

“Perhaps so; but he invites you; and if you don’t go, he may be offended, and you may hear no more from him.”

“We’ll try. When can you go? There are races to come off next week, for once and away, at Langton. I should not mind trying my luck there. What do you say?”

“You can go there and pay him, and ask the same question – what horses, I mean, are to win. All the county are to be there; and plenty of money will change hands.”

“I’ll try,” said Feltram.

“When will you go?”

“Tomorrow,” he answered.

“I have an odd idea, Feltram, that you are really going to pay off those cursed mortgages.”

He laid his hand with at least a gesture of kindness on the thin arm of Feltram, who coldly answered,

“So have I;” and walked down the side of the little knoll and away, without another word or look.

CHAPTER XVII

ON THE LAKE, AT LAST

Next day Philip Feltram crossed the lake; and Sir Bale, seeing the boat on the water, guessed its destination, and watched its progress with no little interest, until he saw it moored and its sail drop at the rude pier that affords a landing at the Clough of Feltram. He was now satisfied that Philip had actually gone to seek out the “cunning man,” and gather hints for the next race.

When that evening Feltram returned, and, later still, entered Sir Bale’s library, the master of Mardykes was gladder to see his face and more interested about his news than he would have cared to confess.

Philip Feltram did not affect unconsciousness of that anxiety, but, with great directness, proceeded to satisfy it.

“I was in Cloostedd Forest today, nearly all day – and found the old gentleman in a wax. He did not ask me to drink, nor show me any kindness. He was huffed because you would not take the trouble to cross the lake to speak to him yourself. He took the money you sent him and counted it over, and dropped it into his pocket; and he called you hard names enough and to spare; but I brought him round, and at last he did talk.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said that the estate of Mardykes would belong to a Feltram.”

“He might have said something more likely,” said Sir Bale sourly. “Did he say anything more?”

“Yes. He said the winner at Langton Lea would be Silver Bell.”

“Any other name?”

“No.”

“Silver Bell? Well, that’s not so odd as the last. Silver Bell stands high in the list. He has a good many backers – long odds in his favour against most of the field. I should not mind backing Silver Bell.”

The fact is, that he had no idea of backing any other horse from the moment he heard the soothsayer’s prediction. He made up his mind to no half measures this time. He would go in to win something handsome.

He was in great force and full of confidence on the racecourse. He had no fears for the result. He bet heavily. There was a good margin still untouched of the Mardykes estate; and Sir Bale was a good old name in the county. He found a ready market for his offers, and had soon staked – such is the growing frenzy of that excitement – about twenty thousand pounds on his favourite, and stood to win seven.

He did not win, however. He lost his twenty thousand pounds.

And now the Mardykes estate was in imminent danger. Sir Bale returned, having distributed IOUs and promissory notes in all directions about him – quite at his wit’s end.

Feltram was standing – as on the occasion of his former happier return – on the steps of Mardykes Hall, in the evening sun, throwing eastward a long shadow that was lost in the lake. He received him, as before, with a laugh.

Sir Bale was too much broken to resent this laugh as furiously as he might, had he been a degree less desperate.

He looked at Feltram savagely, and dismounted.

“Last time you would not trust him, and this time he would not trust you. He’s huffed, and played you false.”

“It was not he. I should have backed that damned horse in any case,” said Sir Bale, grinding his teeth. “What a witch you have discovered! One thing is true, perhaps. If there was a Feltram rich enough, he might have the estate now; but there ain’t. They are all beggars. So much for your conjuror.”

“He may make amends to you, if you make amends to him.”

“He! Why, what can that wretched impostor do? Damn me, I’m past helping now.”

“Don’t you talk so,” said Feltram. “Be civil. You must please the old gentleman. He’ll make it up. He’s placable when it suits him. Why not go to him his own way? I hear you are nearly ruined. You must go and make it up.”

“Make it up! With whom? With a fellow who can’t make even a guess at what’s coming? Why should I trouble my head about him more?”

“No man, young or old, likes to be frumped. Why did you cross his fancy? He won’t see you unless you go to him as he chooses.”

“If he waits for that, he may wait till doomsday. I don’t choose to go on that water – and cross it I won’t,” said Sir Bale.

But when his distracting reminders began to pour in upon him, and the idea of dismembering what remained of his property came home to him, his resolution faltered.

“I say, Feltram, what difference can it possibly make to him if I choose to ride round to Cloostedd Forest instead of crossing the lake in a boat?”

Feltram smiled darkly, and answered.

“I can’t tell. Can you?”

“Of course I can’t – I say I can’t; besides, what audacity of a fellow like that presuming to prescribe to me! Utterly ludicrous! And he can’t predict – do you really think or believe, Feltram, that he can?”

“I know he can. I know he misled you on purpose. He likes to punish those who don’t respect his will; and there is a reason in it, often quite clear – not ill-natured. Now you see he compels you to seek him out, and when you do, I think he’ll help you through your trouble. He said he would.”

“Then you have seen him since?”

“Yesterday. He has put a pressure on you; but he means to help you.”

“If he means to help me, let him remember I want a banker more than a seer. Let him give me a lift, as he did before. He must lend me money.”

“He’ll not stick at that. When he takes up a man, he carries him through.”

“The races of Byermere – I might retrieve at them. But they don’t come off for a month nearly; and what is a man like me to do in the meantime?”

“Every man should know his own business best. I’m not like you,” said Feltram grimly.

Now Sir Bale’s trouble increased, for some people were pressing. Something like panic supervened; for it happened that land was bringing just then a bad price, and more must be sold in consequence.

“All I can tell them is, I am selling land. It can’t be done in an hour. I’m selling enough to pay them all twice over. Gentlemen used to be able to wait till a man sold his acres for payment. Damn them! do they want my body, that they can’t let me alone for five minutes?”

The end of it was, that before a week Sir Bale told Feltram that he would go by boat, since that fellow insisted on it; and he did not very much care if he were drowned.

It was a beautiful autumnal day. Everything was bright in that mellowed sun, and the deep blue of the lake was tremulous with golden ripples; and crag and peak and scattered wood, faint in the distance, came out with a filmy distinctness on the fells in that pleasant light.

Sir Bale had been ill, and sent down the night before for Doctor Torvey. He was away with a patient. Now, in the morning, he had arrived inopportunely. He met Sir Bale as he issued from the house, and had a word with him in the court, for he would not turn back.

“Well,” said the Doctor, after his brief inspection, “you ought to be in your bed; that’s all I can say. You are perfectly mad to think of knocking about like this. Your pulse is at a hundred and ten; and, if you go across the lake and walk about Cloostedd, you’ll be raving before you come back.”

Sir Bale told him, apologetically, as if his life were more to his doctor than to himself, that he would take care not to fatigue himself, and that the air would do him good, and that in any case he could not avoid going; and so they parted.

Sir Bale took his seat beside Feltram in the boat, the sail was spread, and, bending to the light breeze that blew from Golden Friars, she glided from the jetty under Mardykes Hall, and the eventful voyage had begun.

CHAPTER XIX

MYSTAGOGUS

The sail was loosed, the boat touched the stone step, and Feltram sprang out and made her fast to the old iron ring. The Baronet followed. So! he had ventured upon that water without being drowned. He looked round him as if in a dream. He had not been there since his childhood. There were no regrets, no sentiment, no remorse; only an odd return of the associations and fresh feelings of boyhood, and a long reach of time suddenly annihilated.

The little hollow in which he stood; the three hawthorn trees at his right; every crease and undulation of the sward, every angle and crack in the lichen-covered rock at his feet, recurred with a sharp and instantaneous recognition to his memory.

“Many a time your brother and I fished for hours together from that bank there, just where the bramble grows. That bramble has not grown an inch ever since, not a leaf altered; we used to pick blackberries off it, with our rods stuck in the bank – it was later in the year than now – till we stript it quite bare after a day or two. The steward used to come over – they were marking timber for cutting and we used to stay here while they rambled through the wood, with an axe marking the trees that were to come down. I wonder whether the big old boat is still anywhere. I suppose she was broken up, or left to rot; I have not seen her since we came home. It was in the wood that lies at the right – the other wood is called the forest; they say in old times it was eight miles long, northward up the shore of the lake, and full of deer; with a forester, and a reeve, and a verderer, and all that. Your brother was older than you; he went to India, or the Colonies; is he living still?”

“I care not.”

“That’s good-natured, at all events; but do you know?”

“Not I; and what matter? If he’s living, I warrant he has his share of the curse, the sweat of his brow and his bitter crust; and if he is dead, he’s dust or worse, he’s rotten, and smells accordingly.”

Sir Bale looked at him; for this was the brother over whom, only a year or two ago, Philip used to cry tears of pathetic longing. Feltram looked darkly in his face, and sneered with a cold laugh.

“I suppose you mean to jest?” said Sir Bale.

“Not I; it is the truth. It is what you’d say, if you were honest. If he’s alive, let him keep where he is; and if he’s dead, I’ll have none of him, body or soul. Do you hear that sound?”

“Like the wind moaning in the forest?”

“Yes.”

“But I feel no wind. There’s hardly a leaf stirring.”

“I think so,” said Feltram. “Come along.”

And he began striding up the gentle slope of the glen, with many a rock peeping through its sward, and tufted ferns and furze, giving a wild and neglected character to the scene; the background of which, where the glen loses itself in a distant turn, is formed by its craggy and wooded side.

Up they marched, side by side, in silence, towards that irregular clump of trees, to which Feltram had pointed from the Mardykes side.

As they approached, it showed more scattered, and two or three of the trees were of grander dimensions than in the distance they had appeared; and as they walked, the broad valley of Cloostedd Forest opened grandly on their left, studding the sides of the valley with solitary trees or groups, which thickened as it descended to the broad level, in parts nearly three miles wide, on which stands the noble forest of Cloostedd, now majestically reposing in the stirless air, gilded and flushed with the melancholy tints of autumn.

I am now going to relate wonderful things; but they rest on the report, strangely consistent, it is true, of Sir Bale Mardykes. That all his senses, however, were sick and feverish, and his brain not quite to be relied on at that moment, is a fact of which sceptics have a right to make all they please and can.

Startled at their approach, a bird like a huge macaw bounced from the boughs of the trees, and sped away, every now and then upon the ground, toward the shelter of the forest, fluttering and hopping close by the side of the little brook which, emerging from the forest, winds into the glen, and beside the course of which Sir Bale and Philip Feltram had ascended from the margin of the lake.

It fluttered on, as if one of its wings were hurt, and kept hopping and bobbing and flying along the grass at its swiftest, screaming all the time discordantly.

“That must be old Mrs. Amerald’s bird, that got away a week ago,” said Sir Bale, stopping and looking after it. “Was not it a macaw?”

“No,” said Feltram; “that was a grey parrot; but there are stranger birds in Cloostedd Forest, for my ancestors collected all that would live in our climate, and were at pains to find them the food and shelter they were accustomed to until they grew hardy – that is how it happens.”

“By Jove, that’s a secret worth knowing,” said Sir Bale. “That would make quite a feature. What a fat brute that bird was! and green and dusky-crimson and yellow; but its head is white – age, I suspect; and what a broken beak – hideous bird! splendid plumage; something between a macaw and a vulture.”

Sir Bale spoke jocularly, but with the interest of a bird-fancier; a taste which, when young, he had indulged; and for the moment forgot his cares and the object of his unwonted excursion.

A moment after, a lank slim bird, perfectly white, started from the same boughs, and winged its way to the forest.

“A kite, I think; but its body is a little too long, isn’t it?” said Sir Bale again, stopping and looking after its flight also.

“A foreign kite, I daresay?” said Feltram.

All this time there was hopping near them a jay, with the tameness of a bird accustomed to these solitudes. It peered over its slender wing curiously at the visitors; pecking here and nodding there; and thus hopping, it made a circle round them more than once. Then it fluttered up, and perched on a bough of the old oak, from the deep labyrinth of whose branches the other birds had emerged; and from thence it flew down and lighted on the broad druidic stone, that stood like a cyclopean table on its sunken stone props, before the snakelike roots of the oak.

Across this it hopped conceitedly, as over a stage on which it figured becomingly; and after a momentary hesitation, with a little spring, it rose and winged its way in the same direction which the other birds had taken, and was quickly lost in thick forest to the left.

“Here,” said Feltram, “this is the tree.”

“I remember it well! A gigantic trunk; and, yes, those marks; but I never before read them as letters. Yes, H.F., so they are – very odd I should not have remarked them. They are so large, and so strangely drawn-out in some places, and filled-in in others, and distorted, and the moss has grown about them; I don’t wonder I took them for natural cracks and chasms in the bark,” said Sir Bale.

“Very like,” said Feltram.

Sir Bale had remarked, ever since they had begun their walk from the shore, that Feltram seemed to undergo a gloomy change. Sharper, grimmer, wilder grew his features, and shadow after shadow darkened his face wickedly.

The solitude and grandeur of the forest, and the repulsive gloom of his companion’s countenance and demeanour, communicated a tone of anxiety to Sir Bale; and they stood still, side by side, in total silence for a time, looking toward the forest glades; between themselves and which, on the level sward of the valley, stood many a noble tree and fantastic group of forked birch and thorn, in the irregular formations into which Nature had thrown them.

“Now you stand between the letters. Cast your eyes on the stone,” said Feltram suddenly, and his low stern tones almost startled the Baronet.

Looking round, he perceived that he had so placed himself that his point of vision was exactly from between the two great letters, now half obliterated, which he had been scrutinizing just as he turned about to look toward the forest of Cloostedd.

“Yes, so I am,” said Sir Bale.

There was within him an excitement and misgiving, akin to the sensation of a man going into battle, and which corresponded with the pale and sombre frown which Feltram wore, and the manifest change which had come over him.

“Look on the stone steadily for a time, and tell me if you see a black mark, about the size of your hand, anywhere upon its surface,” said Feltram.

Sir Bale affected no airs of scepticism now; his imagination was stirred, and a sense of some unknown reality at the bottom of that which he had affected to treat before as illusion, inspired a strange interest in the experiment.

“Do you see it?” asked Feltram.

Sir Bale was watching patiently, but he had observed nothing of the kind.

Sharper, darker, more eager grew the face of Philip Feltram, as his eyes traversed the surface of that huge horizontal block.

“Now?” asked Feltram again.

No, he had seen nothing.

Feltram was growing manifestly uneasy, angry almost; he walked away a little, and back again, and then two or three times round the tree, with his hands shut, and treading the ground like a man trying to warm his feet, and so impatiently he returned, and looked again on the stone.

Sir Bale was still looking, and very soon said, drawing his brows together and looking hard,

“Ha! – yes – hush. There it is, by Jove! – wait – yes – there; it is growing quite plain.”

It seemed not as if a shadow fell upon the stone, but rather as if the stone became semi-transparent, and just under its surface was something dark – a hand, he thought it – and darker and darker it grew, as if coming up toward the surface, and after some little wavering, it fixed itself movelessly, pointing, as he thought, toward the forest.

“It looks like a hand,” said he. “By Jove, it is a hand – pointing towards the forest with a finger.”

“Don’t mind the finger; look only on that black blurred mark, and from the point where you stand, taking that point for your direction, look to the forest. Take some tree or other landmark for an object, enter the forest there, and pursue the same line, as well as you can, until you find little flowers with leaves like wood-sorrel, and with tall stems and a red blossom, not larger than a drop, such as you have not seen before, growing among the trees, and follow wherever they seem to grow thickest, and there you will find him.”

All the time that Feltram was making this little address, Sir Bale was endeavouring to fix his route by such indications as Feltram described; and when he had succeeded in quite establishing the form of a peculiar tree – a melancholy ash, one huge limb of which had been blasted by lightning, and its partly stricken arm stood high and barkless, stretching its white fingers, as it were, in invitation into the forest, and signing the way for him.

“I have it now,” said he. “Come Feltram, you’ll come a bit of the way with me.”

Feltram made no answer, but slowly shook his head, and turned and walked away, leaving Sir Bale to undertake his adventure alone.

The strange sound they had heard from the midst of the forest, like the rumble of a storm or the far-off trembling of a furnace, had quite ceased. Not a bird was hopping on the grass, or visible on bough or in the sky. Not a living creature was in sight – never was stillness more complete, or silence more oppressive.

It would have been ridiculous to give way to the old reluctance which struggled within him. Feltram had strode down the slope, and was concealed by a screen of bushes from his view. So alone, and full of an interest quite new to him, he set out in quest of his adventures.

CHAPTER XX

THE HAUNTED FOREST

Sir Bale Mardykes walked in a straight line, by bush and scaur, over the undulating ground, to the blighted ash-tree; and as he approached it, its withered bough stretched more gigantically into the air, and the forest seemed to open where it pointed.

He passed it by, and in a few minutes had lost sight of it again, and was striding onward under the shadow of the forest, which already enclosed him. He was directing his march with all the care he could, in exactly that line which, according to Feltram’s rule, had been laid down for him. Now and then, having, as soldiers say, taken an object, and fixed it well in his memory, he would pause and look about him.

As a boy he had never entered the wood so far; for he was under a prohibition, lest he should lose himself in its intricacies, and be benighted there. He had often heard that it was haunted ground, and that too would, when a boy, have deterred him. It was on this account that the scene was so new to him, and that he cared so often to stop and look about him. Here and there a vista opened, exhibiting the same utter desertion, and opening farther perspectives through the tall stems of the trees faintly visible in the solemn shadow. No flowers could he see, but once or twice a wood anemone, and now and then a tiny grove of wood-sorrel.

Huge oak-trees now began to mingle and show themselves more and more frequently among the other timber; and gradually the forest became a great oak wood unintruded upon by any less noble tree. Vast trunks curving outwards to the roots, and expanding again at the branches, stood like enormous columns, striking out their groining boughs, with the dark vaulting of a crypt.

As he walked under the shadow of these noble trees, suddenly his eye was struck by a strange little flower, nodding quite alone by the knotted root of one of those huge oaks.

He stooped and picked it up, and as he plucked it, with a harsh scream just over his head, a large bird with heavy beating wings broke away from the midst of the branches. He could not see it, but he fancied the scream was like that of the huge macaw whose ill-poised flight he had watched. This conjecture was but founded on the odd cry he had heard.

The flower was a curious one – a stem fine as a hair supported a little bell, that looked like a drop of blood, and never ceased trembling. He walked on, holding this in his fingers; and soon he saw another of the same odd type, then another at a shorter distance, then one a little to the right and another to the left, and farther on a little group, and at last the dark slope was all over trembling with these little bells, thicker and thicker as he descended a gentle declivity to the bank of the little brook, which flowing through the forest loses itself in the lake. The low murmur of this forest stream was almost the first sound, except the shriek of the bird that startled him a little time ago, which had disturbed the profound silence of the wood since he entered it. Mingling with the faint sound of the brook, he now heard a harsh human voice calling words at intervals, the purport of which he could not yet catch; and walking on, he saw seated upon the grass, a strange figure, corpulent, with a great hanging nose, the whole face glowing like copper. He was dressed in a bottle-green cut-velvet coat, of the style of Queen Anne’s reign, with a dusky crimson waistcoat, both overlaid with broad and tarnished gold lace, and his silk stockings on thick swollen legs, with great buckled shoes, straddling on the grass, were rolled up over his knees to his short breeches. This ill-favoured old fellow, with a powdered wig that came down to his shoulders, had a dice-box in each hand, and was apparently playing his left against his right, and calling the throws with a hoarse cawing voice.

Raising his black piggish eyes, he roared to Sir Bale, by name, to come and sit down, raising one of his dice-boxes, and then indicating a place on the grass opposite to him.

Now Sir Bale instantly guessed that this was the man, gipsy, warlock, call him what he might, of whom he had come in search. With a strange feeling of curiosity, disgust, and awe, he drew near. He was resolved to do whatever this old man required of him, and to keep him, this time, in good humour.

Sir Bale did as he bid him, and sat down; and taking the box he presented, they began throwing turn about, with three dice, the copper-faced old man teaching him the value of the throws, as he proceeded, with many a curse and oath; and when he did not like a throw, grinning with a look of such real fury, that the master of Mardykes almost expected him to whip out his sword and prick him through as he sat before him.

After some time spent at this play, in which guineas passed now this way, now that, chucked across the intervening patch of grass, or rather moss, that served them for a green cloth, the old man roared over his shoulder,

“Drink;” and picking up a long-stemmed conical glass which Sir Bale had not observed before, he handed it over to the Baronet; and taking another in his fingers, he held it up, while a very tall slim old man, dressed in a white livery, with powdered hair and cadaverous face, which seemed to run out nearly all into a long thin hooked nose, advanced with a flask in each hand. Looking at the unwieldly old man, with his heavy nose, powdered head, and all the bottle-green, crimson, and gold about him, and the long slim serving man, with sharp beak, and white from head to heel, standing by him, Sir Bale was forcibly reminded of the great old macaw and the long and slender kite, whose colours they, after their fashion, reproduced, with something, also indescribable, of the air and character of the birds. Not standing on ceremony, the old fellow held up his own glass first, which the white lackey filled from the flask, and then he filled Sir Bale’s glass.

It was a large glass, and might have held about half a pint; and the liquor with which the servant filled it was something of the colour of an opal, and circles of purple and gold seemed to be spreading continually outward from the centre, and running inward from the rim, and crossing one another, so as to form a beautiful rippling network.

“I drink to your better luck next time,” said the old man, lifting his glass high, and winking with one eye, and leering knowingly with the other; “and you know what I mean.”

Sir Bale put the liquor to his lips. Wine? Whatever it was, never had he tasted so delicious a flavour. He drained it to the bottom, and placing it on the grass beside him, and looking again at the old dicer, who was also setting down his glass, he saw, for the first time, the graceful figure of a young woman seated on the grass. She was dressed in deep mourning, had a black hood carelessly over her head, and, strangely, wore a black mask, such as are used at masquerades. So much of her throat and chin as he could see were beautifully white; and there was a prettiness in her air and figure which made him think what a beautiful creature she in all likelihood was. She was reclining slightly against the burly man in bottle-green and gold, and her arm was round his neck, and her slender white hand showed itself over his shoulder.

“Ho! my little Geaiette,” cried the old fellow hoarsely; “it will be time that you and I should get home. – So, Bale Mardykes, I have nothing to object to you this time; you’ve crossed the lake, and you’ve played with me and won and lost, and drank your glass like a jolly companion, and now we know one another; and an acquaintance is made that will last. I’ll let you go, and you’ll come when I call for you. And now you’ll want to know what horse will win next month at Rindermere races. – Whisper me, lass, and I’ll tell him.”

So her lips, under the black curtain, crept close to his ear, and she whispered.

“Aye, so it will;” roared the old man, gnashing his teeth; “it will be Rainbow, and now make your best speed out of the forest, or I’ll set my black dogs after you, ho, ho, ho! and they may chance to pull you down. Away!”

He cried this last order with a glare so black, and so savage a shake of his huge fist, that Sir Bale, merely making his general bow to the group, clapped his hat on his head, and hastily began his retreat; but the same discordant voice yelled after him:

“You’ll want that, you fool; pick it up.” And there came hurtling after and beside him a great leather bag, stained, and stuffed with a heavy burden, and bounding by him it stopped with a little wheel that brought it exactly before his feet.

He picked it up, and found it heavy.

Turning about to make his acknowledgements, he saw the two persons in full retreat; the profane old scoundrel in the bottle-green limping and stumbling, yet bowling along at a wonderful rate, with many a jerk and reel, and the slender lady in black gliding away by his side into the inner depths of the forest.

So Sir Bale, with a strange chill, and again in utter solitude, pursued his retreat, with his burden, at a swifter pace, and after an hour or so, had recovered the point where he had entered the forest, and passing by the druidic stone and the mighty oak, saw down the glen at his right, standing by the edge of the lake, Philip Feltram, close to the bow of the boat.

CHAPTER XXI

RINDERMERE

Feltram looked grim and agitated when Sir Bale came up to him, as he stood on the flat stone by which the boat was moored.

“You found him?” said he.

“Yes.”

“The lady in black was there?”

“She was.”

“And you played with him?”

“Yes.”

“And what is that in your hand?”

“A bag of something, I fancy money; it is heavy; he threw it after me. We shall see just now; let us get away.”

“He gave you some of his wine to drink?” said Feltram, looking darkly in his face; but there was a laugh in his eyes.

“Yes; of course I drank it; my object was to please him.”

“To be sure.”

The faint wind that carried them across the lake had quite subsided by the time they had reached the side where they now were.

There was now not wind enough to fill the sail, and it was already evening.

“Give me an oar; we can pull her over in little more than an hour,” said Sir Bale; “only let us get away.”

He got into the boat, sat down, and placed the leather bag with its heavy freightage at his feet, and took an oar. Feltram loosed the rope and shoved the boat off; and taking his seat also, they began to pull together, without another word, until, in about ten minutes, they had got a considerable way off the Cloostedd shore.

The leather bag was too clumsy a burden to conceal; besides, Feltram knew all about the transaction, and Sir Bale had no need to make a secret. The bag was old and soiled, and tied about the “neck” with a long leather thong, and it seemed to have been sealed with red wax, fragments of which were still sticking to it.

He got it open, and found it full of guineas.

“Halt!” cried Sir Bale, delighted, for he had half apprehended a trick upon his hopes; “gold it is, and a lot of it, by Jove!”

Feltram did not seem to take the slightest interest in the matter. Sulkily and drowsily he was leaning with his elbow on his knee, and it seemed thinking of something far away. Sir Bale could not wait to count them any longer. He reckoned them on the bench, and found two thousand.

It took some time; and when he had got them back into the leather bag, and tied them up again, Feltram, with a sudden start, said sharply,

“Come, take your oar – unless you like the lake by night; and see, a wind will soon be up from Golden Friars!”

He cast a wild look towards Mardykes Hall and Snakes Island, and applying himself to his oar, told Sir Bale to take his also; and nothing loath, the Baronet did so.

It was slow work, for the boat was not built for speed; and by the time they had got about midway, the sun went down, and twilight and the melancholy flush of the sunset tints were upon the lake and fells.

“Ho! here comes the breeze – up from Golden Friars,” said Feltram; “we shall have enough to fill the sails now. If you don’t fear spirits and Snakes Island, it is all the better for us it should blow from that point. If it blew from Mardykes now, it would be a stiff pull for you and me to get this tub home.”

Talking as if to himself, and laughing low, he adjusted the sail and took the tiller, and so, yielding to the rising breeze, the boat glided slowly toward still distant Mardykes Hall.

The moon came out, and the shore grew misty, and the towering fells rose like sheeted giants; and leaning on the gunwale of the boat, Sir Bale, with the rush and gurgle of the water on the boat’s side sounding faintly in his ear, thought of his day’s adventure, which seemed to him like a dream – incredible but for the heavy bag that lay between his feet.

As they passed Snakes Island, a little mist, like a fragment of a fog, seemed to drift with them, and Sir Bale fancied that whenever it came near the boat’s side she made a dip, as if strained toward the water; and Feltram always put out his hand, as if waving it from him, and the mist seemed to obey the gesture; but returned again and again, and the same thing always happened.

It was three weeks after, that Sir Bale, sitting up in his bed, very pale and wan, with his silk nightcap nodding on one side, and his thin hand extended on the coverlet, where the doctor had been feeling his pulse, in his darkened room, related all the wonders of this day to Doctor Torvey. The doctor had attended him through a fever which followed immediately upon his visit to Cloostedd.

“And, my dear sir, by Jupiter, can you really believe all that delirium to be sober fact?” said the doctor, sitting by the bedside, and actually laughing.

“I can’t help believing it, because I can’t distinguish in any way between all that and everything else that actually happened, and which I must believe. And, except that this is more wonderful, I can find no reason to reject it, that does not as well apply to all the rest.”

“Come, come, my dear sir, this will never do – nothing is more common. These illusions accompanying fever frequently antedate the attack, and the man is actually raving before he knows he is ill.”

“But what do you make of that bag of gold?”

“Someone has lent it. You had better ask all about it of Feltram when you can see him; for in speaking to me he seemed to know all about it, and certainly did not seem to think the matter at all out of the commonplace. It is just like that fisherman’s story, about the hand that drew Feltram into the water on the night that he was nearly drowned. Everyone can see what that was. Why of course it was simply the reflection of his own hand in the water, in that vivid lightning. When you have been out a little and have gained strength you will shake off these dreams.”

“I should not wonder,” said Sir Bale.

It is not to be supposed that Sir Bale reported all that was in his memory respecting his strange vision, if such it was, at Cloostedd. He made a selection of the incidents, and threw over the whole adventure an entirely accidental character, and described the money which the old man had thrown to him as amounting to a purse of five guineas, and mentioned nothing of the passages which bore on the coming race.

Good Doctor Torvey, therefore, reported only that Sir Bale’s delirium had left two or three illusions sticking in his memory.

But if they were illusions, they survived the event of his recovery, and remained impressed on his memory with the sharpness of very recent and accurately observed fact.

He was resolved on going to the races of Rindermere, where, having in his possession so weighty a guarantee as the leather purse, he was determined to stake it all boldly on Rainbow – against which horse he was glad to hear there were very heavy odds.

The race came off. One horse was scratched, another bolted, the rider of a third turned out to have lost a buckle and three halfpence and so was an ounce and a half under weight, a fourth knocked down the post near Rinderness churchyard, and was held to have done it with his left instead of his right knee, and so had run at the wrong side. The result was that Rainbow came in first, and I should be afraid to say how much Sir Bale won. It was a sum that paid off a heavy debt, and left his affairs in a much more manageable state.

From this time Sir Bale prospered. He visited Cloostedd no more; but Feltram often crossed to that lonely shore as heretofore, and it is believed conveyed to him messages which guided his betting. One thing is certain, his luck never deserted him. His debts disappeared; and his love of continental life seemed to have departed. He became content with Mardykes Hall, laid out money on it, and although he never again cared to cross the lake, he seemed to like the scenery.

In some respects, however, he lived exactly the same odd and unpopular life. He saw no one at Mardykes Hall. He practised a very strict reserve. The neighbours laughed at and disliked him, and he was voted, whenever any accidental contact arose, a very disagreeable man; and he had a shrewd and ready sarcasm that made them afraid of him, and himself more disliked.

Odd rumours prevailed about his household. It was said that his old relations with Philip Feltram had become reversed; and that he was as meek as a mouse, and Feltram the bully now. It was also said that Mrs. Julaper had one Sunday evening when she drank tea at the Vicar’s, told his good lady very mysteriously, and with many charges of secrecy, that Sir Bale was none the better of his late-found wealth; that he had a load upon his spirits, that he was afraid of Feltram, and so was everyone else, more or less, in the house; that he was either mad or worse; and that it was an eerie dwelling, and strange company, and she should be glad herself of a change.

Good Mrs. Bedel told her friend Mrs. Torvey; and all Golden Friars heard all this, and a good deal more, in an incredibly short time.

All kinds of rumours now prevailed in Golden Friars, connecting Sir Bale’s successes on the turf with some mysterious doings in Cloostedd Forest. Philip Feltram laughed when he heard these stories – especially when he heard the story that a supernatural personage had lent the Baronet a purse full of money.

“You should not talk to Doctor Torvey so, sir,” said he grimly; “he’s the greatest tattler in the town. It was old Farmer Trebeck, who could buy and sell us all down here, who lent that money. Partly from goodwill, but not without acknowledgement. He has my hand for the first, not worth much, and yours to a bond for the two thousand guineas you brought home with you. It seems strange you should not remember that venerable and kind old farmer whom you talked with so long that day. His grandson, who expects to stand well in his will, being a trainer in Lord Varney’s stables, has sometimes a tip to give, and he is the source of your information.”

“By Jove, I must be a bit mad, then, that’s all,” said Sir Bale, with a smile and a shrug.

Philip Feltram moped about the house, and did precisely what he pleased. The change which had taken place in him became more and more pronounced. Dark and stern he always looked, and often malignant. He was like a man possessed of one evil thought which never left him.

There was, besides, the good old Gothic superstition of a bargain or sale of the Baronet’s soul to the archfiend. This was, of course, very cautiously whispered in a place where he had influence. It was only a coarser and directer version of a suspicion, that in a more credulous generation penetrated a level of society quite exempt from such follies in our day.

One evening at dusk, Sir Bale, sitting after his dinner in his window, saw the tall figure of Feltram, like a dark streak, standing movelessly by the lake. An unpleasant feeling moved him, and then an impatience. He got up, and having primed himself with two glasses of brandy, walked down to the edge of the lake, and placed himself beside Feltram.

“Looking down from the window,” said he, nerved with his Dutch courage, “and seeing you standing like a post, do you know what I began to think of?”

Feltram looked at him, but answered nothing.

“I began to think of taking a wife – marrying.”

Feltram nodded. The announcement had not produced the least effect.

“Why the devil will you make me so uncomfortable! Can’t you be like yourself – what you were, I mean? I won’t go on living here alone with you. I’ll take a wife, I tell you. I’ll choose a good churchgoing woman, that will have every man, woman, and child in the house on their marrow-bones twice a day, morning and evening, and three times on Sundays. How will you like that?”

“Yes, you will be married,” said Feltram, with a quiet decision which chilled Sir Bale, for he had by no means made up his mind to that desperate step.

Feltram slowly walked away, and that conversation ended.

Now an odd thing happened about this time. There was a family of Feltram – county genealogists could show how related to the vanished family of Cloostedd – living at that time on their estate not far from Carlisle. Three co-heiresses now represented it. They were great beauties – the belles of their county in their day.

One was married to Sir Oliver Haworth of Haworth, a great family in those times. He was a knight of the shire, and had refused a baronetage, and, it was said, had his eye on a peerage. The other sister was married to Sir William Walsingham, a wealthy baronet; and the third and youngest, Miss Janet, was still unmarried, and at home at Cloudesly Hall, where her aunt, Lady Harbottle, lived with her, and made a dignified chaperon.

Now it so fell out that Sir Bale, having business at Carlisle, and knowing old Lady Harbottle, paid his respects at Cloudesly Hall; and being no less than five-and-forty years of age, was for the first time in his life, seriously in love.

Miss Janet was extremely pretty – a fair beauty with brilliant red lips and large blue eyes, and ever so many pretty dimples when she talked and smiled. It was odd, but not perhaps against the course of nature, that a man, though so old as he, and quite blasé, should fall at last under that fascination.

But what are we to say of the strange infatuation of the young lady? No one could tell why she liked him. It was a craze. Her family were against it, her intimates, her old nurse – all would not do; and the oddest thing was, that he seemed to take no pains to please her. The end of this strange courtship was that he married her; and she came home to Mardykes Hall, determined to please everybody, and to be the happiest woman in England.

With her came a female cousin, a good deal her senior, past thirty – Gertrude Mainyard, pale and sad, but very gentle, and with all the prettiness that can belong to her years.

This young lady has a romance. Her hero is far away in India; and she, content to await his uncertain return with means to accomplish the hope of their lives, in that frail chance has long embarked all the purpose and love of her life.

When Lady Mardykes came home, a new leaf was, as the phrase is, turned over. The neighbours and all the country people were willing to give the Hall a new trial. There was visiting and returning of visits; and young Lady Mardykes was liked and admired. It could not indeed have been otherwise. But here the improvement in the relations of Mardykes Hall with other homes ceased. On one excuse or another Sir Bale postponed or evaded the hospitalities which establish intimacies. Some people said he was jealous of his young and beautiful wife. But for the most part his reserve was set down to the old inhospitable cause, some ungenial defect in his character; and in a little time the tramp of horses and roll of carriage-wheels were seldom heard up or down the broad avenue of Mardykes Hall.

Sir Bale liked this seclusion; and his wife, “so infatuated with her idolatry of that graceless old man,” as surrounding young ladies said, that she was well content to forego the society of the county people for a less interrupted enjoyment of that of her husband. “What she could see in him” to interest or amuse her so, that for his sake she was willing to be “buried alive in that lonely place,” the same critics were perpetually wondering.

A year and more passed thus; for the young wife, happily – very happily indeed, had it not been for one topic on which she and her husband could not agree. This was Philip Feltram; and an odd quarrel it was.

CHAPTER XXII

SIR BALE IS FRIGHTENED

To Feltram she had conceived, at first sight, a horror. It was not a mere antipathy; fear mingled largely in it. Although she did not see him often, this restless dread grew upon her so, that she urged his dismissal upon Sir Bale, offering to provide, herself, for him a handsome annuity, charged on that part of her property which, by her marriage settlement, had remained in her power. There was a time when Sir Bale was only too anxious to get rid of him. But that was changed now. Nothing could now induce the Baronet to part with him. He at first evaded and resisted quietly. But, urged with a perseverance to which he was unused, he at last broke into fury that appalled her, and swore that if he was worried more upon the subject, he would leave her and the country, and see neither again. This exhibition of violence affrighted her all the more by reason of the contrast; for up to this he had been an uxorious husband. Lady Mardykes was in hysterics, and thoroughly frightened, and remained in her room for two or three days. Sir Bale went up to London about business, and was not home for more than a week. This was the first little squall that disturbed the serenity of their sky.

This point, therefore, was settled; but soon there came other things to sadden Lady Mardykes. There occurred a little incident, soon after Sir Bale’s return from London, which recalled the topic on which they had so nearly quarrelled.

Sir Bale had a dressing-room, remote from the bedrooms, in which he sat and read and sometimes smoked. One night, after the house was all quiet, the Baronet being still up, the bell of this dressing-room rang long and furiously. It was such a peal as a person in extreme terror might ring. Lady Mardykes, with her maid in her room, heard it; and in great alarm she ran in her dressing-gown down the gallery to Sir Bale’s room. Mallard the butler had already arrived, and was striving to force the door, which was secured. It gave way just as she reached it, and she rushed through.

Sir Bale was standing with the bell-rope in his hand, in the extremest agitation, looking like a ghost; and Philip Feltram was sitting in his chair, with a dark smile fixed upon him. For a minute she thought he had attempted to assassinate his master. She could not otherwise account for the scene.

There had been nothing of the kind, however; as her husband assured her again and again, as she lay sobbing on his breast, with her arms about his neck.

“To her dying hour,” she afterwards said to her cousin, “she never could forget the dreadful look in Feltram’s face.”

No explanation of that scene did she ever obtain from Sir Bale, nor any clue to the cause of the agony that was so powerfully expressed in his countenance. Thus much only she learned from him, that Feltram had sought that interview for the purpose of announcing his departure, which was to take place within the year.

“You are not sorry to hear that. But if you knew all, you might. Let the curse fly where it may, it will come back to roost. So, darling, let us discuss him no more. Your wish is granted, dis iratis.”

Some crisis, during this interview, seemed to have occurred in the relations between Sir Bale and Feltram. Henceforward they seldom exchanged a word; and when they did speak, it was coldly and shortly, like men who were nearly strangers.

One day in the courtyard, Sir Bale seeing Feltram leaning upon the parapet that overlooks the lake, approached him, and said in a low tone,

“I’ve been thinking if we – that is, I – do owe that money to old Trebeck, it is high time I should pay it. I was ill, and had lost my head at the time; but it turned out luckily, and it ought to be paid. I don’t like the idea of a bond turning up, and a lot of interest.”

“The old fellow meant it for a present. He is richer than you are; he wished to give the family a lift. He has destroyed the bond, I believe, and in no case will he take payment.”

“No fellow has a right to force his money on another,” answered Sir Bale. “I never asked him. Besides, as you know, I was not really myself, and the whole thing seems to me quite different from what you say it was; and, so far as my brain is concerned, it was all a phantasmagoria; but, you say, it was he.”

“Every man is accountable for what he intends and for what he thinks he does,” said Feltram cynically.

“Well, I’m accountable for dealing with that wicked old dicer I thought I saw – isn’t that it? But I must pay old Trebeck all the same, since the money was his. Can you manage a meeting?”

“Look down here. Old Trebeck has just landed; he will sleep tonight at the George and Dragon, to meet his cattle in the morning at Golden Friars fair. You can speak to him yourself.”

So saying Feltram glided away, leaving Sir Bale the task of opening the matter to the wealthy farmer of Cloostedd Fells.

A broad night of steps leads down from the courtyard to the level of the jetty at the lake: and Sir Bale descended, and accosted the venerable farmer, who was bluff, honest, and as frank as a man can be who speaks a patois which hardly a living man but himself can understand.

Sir Bale asked him to come to the Hall and take luncheon; but Trebeck was in haste. Cattle had arrived which he wanted to look at, and a pony awaited him on the road, hard by, to Golden Friars; and the old fellow must mount and away.

Then Sir Bale, laying his hand upon his arm in a manner that was at once lofty and affectionate, told in his ears the subject on which he wished to be understood.

The old farmer looked hard at him, and shook his head and laughed in a way that would have been insupportable in a house, and told him, “I hev narra bond o’ thoine, mon.”

“I know how that is; so does Philip Feltram.”

“Well?”

“Well, I must replace the money.”

The old man laughed again, and in his outlandish dialect told him to wait till he asked him. Sir Bale pressed it, but the old fellow put it off with outlandish banter; and as the Baronet grew testy, the farmer only waxed more and more hilarious, and at last, mounting his shaggy pony, rode off, still laughing, at a canter to Golden Friars; and when he reached Golden Friars, and got into the hall of the George and Dragon, he asked Richard Turnbull with a chuckle if he ever knew a man refuse an offer of money, or a man want to pay who did not owe; and inquired whether the Squire down at Mardykes Hall mightn’t be a bit “wrang in t’ garrets.” All this, however, other people said, was intended merely to conceal the fact that he really had, through sheer loyalty, lent the money, or rather bestowed it, thinking the old family in jeopardy, and meaning a gift, was determined to hear no more about it. I can’t say; I only know people held, some by one interpretation, some by another.

As the caterpillar sickens and changes its hue when it is about to undergo its transformation, so an odd change took place in Feltram. He grew even more silent and morose; he seemed always in an agitation and a secret rage. He used to walk through the woodlands on the slopes of the fells above Mardykes, muttering to himself, picking up the rotten sticks with which the ground was strewn, breaking them in his hands, and hurling them from him, and stamping on the earth as he paced up and down.

One night a thunderstorm came on, the wind blowing gently up from Golden Friars. It was a night black as pitch, illuminated only by the intermittent glare of the lightning. At the foot of the stairs Sir Bale met Feltram, whom he had not seen for some days. He had his cloak and hat on.

“I am going to Cloostedd tonight,” he said, “and if all is as I expect, I sha’n’t return. We remember all, you and I.” And he nodded and walked down the passage.

Sir Bale knew that a crisis had happened in his own life. He felt faint and ill, and returned to the room where he had been sitting. Throughout that melancholy night he did not go to his bed.

In the morning he learned that Marlin, who had been out late, saw Feltram get the boat off, and sail towards the other side. The night was so dark that he could only see him start; but the wind was light and coming up the lake, so that without a tack he could easily make the other side. Feltram did not return. The boat was found fast to the ring at Cloostedd landing-place.

Lady Mardykes was relieved, and for a time was happier than ever. It was different with Sir Bale; and afterwards her sky grew dark also.

CHAPTER XXII

A LADY IN BLACK

Shortly after this, there arrived at the George and Dragon a stranger. He was a man somewhat past forty, embrowned by distant travel, and, his years considered, wonderfully good-looking. He had good eyes; his dark-brown hair had no sprinkling of grey in it; and his kindly smile showed very white and even teeth. He made inquiries about neighbours, especially respecting Mardykes Hall; and the answers seemed to interest him profoundly. He inquired after Philip Feltram, and shed tears when he heard that he was no longer at Mardykes Hall, and that Trebeck or other friends could give him no tidings of him.

And then he asked Richard Turnbull to show him to a quiet room; and so, taking the honest fellow by the hand, he said,

“Mr. Turnbull, don’t you know me?”

“No, sir,” said the host of the George and Dragon, after a puzzled stare, “I can’t say I do, sir.”

The stranger smiled a little sadly, and shook his head: and with a gentle laugh, still holding his hand in a very friendly way, he said, “I should have known you anywhere, Mr. Turnbull – anywhere on earth or water. Had you turned up on the Himalayas, or in a junk on the Canton river, or as a dervish in the mosque of St. Sophia, I should have recognised my old friend, and asked what news from Golden Friars. But of course I’m changed. You were a little my senior; and one advantage among many you have over your juniors is that you don’t change as we do. I have played many a game of handball in the inn-yard of the George, Mr. Turnbull. You often wagered a pot of ale on my play; you used to say I’d make the best player of fives, and the best singer of a song, within ten miles round the meer. You used to have me behind the bar when I was a boy, with more of an appetite than I have now. I was then at Mardykes Hall, and used to go back in old Marlin’s boat. Is old Marlin still alive?”

“Aye, that – he – is,” said Turnbull slowly, as he eyed the stranger again carefully. “I don’t know who you can be, sir, unless you are – the boy – William Feltram. La! he was seven or eight years younger than Philip. But, lawk! – Well – By Jen, and be you Willie Feltram? But no, you can’t!”

“Aye, Mr. Turnbull, that very boy – Willie Feltram – even he, and no other; and now you’ll shake hands with me, not so formally, but like an old friend.”

“Aye, that I will,” said honest Richard Turnbull, with a great smile, and a hearty grasp of his guest’s hand; and they both laughed together, and the younger man’s eyes, for he was an affectionate fool, filled up with tears.

“And I want you to tell me this,” said William, after they had talked a little quietly, “now that there is no one to interrupt us, what has become of my brother Philip? I heard from a friend an account of his health that has caused me unspeakable anxiety.”

“His health was not bad; no, he was a hardy lad, and liked a walk over the fells, or a pull on the lake; but he was a bit daft, everyone said, and a changed man; and, in troth, they say the air o’ Mardykes don’t agree with everyone, no more than him. But that’s a tale that’s neither here nor there.”

“Yes,” said William, “that was what they told me – his mind affected. God help and guard us! I have been unhappy ever since; and if I only knew it was well with poor Philip, I think I should be too happy. And where is Philip now?”

“He crossed the lake one night, having took leave of Sir Bale. They thought he was going to old Trebeck’s up the Fells. He likes the Feltrams, and likes the folk at Mardykes Hall – though those two families was not always o’er kind to one another. But Trebeck seed nowt o’ him, nor no one else; and what has gone wi’ him no one can tell.”

“I heard that also,” said William with a deep sigh. “But I hoped it had been cleared up by now, and something happier been known of the poor fellow by this time. I’d give a great deal to know – I don’t know what I would not give to know – I’m so unhappy about him. And now, my good old friend, tell your people to get me a chaise, for I must go to Mardykes Hall; and, first, let me have a room to dress in.”

At Mardykes Hall a pale and pretty lady was looking out, alone, from the stone-shafted drawing-room window across the courtyard and the balustrade, on which stood many a great stone cup with flowers, whose leaves were half shed and gone with the winds – emblem of her hopes. The solemn melancholy of the towering fells, the ripple of the lonely lake, deepened her sadness.

The unwonted sound of carriage-wheels awoke her from her reverie.

Before the chaise reached the steps, a hand from its window had seized the handle, the door was thrown open, and William Feltram jumped out.

She was in the hall, she knew not how; and, with a wild scream and a sob, she threw herself into his arms.

Here at last was an end of the long waiting, the dejection which had reached almost the point of despair. And like two rescued from shipwreck, they clung together in an agony of happiness.

William had come back with no very splendid fortune. It was enough, and only enough, to enable them to marry. Prudent people would have thought it, very likely, too little. But he was now home in England, with health unimpaired by his long sojourn in the East, and with intelligence and energies improved by the discipline of his arduous struggle with fortune. He reckoned, therefore, upon one way or other adding something to their income; and he knew that a few hundreds a year would make them happier than hundreds of thousand could other people.

It was five years since they had parted in France, where a journey of importance to the Indian firm, whose right hand he was, had brought him.

The refined tastes that are supposed to accompany gentle blood, his love of art, his talent for music and drawing, had accidentally attracted the attention of the little travelling-party which old Lady Harbottle chaperoned. Miss Janet, now Lady Mardykes, learning that his name was Feltram, made inquiry through a common friend, and learned what interested her still more about him. It ended in an acquaintance, which his manly and gentle nature and his entertaining qualities soon improved into an intimacy.

Feltram had chosen to work his own way, being proud, and also prosperous enough to prevent his pride, in this respect, from being placed under too severe a pressure of temptation. He heard not from but of his brother, through a friend in London, and more lately from Gertrude, whose account of him was sad and even alarming.

When Lady Mardykes came in, her delight knew no bounds. She had already formed a plan for their future, and was not to be put off – William Feltram was to take the great grazing farm that belonged to the Mardykes estate; or, if he preferred it, to farm it for her, sharing the profits. She wanted something to interest her, and this was just the thing. It was hardly half-a-mile away, up the lake, and there was such a comfortable house and garden, and she and Gertrude could be as much together as ever almost; and, in fact, Gertrude and her husband could be nearly always at Mardykes Hall.

So eager and entreating was she, that there was no escape. The plan was adopted immediately on their marriage, and no happier neighbours for a time were ever known.

But was Lady Mardykes content? was she even exempt from the heartache which each mortal thinks he has all to himself? The longing of her life was for children; and again and again had her hopes been disappointed.

One tiny pretty little baby indeed was born, and lived for two years, and then died; and none had come to supply its place and break the childless silence in the great old nursery. That was her sorrow; a greater one than men can understand.

Another source of grief was this: that Sir Bale Mardykes conceived a dislike to William Feltram that was unaccountable. At first suppressed, it betrayed itself negatively only; but with time it increased; and in the end the Baronet made little secret of his wish to get rid of him. Many and ingenious were the annoyances he contrived; and at last he told his wife plainly that he wished William Feltram to find some other abode for himself.

Lady Mardykes pleaded earnestly, and even with tears; for if Gertrude were to leave the neighbourhood, she well knew how utterly solitary her own life would become.

Sir Bale at last vouchsafed some little light as to his motives. There was an old story, he told her, that his estate would go to a Feltram. He had an instinctive distrust of that family. It was a feeling not given him for nothing; it might be the means of defeating their plotting and strategy. Old Trebeck, he fancied, had a finger in it. Philip Feltram had told him that Mardykes was to pass away to a Feltram. Well, they might conspire; but he would take what care he could that the estate should not be stolen from his family. He did not want his wife stript of her jointure, or his children, if he had any, left without bread.

All this sounded very like madness; but the idea was propounded by Philip Feltram. His own jealousy was at bottom founded on superstition which he would not avow and could hardly define. He bitterly blamed himself for having permitted William Feltram to place himself where he was.

In the midst of these annoyances William Feltram was seriously thinking of throwing up the farm, and seeking similar occupation somewhere else.

One day, walking alone in the thick wood that skirts the lake near his farm, he was discussing this problem with himself; and every now and then he repeated his question, “Shall I throw it up, and give him the lease back if he likes?” On a sudden he heard a voice near him say:

“Hold it, you fool! – hold hard, you fool! – hold it, you fool!”

The situation being lonely, he was utterly puzzled to account for the interruption, until on a sudden a huge parrot, green, crimson, and yellow, plunged from among the boughs over his head to the ground, and partly flying, and partly hopping and tumbling along, got lamely, but swiftly, out of sight among the thick under-wood; and he could neither start it nor hear it any more. The interruption reminded him of that which befell Robinson Crusoe. It was more singular, however; for he owned no such bird; and its strangeness impressed the omen all the more.

He related it when he got home to his wife; and as people when living a solitary life, and also suffering, are prone to superstition, she did not laugh at the adventure, as in a healthier state of spirits, I suppose, she would.

They continued, however, to discuss the question together; and all the more industriously as a farm of the same kind, only some fifteen miles away, was now offered to all bidders, under another landlord. Gertrude, who felt Sir Bale’s unkindness all the more that she was a distant cousin of his, as it had proved on comparing notes, was very strong in favour of the change, and had been urging it with true feminine ingenuity and persistence upon her husband. A very singular dream rather damped her ardour, however, and it appeared thus:

She had gone to her bed full of this subject; and she thought, although she could not remember having done so, had fallen asleep. She was still thinking, as she had been all the day, about leaving the farm. It seemed to her that she was quite awake, and a candle burning all the time in the room, awaiting the return of her husband, who was away at the fair near Haworth; she saw the interior of the room distinctly. It was a sultry night, and a little bit of the window was raised. A very slight sound in that direction attracted her attention; and to her surprise she saw a jay hop upon the windowsill, and into the room.

Up sat Gertrude, surprised and a little startled at the visit of so large a bird, without presence of mind for the moment even to frighten it away, and staring at it, as they say, with all her eyes. A sofa stood at the foot of the bed; and under this the bird swiftly hopped. She extended her hand now to take the bell-rope at the left side of the bed, and in doing so displaced the curtains, which were open only at the foot. She was amazed there to see a lady dressed entirely in black, and with the old-fashioned hood over her head. She was young and pretty, and looked kindly at her, but with now and then a slight contraction of lips and eyebrows that indicates pain. This little twitching was momentary, and recurred, it seemed, about once or twice in a minute.

How it was that she was not frightened on seeing this lady, standing like an old friend at her bedside, she could not afterwards understand. Some influence besides the kindness of her look prevented any sensation of terror at the time. With a very white hand the young lady in black held a white handkerchief pressed to her bosom at the top of her bodice.

“Who are you?” asked Gertrude.

“I am a kinswoman, although you don’t know me; and I have come to tell you that you must not leave Faxwell” (the name of the place) “or Janet. If you go, I will go with you; and I can make you fear me.”

Her voice was very distinct, but also very faint, with something undulatory in it, that seemed to enter Gertrude’s head rather than her ear.

Saying this she smiled horribly, and, lifting her handkerchief, disclosed for a moment a great wound in her breast, deep in which Gertrude saw darkly the head of a snake writhing.

Hereupon she uttered a wild scream of terror, and, diving under the bedclothes, remained more dead than alive there, until her maid, alarmed by her cry, came in, and having searched the room, and shut the window at her desire, did all in her power to comfort her.

If this was a nightmare and embodied only by a form of expression which in some states belongs to the imagination, a leading idea in the controversy in which her mind had long been employed, it had at least the effect of deciding her against leaving Faxwell. And so that point was settled; and unpleasant relations continued between the tenants of the farm and the master of Mardykes Hall.

To Lady Mardykes all this was very painful, although Sir Bale did not insist upon making a separation between his wife and her cousin. But to Mardykes Hall that cousin came no more. Even Lady Mardykes thought it better to see her at Faxwell than to risk a meeting in the temper in which Sir Bale then was. And thus several years passed.

No tidings of Philip Feltram were heard; and, in fact, none ever reached that part of the world; and if it had not been highly improbable that he could have drowned himself in the lake without his body sooner or later having risen to the surface, it would have been concluded that he had either accidentally or by design made away with himself in its waters.

Over Mardykes Hall there was a gloom – no sound of children’s voices was heard there, and even the hope of that merry advent had died out.

This disappointment had no doubt helped to fix in Sir Bale’s mind the idea of the insecurity of his property, and the morbid fancy that William Feltram and old Trebeck were conspiring to seize it; than which, I need hardly say, no imagination more insane could have fixed itself in his mind.

In other things, however, Sir Bale was shrewd and sharp, a clear and rapid man of business, and although this was a strange whim, it was not so unnatural in a man who was by nature so prone to suspicion as Sir Bale Mardykes.

During the years, now seven, that had elapsed since the marriage of Sir Bale and Miss Janet Feltram, there had happened but one event, except the death of their only child, to place them in mourning. That was the decease of Sir William Walsingham, the husband of Lady Mardykes’ sister. She now lived in a handsome old dower-house at Islington, and being wealthy, made now and then an excursion to Mardykes Hall, in which she was sometimes accompanied by her sister Lady Haworth. Sir Oliver being a Parliament-man was much in London and deep in politics and intrigue, and subject, as convivial rogues are, to occasional hard hits from gout.

But change and separation had made no alteration in these ladies’ mutual affections, and no three sisters were ever more attached.

Was Lady Mardykes happy with her lord? A woman so gentle and loving as she, is a happy wife with any husband who is not an absolute brute. There must have been, I suppose, some good about Sir Bale. His wife was certainly deeply attached to him. She admired his wisdom, and feared his inflexible will, and altogether made of him a domestic idol. To acquire this enviable position, I suspect there must be something not essentially disagreeable about a man. At all events, what her neighbours good-naturedly termed her infatuation continued, and indeed rather improved by time.

CHAPTER XXIV

AN OLD PORTRAIT

Sir Bale – whom some remembered a gay and convivial man, not to say a profligate one – had grown to be a very gloomy man indeed. There was something weighing upon his mind; and I daresay some of the good gossips of Golden Friars, had there been any materials for such a case, would have believed that Sir Bale had murdered Philip Feltram, and was now the victim of the worm and fire of remorse.

The gloom of the master of the house made his very servants gloomy, and the house itself looked sombre, as if it had been startled with strange and dismal sights.

Lady Mardykes was something of an artist. She had lighted lately, in an out-of-the-way room, upon a dozen or more old portraits. Several of these were full-lengths; and she was – with the help of her maid, both in long aprons, amid sponges and basins, soft handkerchiefs and varnish-pots and brushes – busy in removing the dust and smoke-stains, and in laying-on the varnish, which brought out the colouring, and made the transparent shadows yield up their long-buried treasures of finished detail.

Against the wall stood a full-length portrait as Sir Bale entered the room; having for a wonder, a word to say to his wife.

“O,” said the pretty lady, turning to him in her apron, and with her brush in her hand, “we are in such in pickle, Munnings and I have been cleaning these old pictures. Mrs. Julaper says they are the pictures that came from Cloostedd Hall long ago. They were buried in dust in the dark room in the clock-tower. Here is such a characteristic one. It has a long powdered wig – George the First or Second, I don’t know which – and such a combination of colours, and such a face. It seems starting out of the canvas, and all but speaks. Do look; that is, I mean, Bale, if you can spare time.”

Sir Bale abstractedly drew near, and looked over his wife’s shoulder on the full-length portrait that stood before him; and as he did so a strange expression for a moment passed over his face.

The picture represented a man of swarthy countenance, with signs of the bottle glowing through the dark skin; small fierce pig eyes, a rather flat pendulous nose, and a grim forbidding mouth, with a large wart a little above it. On the head hung one of those full-bottomed powdered wigs that look like a cloud of cotton-wadding; a lace cravat was about his neck; he wore short black-velvet breeches with stockings rolled over them, a bottle-green coat of cut velvet and a crimson waistcoat with long flaps; coat and waistcoat both heavily laced with gold. He wore a sword, and leaned upon a crutch-handled cane, and his figure and aspect indicated a swollen and gouty state. He could not be far from sixty. There was uncommon force in this fierce and forbidding-looking portrait. Lady Mardykes said, “What wonderful dresses they wore! How like a fine magic-lantern figure he looks! What gorgeous colouring! it looks like the plumage of a macaw; and what a claw his hand is! and that huge broken beak of a nose! Isn’t he like a wicked old macaw?”

“Where did you find that?” asked Sir Bale.

Surprised at his tone, she looked round, and was still more surprised at his looks.

“I told you, dear Bale, I found them in the clock-tower. I hope I did right; it was not wrong bringing them here? I ought to have asked. Are you vexed, Bale?”

“Vexed! not I. I only wish it was in the fire. I must have seen that picture when I was a child. I hate to look at it. I raved about it once, when I was ill. I don’t know who it is; I don’t remember when I saw it. I wish you’d tell them to burn it.”

“It is one of the Feltrams,” she answered. “‘Sir Hugh Feltram’ is on the frame at the foot; and old Mrs. Julaper says he was the father of the unhappy lady who was said to have been drowned near Snakes Island.”

“Well, suppose he is; there’s nothing interesting in that. It is a disgusting picture. I connect it with my illness; and I think it is the kind of thing that would make anyone half mad, if they only looked at it often enough. Tell them to burn it; and come away, come to the next room; I can’t say what I want here.”

Sir Bale seemed to grow more and more agitated the longer he remained in the room. He seemed to her both frightened and furious; and taking her a little roughly by the wrist, he led her through the door.

When they were in another apartment alone, he again asked the affrighted lady who had told her that picture was there, and who told her to clean it.

She had only the truth to plead. It was, from beginning to end, the merest accident.

“If I thought, Janet, that you were taking counsel of others, talking me over, and trying clever experiments—” he stopped short with his eyes fixed on hers with black suspicion.

His wife’s answer was one pleading look, and to burst into tears.

Sir Bale let go her wrist, which he had held up to this; and placing his hand gently on her shoulder, he said,

“You must not cry, Janet; I have given you no excuse for tears. I only wished an answer to a very harmless question; and I am sure you would tell me, if by any chance you have lately seen Philip Feltram; he is capable of arranging all that. No one knows him as I do. There, you must not cry any more; but tell me truly, has he turned up? is he at Faxwell?”

She denied all this with perfect truth; and after a hesitation of some time, the matter ended. And as soon as she and he were more themselves, he had something quite different to tell her.

“Sit down, Janet; sit down, and forget that vile picture and all I have been saying. What I came to tell you, I think you will like; I am sure it will please you.”

And with this little preface he placed his arm about her neck, and kissed her tenderly. She certainly was pleased; and when his little speech was over, she, smiling, with her tears still wet upon her cheeks, put her arms round her husband’s neck, and in turn kissed him with the ardour of gratitude, kissed him affectionately; again and again thanking him all the time.

It was no great matter, but from Sir Bale Mardykes it was something quite unusual.

Was it a sudden whim? What was it? Something had prompted Sir Bale, early in that dark shrewd month of December, to tell his wife that he wished to call together some of his county acquaintances, and to fill his house for a week or so, as near Christmas as she could get them to come. He wished her sisters – Lady Haworth (with her husband) and the Dowager Lady Walsingham – to be invited for an early day, before the coming of the other guests, so that she might enjoy their society for a little time quietly to herself before the less intimate guests should assemble.

Glad was Lady Mardykes to hear the resolve of her husband, and prompt to obey. She wrote to her sisters to beg them to arrange to come, together, by the tenth or twelfth of the month, which they accordingly arranged to do. Sir Oliver, it was true, could not be of the party. A minister of state was drinking the waters at Bath; and Sir Oliver thought it would do him no harm to sip a little also, and his fashionable doctor politely agreed, and “ordered” to those therapeutic springs the knight of the shire, who was “consumedly vexed” to lose the Christmas with that jolly dog, Bale, down at Mardykes Hall. But a fellow must have a stomach for his Christmas pudding, and politics takes it out of a poor gentleman deucedly; and health’s the first thing, egad!

So Sir Oliver went down to Bath, and I don’t know that he tippled much of the waters, but he did drink the burgundy of that haunt of the ailing; and he had the honour of making a fourth not unfrequently in the secretary of state’s whist-parties.

It was about the 8th of December when, in Lady Walsingham’s carriage, intending to post all the way, that lady, still young, and Lady Haworth, with all the servants that were usual in such expeditions in those days, started from the great Dower House at Islington in high spirits.

Lady Haworth had not been very well – low and nervous; but the clear frosty sun, and the pleasant nature of the excursion, raised her spirits to the point of enjoyment; and expecting nothing but happiness and gaiety – for, after all, Sir Bale was but one of a large party, and even he could make an effort and be agreeable as well as hospitable on occasion – they set out on their northward expedition. The journey, which is a long one, they had resolved to break into a four days’ progress; and the inns had been written to, bespeaking a comfortable reception.

CHAPTER XXV

THROUGH THE WALL

On the third night they put up at the comfortable old inn called the Three Nuns. With an effort they might easily have pushed on to Mardykes Hall that night, for the distance is not more than five-and-thirty miles. But, considering her sister’s health, Lady Walsingham in planning their route had resolved against anything like a forced march.

Here the ladies took possession of the best sitting-room; and, notwithstanding the fatigue of the journey, Lady Haworth sat up with her sister till near ten o’clock, chatting gaily about a thousand things.

Of the three sisters, Lady Walsingham was the eldest. She had been in the habit of taking the command at home; and now, for advice and decision, her younger sisters, less prompt and courageous than she, were wont, whenever in her neighbourhood, to throw upon her all the cares and agitations of determining what was best to be done in small things and great. It is only fair to say, in addition, that this submission was not by any means exacted; it was the deference of early habit and feebler will, for she was neither officious nor imperious.

It was now time that Lady Haworth, a good deal more fatigued than her sister, should take leave of her for the night.

Accordingly they kissed and bid each other goodnight; and Lady Walsingham, not yet disposed to sleep, sat for some time longer in the comfortable room where they had taken tea, amusing the time with the book that had, when conversation flagged, beguiled the weariness of the journey. Her sister had been in her room nearly an hour, when she became herself a little sleepy. She had lighted her candle, and was going to ring for her maid, when, to her surprise, the door opened, and her sister Lady Haworth entered in a dressing-gown, looking frightened.

“My darling Mary!” exclaimed Lady Walsingham, “what is the matter? Are you well?”

“Yes, darling,” she answered, “quite well; that is, I don’t know what is the matter – I’m frightened.” She paused, listening, with her eyes turned towards the wall. “O, darling Maud, I am so frightened! I don’t know what it can be.”

“You must not be agitated, darling; there’s nothing. You have been asleep, and I suppose you have had a dream. Were you asleep?”

Lady Haworth had caught her sister fast by the arm with both hands, and was looking wildly in her face.

“Have you heard nothing?” she asked, again looking towards the wall of the room, as if she expected to hear a voice through it.

“Nonsense, darling; you are dreaming still. Nothing; there has been nothing to hear. I have been awake ever since; if there had been anything to hear, I could not have missed it. Come, sit down. Sip a little of this water; you are nervous, and overtired; and tell me plainly, like a good little soul, what is the matter; for nothing has happened here; and you ought to know that the Three Nuns is the quietest house in England; and I’m no witch, and if you won’t tell me what’s the matter, I can’t divine it.”

“Yes, of course,” said Mary, sitting down, and glancing round her wildly. “I don’t hear it now; you don’t?”

“Do, my dear Mary, tell me what you mean,” said Lady Walsingham kindly but firmly.

Lady Haworth was holding the still untasted glass of water in her hand.

“Yes, I’ll tell you; I have been so frightened! You are right; I had a dream, but I can scarcely remember anything of it, except the very end, when I wakened. But it was not the dream; only it was connected with what terrified me so. I was so tired when I went to bed, I thought I should have slept soundly; and indeed I fell asleep immediately; and I must have slept quietly for a good while. How long is it since I left you?”

“More than an hour.”

“Yes, I must have slept a good while; for I don’t think I have been ten minutes awake. How my dream began I don’t know. I remember only that gradually it came to this: I was standing in a recess in a panelled gallery; it was lofty, and, I thought, belonged to a handsome but old-fashioned house. I was looking straight towards the head of a wide staircase, with a great oak banister. At the top of the stairs, as near to me, about, as that window there, was a thick short column of oak, on top of which was a candlestick. There was no other light but from that one candle; and there was a lady standing beside it, looking down the stairs, with her back turned towards me; and from her gestures I should have thought speaking to people on a lower lobby, but whom from my place I could not see. I soon perceived that this lady was in great agony of mind; for she beat her breast and wrung her hands every now and then, and wagged her head slightly from side to side, like a person in great distraction. But one word she said I could not hear. Nor when she struck her hand on the banister, or stamped, as she seemed to do in her pain, upon the floor, could I hear any sound. I found myself somehow waiting upon this lady, and was watching her with awe and sympathy. But who she was I knew not, until turning towards me I plainly saw Janet’s face, pale and covered with tears, and with such a look of agony as – O God! – I can never forget.”

“Pshaw! Mary darling, what is it but a dream! I have had a thousand more startling; it is only that you are so nervous just now.”

“But that is not all – nothing; what followed is so dreadful; for either there is something very horrible going on at Mardykes, or else I am losing my reason,” said Lady Haworth in increasing agitation. “I wakened instantly in great alarm, but I suppose no more than I have felt a hundred times on awakening from a frightful dream. I sat up in my bed; I was thinking of ringing for Winnefred, my heart was beating so, but feeling better soon I changed my mind. All this time I heard a faint sound of a voice, as if coming through a thick wall. It came from the wall at the left side of my bed, and I fancied was that of some woman lamenting in a room separated from me by that thick partition. I could only perceive that it was a sound of crying mingled with ejaculations of misery, or fear, or entreaty. I listened with a painful curiosity, wondering who it could be, and what could have happened in the neighbouring rooms of the house; and as I looked and listened, I could distinguish my own name, but at first nothing more. That, of course, might have been an accident; and I knew there were many Marys in the world besides myself. But it made me more curious; and a strange thing struck me, for I was now looking at that very wall through which the sounds were coming. I saw that there was a window in it. Thinking that the rest of the wall might nevertheless be covered by another room, I drew the curtain of it and looked out. But there is no such thing. It is the outer wall the entire way along. And it is equally impossible of the other wall, for it is to the front of the house, and has two windows in it; and the wall that the head of my bed stands against has the gallery outside it all the way; for I remarked that as I came to you.”

“Tut, tut, Mary darling, nothing on earth is so deceptive as sound; this and fancy account for everything.”

“But hear me out; I have not told you all. I began to hear the voice more clearly, and at last quite distinctly. It was Janet’s, and she was conjuring you by name, as well as me, to come to her to Mardykes, without delay, in her extremity; yes, you, just as vehemently as me. It was Janet’s voice. It still seemed separated by the wall, but I heard every syllable now; and I never heard voice or words of such anguish. She was imploring of us to come on, without a moment’s delay, to Mardykes; and crying that, if we were not with her, she should go mad.”

“Well, darling,” said Lady Walsingham, “you see I’m included in this invitation as well as you, and should hate to disappoint Janet just as much; and I do assure you, in the morning you will laugh over this fancy with me; or rather, she will laugh over it with us, when we get to Mardykes. What you do want is rest, and a little sal-volatile.”

So saying she rang the bell for Lady Haworth’s maid. Having comforted her sister, and made her take the nervous specific she recommended, she went with her to her room; and taking possession of the armchair by the fire, she told her that she would keep her company until she was asleep, and remain long enough to be sure that the sleep was not likely to be interrupted. Lady Haworth had not been ten minutes in her bed, when she raised herself with a start to her elbow, listening with parted lips and wild eyes, her trembling fingers behind her ears. With an exclamation of horror, she cried,

“There it is again, upbraiding us! I can’t stay longer.”

She sprang from the bed, and rang the bell violently.

“Maud,” she cried in an ecstasy of horror, “nothing shall keep me here, whether you go or not. I will set out the moment the horses are put to. If you refuse to come, Maud, mind the responsibility is yours – listen!” and with white face and starting eyes she pointed to the wall. “Have you ears; don’t you hear?”

The sight of a person in extremity of terror so mysterious, might have unnerved a ruder system than Lady Walsingham’s. She was pale as she replied; for under certain circumstances those terrors which deal with the supernatural are more contagious than any others. Lady Walsingham still, in terms, held to her opinion; but although she tried to smile, her face showed that the panic had touched her.

“Well, dear Mary,” she said, “as you will have it so, I see no good in resisting you longer. Here, it is plain, your nerves will not suffer you to rest. Let us go then, in heaven’s name; and when you get to Mardykes Hall you will be relieved.”

All this time Lady Haworth was getting on her things, with the careless hurry of a person about to fly for her life; and Lady Walsingham issued her orders for horses, and the general preparations for resuming the journey.

It was now between ten and eleven; but the servant who rode armed with them, according to the not unnecessary usage of the times, thought that with a little judicious bribing of postboys they might easily reach Mardykes Hall before three o’clock in the morning.

When the party set forward again, Lady Haworth was comparatively tranquil. She no longer heard the unearthly mimicry of her sister’s voice; there remained only the fear and suspense which that illusion or visitation had produced.

Her sister, Lady Walsingham, after a brief effort to induce something like conversation, became silent. A thin sheet of snow had covered the darkened landscape, and some light flakes were still dropping. Lady Walsingham struck her repeater often in the dark, and inquired the distances frequently. She was anxious to get over the ground, though by no means fatigued. Something of the anxiety that lay heavy at her sister’s heart had touched her own.

CHAPTER XXVI

PERPLEXED

The roads even then were good, and very good horses the posting-houses turned out; so that by dint of extra pay the rapid rate of travelling undertaken by the servant was fully accomplished in the first two or three stages.

While Lady Walsingham was continually striking her repeater in her ear, and as they neared their destination, growing in spite of herself more anxious, her sister’s uneasiness showed itself in a less reserved way; for, cold as it was, with snowflakes actually dropping, Lady Haworth’s head was perpetually out at the window, and when she drew it up, sitting again in her place, she would audibly express her alarms, and apply to her sister for consolation and confidence in her suspense.

Under its thin carpet of snow, the pretty village of Golden Friars looked strangely to their eyes. It had long been fast asleep, and both ladies were excited as they drew up at the steps of the George and Dragon, and with bell and knocker roused the slumbering household.

What tidings awaited them here? In a very few minutes the door was opened, and the porter staggered down, after a word with the driver, to the carriage-window, not half awake.

“Is Lady Mardykes well?” demanded Lady Walsingham.

“Is Sir Bale well?”

“Are all the people at Mardykes Hall quite well?”

With clasped hands Lady Haworth listened to the successive answers to these questions which her sister hastily put. The answers were all satisfactory. With a great sigh and a little laugh, Lady Walsingham placed her hand affectionately on that of her sister; who, saying, “God be thanked!” began to weep.

“When had you last news from Mardykes?” asked Lady Walsingham.

“A servant was down here about four o’clock.”

“O! no one since?” said she in a disappointed tone.

No one had been from the great house since, but all were well then.

“They are early people, you know, dear; and it is dark at four, and that is as late as they could well have heard, and nothing could have happened since – very unlikely. We have come very fast; it is only a few minutes past two, darling.”

But each felt the chill and load of their returning anxiety.

While the people at the George were rapidly getting a team of horses to, Lady Walsingham contrived a moment for an order from the other window to her servant, who knew Golden Friars perfectly, to knock-up the people at Doctor Torvey’s, and to inquire whether all were well at Mardykes Hall.

There he learned that a messenger had come for Doctor Torvey at ten o’clock, and that the Doctor had not returned since. There was no news, however, of anyone’s being ill; and the Doctor himself did not know what he was wanted about. While Lady Haworth was talking to her maid from the window next the steps, Lady Walsingham was, unobserved, receiving this information at the other.

It made her very uncomfortable.

In a few minutes more, however, with a team of fresh horses, they were again rapidly passing the distance between them and Mardykes Hall.

About two miles on, their drivers pulled up, and they heard a voice talking with them from the roadside. A servant from the Hall had been sent with a note for Lady Walsingham, and had been ordered, if necessary, to ride the whole way to the Three Nuns to deliver it. The note was already in Lady Walsingham’s hand; her sister sat beside her, and with the corner of the open note in her fingers, she read it breathlessly at the same time by the light of a carriage-lamp which the man held to the window. It said:

My dearest love – my darling sister – dear sisters both! – in God’s name, lose not a moment. I am so overpowered and terrified. I cannot explain; I can only implore of you to come with all the haste you can make. Waste no time, darlings. I hardly understand what I write. Only this, dear sisters; I feel that my reason will desert me, unless you come soon. You will not fail me now. Your poor distracted

Janet

The sisters exchanged a pale glance, and Lady Haworth grasped her sister’s hand.

“Where is the messenger?” asked Lady Walsingham.

A mounted servant came to the window.

“Is anyone ill at home?” she asked.

“No, all were well – my lady, and Sir Bale – no one sick.”

“But the Doctor was sent for; what was that for?”

“I can’t say, my lady.”

“You are quite certain that no one – think – no one is ill?”

“There is no one ill at the Hall, my lady, that I have heard of.”

“Is Lady Mardykes, my sister, still up?”

“Yes, my lady; and her maid is with her.”

“And Sir Bale, are you certain he is quite well?”

“Sir Bale is quite well, my lady; he has been busy settling papers tonight, and was as well as usual.”

“That will do, thanks,” said the perplexed lady; and to her own servant she added, “On to Mardykes Hall with all the speed they can make. I’ll pay them well, tell them.”

And in another minute they were gliding along the road at a pace which the muffled beating of the horses’ hoofs on the thin sheet of snow that covered the road showed to have broken out of the conventional trot, and to resemble something more like a gallop.

And now they were under the huge trees, that looked black as hearse-plumes in contrast with the snow. The cold gleam of the lake in the moon which had begun to shine out now met their gaze; and the familiar outline of Snakes Island, its solemn timber bleak and leafless, standing in a group, seemed to watch Mardykes Hall with a dismal observation across the water. Through the gate and between the huge files of trees the carriage seemed to fly; and at last the steaming horses stood panting, nodding and snorting, before the steps in the courtyard.

There was a light in an upper window, and a faint light in the hall, the door of which was opened; and an old servant came down and ushered the ladies into the house.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE HOUR

Lightly they stepped over the snow that lay upon the broad steps, and entering the door saw the dim figure of their sister, already in the large and faintly-lighted hall. One candle in the hand of her scared maid, and one burning on the table, leaving the distant parts of that great apartment in total darkness, touched the figures with the odd sharp lights in which Schalken delights; and a streak of chilly moonlight, through the open door, fell upon the floor, and was stretched like a white sheet at her feet. Lady Mardykes, with an exclamation of agitated relief, threw her arms, in turn, round the necks of her sisters, and hugging them, kissed them again and again, murmuring her thanks, calling them her “blessed sisters,” and praising God for his mercy in having sent them to her in time, and altogether in a rapture of agitation and gratitude.

Taking them each by a hand, she led them into a large room, on whose panels they could see the faint twinkle of the tall gilded frames, and the darker indication of the old portraits, in which that interesting house abounds. The moonbeams, entering obliquely through the Tudor stone-shafts of the window and thrown upon the floor, reflected an imperfect light; and the candle which the maid who followed her mistress held in her hand shone dimly from the sideboard, where she placed it. Lady Mardykes told her that she need not wait.

“They don’t know; they know only that we are in some great confusion; but – God have mercy on me! – nothing of the reality. Sit down, darlings; you are tired.”

She sat down between them on a sofa, holding a hand of each. They sat opposite the window, through which appeared the magnificent view commanded from the front of the house: in the foreground the solemn trees of Snakes Island, one great branch stretching upward, bare and moveless, from the side, like an arm raised to heaven in wonder or in menace towards the house; the lake, in part swept by the icy splendour of the moon, trembling with a dazzling glimmer, and farther off lost in blackness; the Fells rising from a base of gloom, into ribs and peaks white with snow, and looking against the pale sky, thin and transparent as a haze. Right across to the storied woods of Cloostedd, and the old domains of the Feltrams, this view extended.

Thus alone, their mufflers still on, their hands clasped in hers, they breathlessly listened to her strange tale.

Connectedly told it amounted to this: Sir Bale seemed to have been relieved of some great anxiety about the time when, ten days before, he had told her to invite her friends to Mardykes Hall. This morning he had gone out for a walk with Trevor, his under-steward, to talk over some plans about thinning the woods at this side; and also to discuss practically a proposal, lately made by a wealthy merchant, to take a very long lease, on advantageous terms to Sir Bale as he thought, of the old park and chase of Cloostedd, with the intention of building there, and making it once more a handsome residence.

In the improved state of his spirits, Sir Bale had taken a shrewd interest in this negotiation; and was actually persuaded to cross the lake that morning with his adviser, and to walk over the grounds with him.

Sir Bale had seemed unusually well, and talked with great animation. He was more like a young man who had just attained his majority, and for the first time grasped his estates, than the grim elderly Baronet who had been moping about Mardykes, and as much afraid as a cat of the water, for so many years.

As they were returning toward the boat, at the roots of that same scathed elm whose barkless bough had seemed, in his former visit to this old wood, to beckon him from a distance, like a skeleton arm, to enter the forest, he and his companion on a sudden missed an old map of the grounds which they had been consulting.

“We must have left it in the corner tower of Cloostedd House, which commands that view of the grounds, you remember; it would not do to lose it. It is the most accurate thing we have. I’ll sit down here and rest a little till you come back.”

The man was absent little more than twenty minutes. When he returned, he found that Sir Bale had changed his position, and was now walking to and fro, around and about, in what, at a distance, he fancied was mere impatience, on the open space a couple of hundred paces nearer to the turn in the valley towards the boat. It was not impatience. He was agitated. He looked pale, and he took his companion’s arm – a thing he had never thought of doing before – and said, “Let us away quickly. I’ve something to tell at home, – and I forgot it.”

Not another word did Sir Bale exchange with his companion. He sat in the stern of the boat, gloomy as a man about to glide under traitor’s-gate. He entered his house in the same sombre and agitated state. He entered his library, and sat for a long time as if stunned.

At last he seemed to have made-up his mind to something; and applied himself quietly and diligently to arranging papers, and docketing some and burning others. Dinnertime arrived. He sent to tell Lady Mardykes that he should not join her at dinner, but would see her afterwards.

“It was between eight and nine,” she continued, “I forget the exact time, when he came to the tower drawing-room where I was. I did not hear his approach. There is a stone stair, with a thick carpet on it. He told me he wished to speak to me there. It is an out-of-the-way place – a small old room with very thick walls, and there is a double door, the inner one of oak – I suppose he wished to guard against being overheard.

“There was a look in his face that frightened me; I saw he had something dreadful to tell. He looked like a man on whom a lot had fallen to put someone to death,” said Lady Mardykes. “O, my poor Bale! my husband, my husband! he knew what it would be to me.”

Here she broke into the wildest weeping, and it was some time before she resumed.

“He seemed very kind and very calm,” she said at last; “he said but little; and, I think, these were his words: ‘I find, Janet, I have made a great miscalculation – I thought my hour of danger had passed. We have been many years together, but a parting must sooner or later be, and my time has come.’

“I don’t know what I said. I would not have so much minded – for I could not have believed, if I had not seen him – but there was that in his look and tone which no one could doubt.

“‘I shall die before tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘You must command yourself, Janet; it can’t be altered now.’

“‘O, Bale,’ I cried, nearly distracted, ‘you would not kill yourself!’

“‘Kill myself! poor child! no, indeed,’ he said; ‘it is simply that I shall die. No violent death – nothing but the common subsidence of life – I have made up my mind; what happens to everybody can’t be so very bad; and millions of worse men than I die every year. You must not follow me to my room, darling; I shall see you by and by.’

“His language was collected and even cold; but his face looked as if it was cut in stone; you never saw, in a dream, a face like it.”

Lady Walsingham here said, “I am certain he is ill; he’s in a fever. You must not distract and torture yourself about his predictions. You sent for Doctor Torvey; what did he say?”

“I could not tell him all.”

“O, no; I don’t mean that; they’d only say he was mad, and we little better for minding what he says. But did the Doctor see him? and what did he say of his health?”

“Yes; he says there is nothing wrong – no fever – nothing whatever. Poor Bale has been so kind; he saw him to please me,” she sobbed again wildly. “I wrote to implore of him. It was my last hope, strange as it seems; and O, would to God I could think it! But there is nothing of that kind. Wait till you have seen him. There is a frightful calmness about all he says and does; and his directions are all so clear, and his mind so perfectly collected, it is quite impossible.”

And poor Lady Mardykes again burst into a frantic agony of tears.

CHAPTER XXVIII

SIR BALE IN THE GALLERY

“Now, Janet darling, you are yourself low and nervous, and you treat this fancy of Bale’s as seriously as he does himself. The truth is, he is a hypochondriac, as the doctors say; and you will find that I am right; he will be quite well in the morning, and I daresay a little ashamed of himself for having frightened his poor little wife as he has. I will sit up with you. But our poor Mary is not, you know, very strong; and she ought to lie down and rest a little. Suppose you give me a cup of tea in the drawing-room. I will run up to my room and get these things off, and meet you in the drawing-room; or, if you like it better, you can sit with me in my own room; and for goodness’ sake let us have candles enough and a bright fire; and I promise you, if you will only exert your own good sense, you shall be a great deal more cheerful in a very little time.”

Lady Walsingham’s address was kind and cheery, and her air confident. For a moment a ray of hope returned, and her sister Janet acknowledged at least the possibility of her theory. But if confidence is contagious, so also is panic; and Lady Walsingham experienced a sinking of the heart which she dared not confess to her sister, and vainly strove to combat.

Lady Walsingham went up with her sister Mary, and having seen her in her room, and spoken again to her in the same cheery tone in which she had lectured her sister Lady Mardykes, she went on; and having taken possession of her own room, and put off her cloaks and shawls, she was going downstairs again, when she heard Sir Bale’s voice, as he approached along the gallery, issuing orders to a servant, as it seemed, exactly in his usual tone.

She turned, with a strange throb at her heart, and met him.

A little sterner, a little paler than usual he looked; she could perceive no other change. He took her hand kindly and held it, as with dilated eyes he looked with a dark inquiry for a moment in her face. He signed to the servant to go on, and said, “I’m glad you have come, Maud. You have heard what is to happen; and I don’t know how Janet could have borne it without your support. You did right to come; and you’ll stay with her for a day or two, and take her away from this place as soon as you can.”

She looked at him with the embarrassment of fear. He was speaking to her with the calmness of a leave-taking in the press-room – the serenity that overlies the greatest awe and agony of which human nature is capable.

“I am glad to see you, Bale,” she began, hardly knowing what she said, and she stopped short.

“You are come, it turns out, on a sad mission,” he resumed; “you find all about to change. Poor Janet! it is a blow to her. I shall not live to see tomorrow’s sun.”

“Come,” she said, startled, “you must not talk so. No, Bale, you have no right to speak so; you can have no reason to justify it. It is cruel and wicked to trifle with your wife’s feelings. If you are under a delusion, you must make an effort and shake it off, or, at least, cease to talk of it. You are not well; I know by your looks you are ill; but I am very certain we shall see you much better by tomorrow, and still better the day following.”

“No, I’m not ill, sister. Feel that pulse, if you doubt me; there is no fever in it. I never was more perfectly in health; and yet I know that before the clock, that has just struck three, shall have struck five, I, who am talking to you, shall be dead.”

Lady Walsingham was frightened, and her fear irritated her.

“I have told you what I think and believe,” she said vehemently. “I think it wrong and cowardly of you to torture my poor sister with your whimsical predictions. Look into your own mind, and you will see you have absolutely no reason to support what you say. How can you inflict all this agony upon a poor creature foolish enough to love you as she does, and weak enough to believe in your idle dreams?”

“Stay, sister; it is not a matter to be debated so. If tomorrow I can hear you, it will be time enough to upbraid me. Pray return now to your sister; she needs all you can do for her. She is much to be pitied; her sufferings afflict me. I shall see you and her again before my death. It would have been more cruel to leave her unprepared. Do all in your power to nerve and tranquillise her. What is past cannot now be helped.”

He paused, looking hard at her, as if he had half made up his mind to say something more. But if there was a question of the kind, it was determined in favour of silence.

He dropped her hand, turned quickly, and left her.

CHAPTER XXIX

DR. TORVEY’S OPINION

When Lady Walsingham reached the head of the stairs, she met her maid, and from her learned that her sister, Lady Mardykes, was downstairs in the same room. On approaching, she heard her sister Mary’s voice talking with her, and found them together. Mary, finding that she could not sleep, had put on her clothes again, and come down to keep her sister company. The room looked more comfortable now. There were candles lighted, and a good fire burnt in the grate; teathings stood on a little table near the fire, and the two sisters were talking, Lady Mardykes appearing more collected, and only they two in the room.

“Have you seen him, Maud?” cried Lady Mardykes, rising and hastily approaching her the moment she entered.

“Yes, dear; and talked with him, and—”

“Well?”

“And I think very much as I did before. I think he is nervous, he says he is not ill; but he is nervous and whimsical, and as men always are when they happen to be out of sorts, very positive; and of course the only thing that can quite undeceive him is the lapse of the time he has fixed for his prediction, as it is sure to pass without any tragic result of any sort. We shall then all see alike the nature of his delusion.”

“O, Maud, if I were only sure you thought so! if I were sure you really had hopes! Tell me, Maud, for God’s sake, what you really think.”

Lady Walsingham was a little disconcerted by the unexpected directness of her appeal.

“Come, darling, you must not be foolish,” she said; “we can only talk of impressions, and we are imposed upon by the solemnity of his manner, and the fact that he evidently believes in his own delusion; everyone does believe in his own delusion – there is nothing strange in that.”

“O, Maud, I see you are not convinced; you are only trying to comfort me. You have no hope – none, none, none!” and she covered her face with her hands, and wept again convulsively.

Lady Walsingham was silent for a moment, and then with an effort said, as she placed her hand on her sister’s arm, “You see, dear Janet, there is no use in my saying the same thing over and over again; an hour or two will show who is right. Sit down again, and be like yourself. My maid told me that you had sent to the parlour for Doctor Torvey; he must not find you so. What would he think? Unless you mean to tell him of Bale’s strange fancy; and a pretty story that would be to set afloat in Golden Friars. I think I hear him coming.”

So, in effect, he was. Doctor Torvey – with the florid gravity of a man who, having just swallowed a bottle of port, besides some glasses of sherry, is admitted to the presence of ladies whom he respects – entered the room, made what he called his “leg and his compliments,” and awaited the ladies’ commands.

“Sit down, Doctor Torvey,” said Lady Walsingham, who in the incapacity of her sister undertook the doing of the honours. “My sister, Lady Mardykes, has got it into her head somehow that Sir Bale is ill. I have been speaking to him; he certainly does not look very well, but he says he is quite well. Do you think him well? – that is, we know you don’t think there is anything of importance amiss – but she wishes to know whether you think him perfectly well.”

The Doctor cleared his voice and delivered his lecture, a little thickly at some words, upon Sir Bale’s case; the result of which was that it was no case at all; and that if he would only live something more of a country gentleman’s life, he would be as well as any man could desire – as well as any man, gentle or simple, in the country.

“The utmost I should think of doing for him would be, perhaps, a little quinine, nothing mo’ – shurely – he is really and toory a very shoun’ shtay of health.”

Lady Walsingham looked encouragingly at her sister and nodded.

“I’ve been shen’ for, La’y Walsh – Walse – Walsing – ham; old Jack Amerald – he likshe his glass o’ port,” he said roguishly, “and shuvversh accord’n’ly,” he continued, with a compassionating paddle of his right hand; “one of thoshe aw – odd feels in his stomach; and as I have pretty well done all I can man’ge down here, I must be off, ye shee. Wind up from Golden Friars, and a little flutter ovv zhnow, thazh all;” and with some remarks about the extreme cold of the weather, and the severity of their night journey, and many respectful and polite parting speeches, the Doctor took his leave; and they soon heard the wheels of his gig and the tread of his horse, faint and muffled from the snow in the courtyard, and the Doctor, who had connected that melancholy and agitated household with the outer circle of humanity, was gone.

There was very little snow falling, half-a-dozen flakes now and again, and their flight across the window showed, as the Doctor had in a manner boasted, that the wind was in his face as he returned to Golden Friars. Even these desultory snowflakes ceased, at times, altogether; and returning, as they say, “by fits and starts,” left for long intervals the landscape, under the brilliant light of the moon, in its wide white shroud. The curtain of the great window had not been drawn. It seemed to Lady Walsingham that the moonbeams had grown more dazzling, that Snakes Island was nearer and more distinct, and the outstretched arm of the old tree looked bigger and angrier, like the uplifted arm of an assassin, who draws silently nearer as the catastrophe approaches.

Cold, dazzling, almost repulsive in this intense moonlight and white sheeting, the familiar landscape looked in the eyes of Lady Walsingham. The sisters gradually grew more and more silent, an unearthly suspense overhung them all, and Lady Mardykes rose every now and then and listened at the open door for step or voice in vain. They all were overpowered by the intenser horror that seemed gathering around them. And thus an hour or more passed.

CHAPTER XXX

HUSH!

Pale and silent those three beautiful sisters sat. The horrible quietude of a suspense that had grown all but insupportable oppressed the guests of Lady Mardykes, and something like the numbness of despair had reduced her to silence, the dreadful counterfeit of peace.

Sir Bale Mardykes on a sudden softly entered the room. Reflected from the floor near the window, the white moonlight somehow gave to his fixed features the character of a smile. With a warning gesture, as he came in, he placed his finger to his lips, as if to enjoin silence; and then, having successively pressed the hands of his two sisters-in-law, he stooped over his almost fainting wife, and twice pressed her cold forehead with his lips; and so, without a word, he went softly from the room.

Some seconds elapsed before Lady Walsingham, recovering her presence of mind, with one of the candlesticks from the table in her hand, opened the door and followed.

She saw Sir Bale mount the last stair of the broad flight visible from the hall, and candle in hand turn the corner of the massive banister, and as the light thrown from his candle showed, he continued, without hurry, to ascend the second flight.

With the irrepressible curiosity of horror she continued to follow him at a distance.

She saw him enter his own private room, and close the door.

Continuing to follow she placed herself noiselessly at the door of the apartment, and in breathless silence, with a throbbing heart, listened for what should pass.

She distinctly heard Sir Bale pace the floor up and down for some time, and then, after a pause, a sound as if someone had thrown himself heavily on the bed. A silence followed, during which her sisters, who had followed more timidly, joined her. She warned them with a look and gesture to be silent.

Lady Haworth stood a little behind, her white lips moving, and her hands clasped in a silent agony of prayer. Lady Mardykes leaned against the massive oak door-case.

With her hand raised to her ear, and her lips parted, Lady Walsingham listened for some seconds – for a minute, two minutes, three. At last, losing heart, she seized the handle in her panic, and turned it sharply. The door was locked on the inside, but someone close to it said from within, “Hush, hush!”

Much alarmed now, the same lady knocked violently at the door. No answer was returned.

She knocked again more violently, and shook the door with all her fragile force. It was something of horror in her countenance as she did so, that, no doubt, terrified Lady Mardykes, who with a loud and long scream sank in a swoon upon the floor.

The servants, alarmed by these sounds, were speedily in the gallery. Lady Mardykes was carried to her room, and laid upon her bed; her sister, Lady Haworth, accompanying her. In the meantime the door was forced. Sir Bale Mardykes was found stretched upon his bed.

Those who have once seen it, will not mistake the aspect of death. Here, in Sir Bale Mardykes’ room, in his bed, in his clothes, is a stranger, grim and awful; in a few days to be insupportable, and to pass alone into the prison-house, and to be seen no more.

Where is Sir Bale Mardykes now, whose roof-tree and whose place at board and bed will know him no more? Here lies a chap-fallen, fish-eyed image, chilling already into clay, and stiffening in every joint.

There is a marble monument in the pretty church of Golden Friars. It stands at the left side of what antiquarians call “the high altar.” Two pillars at each end support an arch with several armorial bearings on as many shields sculptured above. Beneath, on a marble flooring raised some four feet, with a cornice round, lies Sir Bale Mardykes, of Mardykes Hall, ninth Baronet of that ancient family, chiselled in marble with knee-breeches and buckled-shoes, and ailes de pigeon, and single-breasted coat and long waistcoat, ruffles and sword, such as gentlemen wore about the year 1770, and bearing a strong resemblance to the features of the second Charles. On the broad marble which forms the background is inscribed an epitaph, which has perpetuated to our times the estimate formed by his “inconsolable widow,” the Dowager Lady Mardykes, of the virtues and accomplishments of her deceased lord.

Lady Walsingham would have qualified two or three of the more highly-coloured hyperboles, at which the Golden Friars of those days sniffed and tittered. They don’t signify now; there is no contemporary left to laugh or whisper. And if there be not much that is true in the letter of that inscription, it at least perpetuates something that is true – that wonderful glorificaion of partisanship, the affection of an idolising wife.

Lady Mardykes, a few days after the funeral, left Mardykes Hall forever. She lived a great deal with her sister, Lady Walsingham; and died, as a line cut at the foot of Sir Bale Mardykes’ epitaph records, in the year 1790; her remains being laid beside those of her beloved husband in Golden Friars.

The estates had come to Sir Bale Mardykes free of entail. He had been pottering over a will, but it was never completed, nor even quite planned; and after much doubt and scrutiny, it was at last ascertained that, in default of a will and of issue, a clause in the marriage-settlement gave the entire estates to the Dowager Lady Mardykes.

By her will she bequeathed the estates to “her cousin, also a kinsman of the late Sir Bale Mardykes her husband,” William Feltram, on condition of his assuming the name and arms of Mardykes, the arms of Feltram being quartered in the shield.

Thus was oddly fulfilled the prediction which Philip Feltram had repeated, that the estates of Mardykes were to pass into the hands of a Feltram.

About the year 1795 the baronetage was revived, and William Feltram enjoyed the title for fifteen years, as Sir William Mardykes.

“Belgravia” magazine, Jul. 1870

Chronicles Of Golden Friars (1871)

A STRANGE ADVENTURE
IN THE LIFE OF MISS LAURA MILDMAY

(1871)

CHAPTER I

NEWS FROM HILERIA PULLEN

Outside, the moon is shining over a solemn winter landscape. Towering mountains, with their bases so near the foreground that you can see the rude fences and solitary trees that mark them, rise wilder and bolder into snowy altitudes, above which, in the deep blue of night, the stars are twinkling frostily. Dropped here suddenly, you might think yourself in a Swiss valley. But the character of the little village that stands by the margin of the lake, though in some respects singular, and altogether quaint, is decidedly English.

This scene lies in the North of England. The village is called Golden Friars; and the grey stone house, with the piers, and the shadow of the sombre elms, that stands within a stone’s throw of the village churchyard, is the vicar’s ancient dwelling.

In wintry weather – in the long nights – every room looks cheery that glows with a mixture of firelight and candles. The curtains were drawn on the narrow windows; and the flicker of that warm light showed very pleasantly on walls varied with press and cupboard, and with some old-fashioned bookshelves, well stored with volumes, and visited the portrait of the vicar’s grandfather, who, having been a doctor of laws near a hundred years ago at Oxford, was taken in his red hood, which glowed grandly out from the shadow, and helped to light up the homely chamber.

The Vicar of Golden Friars was a natty man, and the soul of punctuality. His sermons were all written on Thursday afternoon for delivery from the pulpit on the Sunday following. He had just completed one. The last page was open on the table; the light of the candle was glittering from the still wet ink.

The vicar, as he leaned back in his chair with his fingers interlaced, and the tips of his thumbs together, looked down, sidelong, on his performance with an air of complacency – not quite a smile, but very near it. The Reverend Hugh Jenner was, I must confess, conceited of his sermons. As he looked, the horn of the mail-coach, driving through the High Street, sounded clear in the frosty air, as it were, a little flourish of triumph not inappropriate.

His good wife was working at her broderie anglaise, at the other side of the fire. She was absorbed apparently in it, really in a rumination; and, as people will under the circumstances, she gazed upon her work with dull and gloating eyes, and lips pursed, and forgot next Sunday’s sermon, the husband of her bosom, and the little dog that slept in a basket on a cushion at her feet.

Once or twice Doctor Jenner stole a glance at his wife, expecting the good woman, after her wont, to inquire how the sermon pleased him, what was the subject, and so forth.

I think, if she had owned a nursery duly stocked, or had ever had such a pleasant and anxious little colony to look after, she might not have cared quite so much for the sermon, and someone else would have stitched them into their purple paper covers. People are never, of course, quite content with the thing that is. Nature hides away the ugliness of decay, disease, and death. There is, if we could fathom it, a profound mystery in the fact that man anticipates good from every change; and that the pain that belongs to every imaginable situation is hidden from all but those who suffer it.

I think that these two people, living in the quaint grey house, with the tall piers, capped with stone balls, in front, between which swung the iron gate, flanked without by clumps of lofty elms, were possibly a happier pair than if they had obtained the wish of their hearts – a hope they had long ceased to cherish – a little child to look in their faces, and prattle and play about the trim, quiet rooms.

Well, they had been twenty years married, and were childless. And, as it turned out, by an odd coincidence – for it chimed in with her own thoughts at the moment – the vicar, who had now risen, and was standing with his back to the fire, said at last—

“I have finished the sermon, my love; and it treats a good deal of the case of Elkanah and Hannah.”

“How very odd!” said Mrs. Jenner; “I can’t account for it.”

“For what, Dolly?”inquired the vicar.

“I dreamed last night that we had such a darling little child. I thought it lay sleeping, poor little thing! on my knees; and that while I was looking at it, you were reading aloud such a beautiful sermon about Hannah and Elkanah; and here it is – the very subject! And, oddly enough, I was thinking of it at the very moment!”

“Very odd, my dear!” said the vicar – “very odd!”

And he stepped over to her side, smiling, and kissed her cheek gently, and patting it, smiled still with great affection upon her, saying—

“Dolly, my darling, we must not fret about the matter. Let us leave all in the hands of God, Who has given us one another, and this quiet and happy life. Remember the kind reproach of Elkanah to his beloved wife: ‘Am not I better to thee than ten sons?’ There is some good reason, or the God of all comfort would not deny us this. And is there not compensation? For my part, Dolly, when I look at you I feel that I already owe more love on earth than I can ever repay.”

So they kissed very tenderly, and she said—

“I’m sure it is true. But I don’t repine; you must not fancy that. It is only when my darling man is out, making his visits, that I do sometimes feel lonely, and think that if I had a little creature to play with—”

“Little creature to play with, my dear? It might be a young man of twenty by this time,” said the vicar.

“I don’t see why it should,” expostulated his wife. “But I can’t help wishing; and I know it would be delightful if a kind fairy would come, as happens in the old fairytale, and give us our wish, and a pretty present for the little creature at its christening.”

At this moment the door opened, and the maid entered with a letter.

It had the postmark. It had just arrived by the coach. It was for the vicar.

“What an odd hand! Who is it?”

The vicar had replaced his spectacles, and was standing with his side to the candle, and the letter open in his fingers. He had just begun to read it, but rumpled it round, to read the signature for his wife.

“Hileria Pullen.”

“What an odd name!” exclaimed Mrs. Jenner.

“Yes,” said the vicar, “it is odd. Hilaria one could have understood; but Hileria – it is odd; it is barbarous. I never heard of the person. I don’t think I ever knew anyone of that name. Pullen? No.”

“What is the postmark?” asked his wife curiously.

“Guildford, Surrey,” he answered. “I don’t know a soul who lives there.”

He drew nearer to the candle, and read for a few seconds undisturbed.

“Aren’t there some people related to you called Torquil?” he asked.

“Yes, my second cousin, Janet Ayger married a Captain Torquil,” answered Dolly.

“Well – yes. Listen to this,” said the vicar. “Shall I read it aloud for you, as well as I can?”

“Do, like a darling,” said she, and the vicar began.

“It is rather long, and I have only read a little way.”

CHAPTER II

THE VICAR AND HIS WIFE ARE ADJURED

The letter began thus:

‘Reverend Sir, – Please your divine, I am the woman by name Hileria Pullen, who cares the dearling child resently left an orphen by that angle of goodness the deseased Mrs. Mildmay, of Queen’s Snedley, and which I do suppose was well known to you and your lady, if she be still living; and Mr. Mildmay, whose lamentable departure likewise you saw, from a fall from his gig being in the papers – and the horse ran away, which caused his lamentable departure, a year before my mistress that was. Leaving her and her dearling infent, only eight months old, to lament his departure.’

“These people are all new to me,” said the vicar, shaking his head a little, and lowering the letter to the table, as he looked on his wife.

“Yes; that’s poor Alice. She married Mr. Mildmay, of Queen’s Snedley. I thought she took airs a little, and we have not written to one another this long time. Perhaps I wronged her; and so she’s gone, poor thing.”

“And he also died, it seems, a year before; and this is the nurse, I suppose,” said the vicar.

The vicar resumed:

‘Two days after my lamentable mistress died, Captain Torquil came to Queen’s Snedley, having given an order to Floss and Company for the funeral, which was done private. He has took the child and me to Guildford, where it and me at this present time is. We are comfortable in every particular as yet. Mrs. Torquil is here herself, but is not happy, nor, I think, in ’ealth, to make it sootable for Miss Mildmay when she comes to grow up a bit to stay here, even if the captain was a saint upon earth – which it is far from so. Because, as I can make plain, I am very Unhappy about the dear child. He comes down here from London, sometimes every day for a bit, and sometimes he will not come for a week. Mrs. Torquil says she is a relative of your lady, and asked me after her very kindly, if she be still living, which I cannot tell, not having knewed the name.’

“That’s true, isn’t it?” asked the vicar. “They are related?”

“Yes, she is a cousin – not a first cousin – and I never saw very much of her. But go on, dear.”

“Well – yes. Where was I? Oh! here.”

And the vicar continued, thus:

‘But I am very anxious, please your divine, on account of the darling baby, you are aware it is only eighteen months old on the seventh of December last, and there is a many things you should know about; there being no near relative, and me in very great fear for the consequences. The captain is a pillite gentleman, and nice spoken to me. But I cannot write to your divine the cause of me being so very frightened as I am. For the captain he has been very kind to me, and I have nothing to complain. But has come to the nursery frequently, and looks at the child, and always offers me a drink, which is not the place of a gentleman to such as me; and having charge of the dearling child to offer me a drink, and press me to take it as he does.’

“Very odd, indeed,” said Mrs. Jenner. “I wonder what aged person this is?”

“I haven’t a notion, my dear,” answered the vicar.

“But what can he mean by it?” repeated his wife, with dignity.

“It is possibly mere good nature,” said her husband.

“I hope so,” said Mrs. Jenner. “I don’t think it gentlemanlike.”

“She may be an old woman, you know,” said the vicar.

“Extremely unlikely,” said the good lady, with an offended air. “You may as well read on, Hugh.”

The vicar read on therefore:

‘Being myself a many a year in the world, and having seen a great deal – ’

“Oh! then she is a person of a certain age,” said the vicar.

“I’m glad she is. She’s the fitter person to take charge of children,” said his wife. “But I never heard any good of that Captain Torquil, and, Heaven forgive me if I wrong him, I don’t believe any; and I don’t say so without having heard a good deal about him. But read on, darling.”

“Very good,” said the vicar. “I wonder what on earth she can want of me? however, we’ll see,” and he read on:

‘It seems to me the captain wants to take the management of the dearling baby out of my hands hole us bole us.’

“She spells very oddly,” said the vicar.

“Never mind. What more, darling?” said Mrs. Jenner.

‘And the notions of such a thing puts me to my wits end, and, indeed, God alone is my chief hope.’

“That, under all circumstances, I trust,” interpolated the vicar.

‘And I would wash my ends of it, and leave the place, was it not for that dearling baby, and the dreadful sin which it would lay on my soul – which the Lord forbid – and what may become of it I know not, if you will not see fit to come here and remove the poor little dearling. It will not do to write to me here, for it will fall, most likely, into the ends of the captain, which it would be a great break up, and the undoing of me; for he is, I hear, a very violent gentleman when he is crossed, and I should then be quite heartbroke about the dearling baby, for it would pass altogether into other ends, and so God only knows the consequence; and you being a parson, and acquainted with all goodness, will know what is right to be done by the poor innocent, and your own kin, and a great sin ’twill be if you let the child come to evil. Great Heaven, if you but knew the hawful state I am in this hour, and the baby, poor innocent darling, in so great a danger, you would not fail to take coach for here – Guildford, Surrey, Old Hall, at the grocer’s in High Street, Samuel Folder’s, they will tell you of me; and as you hope for mercy yourself, come here and take away the child to stay in safety in your care.’

That was the end of the letter; and when he had read it, he lowered it again to the table, and looked in his wife’s face, and she looked in his.

CHAPTER III

VOICES IN THE HALL

“I don’t see, my love, do you,” said the vicar, “that I am called upon to take any step on this odd letter from a servant-maid?”

“But, Hugh, dear, suppose she says true? Suppose there is a good reason for her alarm and urgency?”

“People of that rank of life don’t understand ours. I don’t believe, Dolly, there is any reason such as an educated person would act on.”

“And – I was just thinking, Hugh – does not this offer, as it were, from Providence of a little child of our kindred to take in, and protect, and educate, and love, I might say, very wonderfully? It might be such a darling – just eighteen months old, and a little orphan, poor little thing; and it must be a darling little creature, or she could not love it so very much.”

“But, my dear, the woman may be mad. If I could be certain there was anything in it – but I don’t even understand what she means.”

“Don’t you think she means that the child will be kidnapped, or made away with somehow?”

“Well, suppose she does, is it not more likely that a woman in her rank of life should be either stupid, or tipsy, or even mad, than that Captain – what’s his name?-should meditate any such enormity?”

“But you told us, Hugh, last Sunday, in that beautiful sermon on the text, ‘Search the Scriptures,’ that that was the very argument – wasn’t it? – by which that wicked man, Mr. Hume, attacked revealed religion.”

“Very well argued, I allow, Dolly,” said the vicar, smiling and patting her cheek affectionately.

“I am not sure, but I know it was something like it. And suppose, Hugh, dear, that anything bad did happen to the poor little child in consequence of your holding back and leaving it to its fate, would you ever forgive yourself? Think what a treasure it might be; and, oh, could you – could you feel quite happy if you resolve on leaving the poor little thing to take its chance after this warning?”

“I see, my good little Dolly, you have set your heart on our burning our fingers with other people’s chestnuts,” said the vicar, who secretly was more of his wife’s way of feeling and thinking in the matter than he cared to avow; and even at the cost of the long journey – a longer one than the rail makes of it – he was very well disposed to be urged into the affair. “I see you have made up your mind, and I suppose, with such a termagant for a wife, I may as well make up mine,” he continued merrily. “It would be odd, Dolly, if it turned out as you say, and supplied a little inmate for that one lonely nook in the house, the quiet room upstairs, that may be noisy enough yet. But you must give me time to arrange about my duty, and to speak to Stubbs and Mompesson. And you’ll allow me to pack my trunk, also. I think you will? And so we’ll see what’s to be done, and should anything come of it, I may be delayed. I may be absent two Sundays; and, do you observe, the letter is stamped ‘late.’ I see the date corresponds. It has been a day longer making the journey than it ought; but that accounts for it. The last mail. They are so dilatory in that rank of life. Yes, we must reckon two Sundays’ absence. If you look at the map” – he pointed to a large map of England hanging on the screen – “you’ll see that it is a long way between this and Guildford.”

By this time the vicar was a little fussed, and had begun to feel the distraction of the coming journey.

Dorothy had got Hileria Pullen’s letter, and was reading it, over again.

“Well, darling, may God bless the undertaking,” said the vicar, after a silence of some minutes, laying his hand kindly on his wife’s shoulder. “But the more I think of it, the more I am satisfied we are right.”

She looked up, meeting his fond glance as fondly.

“Yes, Hugh, it will be the longest separation we have had since we were married.”

And these good people, who loved very fondly and kissed easily, kissed very tenderly again, and she laid her hand in his as he sat down by her side, and they looked with inexpressible affection and happiness in each other’s faces. I wonder if it was possible for two human beings to be happier; and yet the wish of these hearts was still to seek – quifit Mecaenas?

As, hand locked in hand, they fell thus into a reverie, on a sudden the iron gate opened, a tramp of feet and the sound of voices reached the hall door, at which came a loud knock like a woundy pelt, as they say in that country, of a hammer. This was followed by a great peal of the bell, and was so startling that good Mrs. Jenner bounded with an ejaculation, and the vicar, holding his wife’s hand tighter than he intended, looked round to the window.

There were several voices talking, and the bell rang again.

“Someone ill, I’m afraid,” said the vicar, going to the head of the stairs to hurry the maid.

She was already at the door, and he heard feet entering, and some talk, and the deep bass voice of Tom Shackles among the rest.

“By the mess!” cried the lusty voice of the girl. “Here will be news for the master and mistress. In wi’ it here. By Jen!”

The other voices meanwhile were talking loudly enough in the hall to make it no easy matter for the vicar, calling over the banister at the head of the stairs, to make himself heard.

“Fetch it in!”

Could it be some half-drowned body picked out of the lake, and brought in to recover or die, as God might please, in the vicar’s house?

CHAPTER IV

IN WHICH A PERSON COMES
TO MAKE A VISIT TO THE VICARAGE

The talking in the hall continued, but Catherine Bell, the vicar’s servant, ran upstairs, and seeing her master calling unheeded over the banister, she accosted him from the landing below in these words, with a delighted grin on her ruddy face:

“Oh, sir, beggin’ yer pardon, please, there be a bairn coom.”

“A child come. What child? Whose child? What’s the meaning of all this? Is that Tom Shackles I hear downstairs? Will you tell him to come up to the lobby? I shall never know what it is otherwise; and come yourself also.”

And he put his head into the drawing-room and said, “Something that will interest you, my love. It never rains but it pours. A baby arrived, and coming up.”

“Bring the child up with you; that is, if it is fit to come up, of course. How do you do, Shackles? Come up for a moment; we want to hear what it is.”

“Here they come, dear,” he said, returning to the drawing-room, where his wife was standing near the door in a high state of excitement.

“Is he coming?” she asked.

“I’ll carry it. Gie’t to me, Tom, will ye?” said Catherine Bell, in a giggle of ecstasy, coming up the stairs with the baby lying across in her arms, looking like a bale of flannels, with a tweed shawl folded round it, and some thick veils pinned over its face.

“Bring the darling here, near the candles,” said kind Dolly Jenner to her maid. “Lay it on my lap.”

“The bonny bab! it’s sleepin’, ma’am.”

“Oh! the darling!” pursued the vicar’s wife. “We must take care, Kitty, not to let the light on its eyes, the poor little thing!”

“‘Twill be a bonny wee thing, I’ll warrant ye, ma’am. Shall I unpin the clout from its face?”

“Do, Kitty, quickly,” answered the lady, who was looking down on the lace veil – which indicated the rank of this little outcast’s people – longing, if it were possible, to see through it to the little slumbering face that was hidden from her eager eyes.

While they were thus employed, the vicar talked with Tom Shackles near the door.

Tom was the parish clerk, and followed other callings too. A tall fellow, of a long and solemn face, with a somewhat golden tint, and thick black hair streaked with white, and a very blue chin.

“As ’twas a matter for your reverence, they sent round the corner for me. You’d say the woman was dyin’ a’most, and she calls for the sacrament. She’s down at the George, they’ve got her to bed. She says there be them on her tracks that would hurt the child, and that’s why she could not hold her peace till the babby was in charge o’ your reverence. She asked was your wife living, and when she heard so, she took heart and thanked God, and cried a bit. She did not come by the mail-coach. She got out at Scardon Hall, and took a chaise across. She thinks she’s followed, and she’s took wi’ the creepings at every stir in the hall. The doctor’s wi’ her noo. She was bad settin’ out, and she’s liggin’ in her bed now. I thought she was a bit strackle-brained, I did truly, when I saw her first. I couldn’t tell what she was drivin’ at; but she knew well enough herself. She was troubled in mind, and freated terrible about the babby, and that be-twattled I ’most thought she was daft.”

“But she’s not mad?” asked the vicar.

“Na, na, not a bit; only put about, and scared like.”

“Where does she come from?”

“South – Lonnon, I take it – a long way. She looks like death ‘most.”

“Did she mention her name?” asked the vicar.

“Aye, sir, I wrote it down here.”

And he plucked a scrap of paper from his waistcoat and read, “Hileria Pullen.”

“Hileria Pullen! Dear me!” said the vicar, with the scrap of paper in his fingers, and turning to his wife, who, with Kitty Bell, was busy over the child. “Why, here’s that woman, Hileria Pullen, actually arrived at the George, and that’s the child, and the woman’s very ill. You saw her, didn’t you? What kind of person does she seem to you to be? respectable?” asked the vicar.

“That she does, sir; yes, a decent, farrantly woman, none o’ your fussocks, you know. A thin atomy of a woman, but well dressed. Not young, nor good-lookin’.”

“All the better, perhaps,” said the vicar.

“Thin and white-faced; fluke-mouthed, you’d say, sir.”

“No, Tom, not that phrase,” said the vicar.

“And hollow in the cheeks – dish-faced, you know. But I couldn’t see very well, for the candle was little better than a pigtail – and they’s dark enough – except just where a twine of the candlelight fell.”

“And she wants to see me?” said the vicar, lighting a bedroom candle.

“Just so, your reverence.”

“And the sacrament, you’re sure?”

“Certain, sir.”

“Come in here, Tom. There is some of the port open from last Sunday. You will carry it down; the rest we shall find there.”

And into the vicar’s study they stepped.

There, in a corner under the secretary, the bottle stood, also the simple silver cup and the patten. These the clerk put up, while the vicar took his hat, and coat, and thick woollen gloves, and his stick.

“I’m going, my love, to see the poor woman; down to the George; only a step,” said Doctor Jenner, with his mufflers on and his hat in his hand, extinguishing the candle he had just set down.

“And what is to be done with this poor little thing, Hugh? I wish so much it might remain.”

“Certainly, darling, whatever you like best – exactly what you think best; and I shan’t be very long away, and you shall hear all when I come back. And hadn’t I better send Mrs. Jolliffe up here? she knows everything that ought to be done, and we pass her door on the way to the George.”

“Oh, thank you, Hugh, darling – the very thing. It is so thoughtful of you. You do always think of everything.”

And running up close to him for her farewell, she kissed him with her arms about him, on the lobby, she added, in a hurried whisper—

“You darling, I am so delighted!”

Smiling, the vicar ran down, and, opening the hall door, the beautiful moonlight scene was before him. The solitary old trees in the foreground, the lake with its dark expanse and glimmering lights, and the mountains rising round like mighty shadows.

“A beautiful night, Tom,” said the vicar, as they stood for a moment on the hard, dry ground before his door.

“A black frost belike, sir,” answered Tom.

“The countless watch-fires of an unseen host, Tom,” said the vicar, looking up at the glorious field of stars above him, and then down again on the beautiful lake, and across it to the huge, phantom-like mountains; and then, a little to the left, the antique George Inn close by met his view and recalled him. So with a sigh he said—

“Let us get on, Tom; we have a serious duty before us. Poor woman! I trust we may find her better.”

And walking on the short green grass, beneath which the frozen earth echoed to their tread, he approached the one red light that glowed from its porch.

“Just tell Mrs. Jolliffe, Tom, as we pass, that the mistress wants her at the house this moment.”

“May God send all for the best,” murmured the vicar as, alone, he raised his eyes to heaven. “But come whatsoever his wisdom may decree, the poor little thing is welcome to share with us.”

Hereupon he entered the door of the George, which was still open. He inquired for the sick woman.

The doctor was still with her, and was giving her hot negus. “A very good thing, and there can’t be any fever, then, I take it,” said the vicar, relieved.

“I’ll go upstairs, Tom, and see the doctor,” he said, addressing Shackles, who had joined him; “and I’ll take the bag in my hand,” he added, not caring that the silver vessels of the church should run a risk of accidental irreverence; “and I will call for you, Tom, as soon as you are required.”

Tom sat down at the bar for a chat with Mrs. Winder, and the vicar mounted the stairs with a gentle and measured step.

CHAPTER V

THE BABY’S FACE

While the vicar had been talking to Tom Shackles, his wife and Kitty Bell had been equally busy about the little creature whom the girl called the “bairn.”

The first thing that struck them was the fineness and even elegance of the interior wrappings in which it was enveloped.

“How nicely she keeps it! That must be a really conscientious woman, that Mrs. Pullen,” said the good lady. “I hope, poor thing, she may recover.”

Perhaps she was thinking of tempting Hileria Pullen to make Golden Friars her residence, and to live at the vicarage.

“How soundly it sleeps, poor little darling! I wonder, Kitty, whether it would matter if we unpinned the covering over its darling face? I do so long to look at it.”

“Not it, ma’am. I would. I’d fain gie’t a smoucher, the canny darlin’.”

“But we mustn’t kiss it yet, you know; not till it’s awake; and now that I think, we ought not to lose a moment first in getting the nursery to rights. Mary will do that, and light a very good fire; and come back when you have told her. Is the little bed in the same place exactly?”

“Aye, ma’am; it stoodens just where it did, in the nook by the fire.”

“Yes, that’s the best place. Run, Kitty, and see to that, and come back in a moment.”

Away ran Kitty, and good Mrs. Jenner, in the delighted importance of her vicarious maternity, carried the little bale of flannels in her arms to the fireplace, where, very cautiously, she sat down, smiling, her head already full of the future, and the air glorious with cloudy castles and grand romances, of which the heroine lay so helpless and unconscious in her lap.

From the nursery, which good Mrs. Jenner for years had looked after, every now and then – lest, I suppose, a family should come upon them by surprise – Kitty Bell came quickly back again, with the same irrepressible grin upon her hale, honest face.

“Well, Kitty, a good fire in the nursery?”

“Hoot! ma’am, a grand fire, like a Kersmas stock a’most; the room’s all alight wi’t. The folk’ll see it a gliskin’ i’ the lake, across from the fells, it gars a look so gladsome.”

“We must not set the house on fire, though,” said her mistress, in high glee.

“Na, na, that won’t be, ma’am. Dick Carpenter says ye couldna burn the vicarage, ’tis so well biggit, all stone and hard oak; and dear me! baint it tired, poor, weeny, winsome thing; winking still, it be, God bless it.”

“Yes, fast asleep; but I think we might peep now, Kitty, what do you say?”

“Surely, ma’am. Do let us, just a glent; ’twill do us good to see the weeny face o’t.”

And so, in eager whispers, speaking under their breath, they exchanged suggestions and cautions as they withdrew pin after pin; and at length the slumbering baby’s face was disclosed to their longing eyes.

To say they were disappointed would be nothing – they were shocked. It was the ugliest baby they had ever seen, and looked, moreover, as if it were dying.

“Adzooks!” gasped Kitty, after a silence of some seconds. “Dear me! Poor little thing!” said Mrs. Jenner, in a whisper of amazement. “It certainly is very plain.”

“Did I ever see such a windered babby as that!” exclaimed Kitty.

“It certainly is very thin,” observed the vicar’s wife to herself.

“It looks as if ’twas just un-gone,” exclaimed Kitty.

“All but dead indeed, poor little thing!” said the mistress, echoing Kitty’s criticism; “and I think that cheek is swollen. Oh, dear! it is such a pity.”

“Did ye ever see sic a poor blea’ little face?” continued Kitty, employing the epithet which in that country expresses pale and livid. “Happen as ca’ad it be?”

“No, it ain’t cold – quite warm,” said the crestfallen lady, very gently touching its cheek with her fingertips.

“I hope it mayn’t prove a nafflin,” added Kitty.

“No, no, no, Kitty; it’s a plain child, but I see no sign of its being foolish or weak. Heaven forbid!” said Mrs. Jenner, alarmed.

“Whoever sid sic a bairn?” repeated Kitty, that Job’s comforter, deliberately, “now that the can’le shines right down on’t. By t’ mess! What’ll the maister say when he comes back. ’Twill be a rue-bargain wi’ him, I’m thinkin’.”

“No, he’ll not regret it – ’twasn’t for its looks he took it. He thought it right; and he always does what he thinks right; but he will be disappointed – that can’t be helped.”

“We may come to like it yet, ma’am,” said Kitty, to whose woman’s heart something in that helpless, ugly little face appealed.

“I was just thinking so – I was,” said the lady. “We may love it even more if it is sickly, poor little thing; and the less beauty it has, and the more suffering, the higher right has God given it to our compassion, help, and love.”

Her eyes filled up with gentle tears as she spoke, and she stooped down and kissed the little baby; drawing it fondly to her lips, and again and again making amends, as it were, for the cold hospitality of its reception.

“’Twill – ’twill indeed – ’twill be welcome,” said Kitty relenting also.

And in the midst of these caresses and welcomings, the child, I suppose under the endearments of good Mrs. Jenner, awoke and began to cry.

Its crying was not of the angry and shrilly sort. It was a low, gentle wail and sobbing, and much more moving than that higher-pitched and more energetic lamentation to which we are accustomed.

“There, there, there,” said the women, and all kinds of hushing and soothing accompanied its sorrowing.

“Has Mrs. Jolliffe come, I wonder?”

Yes, she had arrived, and was in the nursery when Kitty Bell had left it.

“Come up to the nursery, Kitty. Take the candle, and I’ll carry the child. I like carrying it, poor little thing. I feel I have been so unkind to it. I wish it could understand me, that I might beg its pardon.”

So they trooped up to the nursery, where good Mrs. Jolliffe, tall, with a grave and kindly face, made her curtsey, and took the baby in her experienced arms; and with these movements, and sayings, and unintelligible words of power, intoned according to tradition, she tranquillised that troubled spirit in a way that Kitty, who was watching over one shoulder, admired and Mrs. Jenner, peering over the other, envied.

“How do she and the child so delightfully understand one another?” thought the vicar’s wife. “How happy and how conceited Mrs. Jolliffe must be.”

“By Jen!” exclaimed Kitty.

“You must not swear, Kitty,” said the vicar’s good wife.

“No, ma’am; but, lawk! don’t ye see, ma’am? Look at its eyen! Hoot! sic a gloo it has.”

“No, no, it does not squint,” expostulated Mrs. Jenner in a new distress. “Surely it doesn’t squint, Mrs. Jolliffe?”

“That little gloo is only the teething, ma’am; it won’t signify.”

“Thank Heaven,” said poor Mrs. Jenner.

“Amen,” responded Kitty. “And, oh, ma’am, doant the nursery look gladsome! Look around, ma’am, do, wi’ the fire and the candle, and the poor weeny thing in the flannels, and Mrs. Jolliffe a singin’ to it. For a nursery without a baby, it does look dowly, ma’am.”

“So it does, indeed,” said the vicar’s wife, with a kind look at the girl, that was almost as good as a kiss.

“And when Mrs. Jolliffe ain’t here, I’m to take care o’ the child, and I’ll talk and sing to it so canty all day; ain’t I, ma’am?”

“Very likely, Kitty.”

“Ha, ha!” said Kitty, with a broad grin.

CHAPTER VI

HILERIA PULLEN

While all this and a great deal more was going on in the nursery, in the George Inn, whose porch and sign you could see from the window in the moonlight, the vicar had walked upstairs and tapped at the door to which the chambermaid had conducted him. The doctor told him to come in.

There was now quite a little levee in the stranger’s room. Hileria Pullen was in bed. She was, in truth, neither young nor pretty, being somewhat yellow, and very sharp of feature. She looked woefully exhausted, and thought that she was dying. She lay making a straight, narrow ridge down the centre of a rather large four-poster. At the foot stood Mr. Turnbull, of the George, grave, bald, and florid, in a vast white waistcoat, a brass-buttoned blue coat, and a big bunch of watch-seals dangling on the paunch of his drab trousers. At the end of the bolster stood short, energetic Doctor Lincote, with his fingers on Hileria’s pulse, and his watch in the palm of his other hand. The vicar glided silently to the side of the pillow opposite the doctor, who, stuffing his watch into his fob, said with decision—

“Don’t mind your sensations, ma’am, you’re better. Glad to see you, Mr. Jenner. This is the vicar, ma’am. I hope we’ll disappoint him, ma’am. We’ll hardly ask for our viaticum yet, Mr. Vicar, ha, hey?”

“Glad to hear you say so, doctor. You’re in very safe hands, Mrs. Pullen. How do you feel, pray?”

“Jest gone, sir, please,” answered the patient querulously. The doctor winked across the bed to the vicar, to intimate that he was to take that announcement with a grain of allowance.

“And you remember you told Mr. Turnbull to let nobody into his inn; but that couldn’t be, you know; so you must be more precise, and say who you mean, do you see? and if you want to talk to him, you must take a glass of sherry first for I need not tell you, you are very much exhausted. I see she does wish to speak to you, Turnbull. Hand her a glass of sherry – hold it yourself to her lips, you’d better.”

And while the host was doing that congenial office, the doctor came round the bed and signed to the vicar, who followed him to the corner of the room next the window, and there in a whisper he said—

“A very hysterical subject, she is; in a high state of excitement, and utterly over-fatigued and exhausted. You may guess what that is; but there’s nothing at present to alarm.”

“You have been giving her ether,” said the vicar; “I smell it.”

“Very sharp – very sharp, Mr. Vicar; you know the leading medicines, and the leading cases. You have a very pretty notion of medicine; I often told you. She’s half mad with fright about some captain she says is pursuing her. By Jove! he must be a very hot-blooded fellow – eh?”

“I’m only a poor woman,” said the female voice in a quaver from the bed; “but you are gentlemen, and you’ll consider me all the same; and Captain Torquil is coming after me on account of that child – and he’s a dangerous man.” Here the doctor winked again at the vicar. “And my life would not be safe if his anger got the better of him; and you must not let him know or guess I’m here. If you do, you’ll have all to answer for.”

“No, my good woman, you may rely upon it. Of course, Turnbull, she may depend upon you. Make your mind quite easy, upon my honour you may,” said the doctor. And aside to the vicar he whispered—

“Did you ever, in all your days, see a poor creature in such a terror? I really believe, if he got into the room, ’twould either kill her outright, or put her out of her reason.”

“Poor thing! it is most pitiable,” said the vicar.

“And oh, sir, is the child safe?”

“Quite, my good woman,” answered the vicar, drawing near.

“And in your house, sir?”

“In my house,” answered he.

“And if you give it up, may you be judged.”

“Now, my good woman, you must not be trying to sit up; don’t you see you’re not equal to it?” said the doctor. “Compose yourself for tonight, and in the morning you may talk as long as you like.”

“I shan’t live to see the morning, sir. May the Lord have mercy, and forgive my sins,” she answered in an agony. “And now, sir, parson Jenner, give me the holy sacrament to my comfort, and pray for me, as you hope for mercy yourself, when you come to this dreadful hour.”

CHAPTER VII

NEXT MORNING

Fervently, with upturned eyes, with hands joined together, with the dew of agony on her face, and a trembling voice, did Hileria Pullen do her part in the great rite of the Church.

And when it was over, she did seem comforted, and after a while, composed; and at last, worn out with fatigue, and aided by Doctor Lincote’s draught, she fell asleep, and slept deep and serenely till nearly ten o’clock next morning.

The little child slept also a great deal, but not so easily. Mrs. Jolliffe, who had remained in charge of it, was of opinion that there was some sickness hanging over it.

All through the night it was starting, as if in sudden pain, and “blarin’ ye could hear it across the green a’most; and there’s arrals come out all over its skin; and its poor, tiny-winey joints is creaked wi’ fits like, and ’twas always workin’ aswint in the bed; and it looks so pined,” said Mrs. Jolliffe, making her report; “and the babby’s very bad – there’s nout else to be said; and what its sickness may be, there’s none can tell; ’taint like none that’s go in’, unless happen the doctor might guess.”

In the midst of this consternation the doctor, who had been sent for, arrived.

Mrs. Jenner, Mrs. Jolliffe, Kitty, and even Mall the cook, were assembled there, hanging upon the words, and even the looks of the sage.

The doctor examined the child curiously, like a work of art. Then he stood up and looked at it with a frown, and asked some questions of Mrs. Jolliffe; and then he peered at it again, and felt its skin, and its pulse, and looked keenly into its eyes, and at last he remarked—

“It’s a very odd case indeed. Did you ever see a case like that, quite, Mrs. Jolliffe? No, I rather think not. It’s as odd a case as ever I saw. That child’s diet must have been played with, I’d say – only I know it has been in honest hands – the child was poisoned. Not enough, I hope, to kill it, whatever’s wrong. But it has had a squeak for it. Warm bathing; just a very little medicine I’ll send; as much whey and goat’s milk as it will drink, and the room kept warm but airy; and trust the rest to young blood, and the energy of new life. Disease, Mrs. Jenner, ma’am, quails before children.”

“You observe its eyes, Mr. Lincote. Do you think there is a – a squint, doctor?”

“I don’t think so, ma’am,” he answered. “It is a more dangerous thing – a symptom of pressure on the brain. Only slight, but it shows how general the derangement is.”

“I knew ’twas bad,” said Kitty, “for it only healed when I sang til’t, and jinked t’keys before its een.”

“If the light hurts its eyes, put a screen before it; and give it nothing solid to eat; and we’ll see how it gets on towards evening again.”

So the doctor took his leave.

Saint George and the Dragon, in spite of the sanguinary character of the situation, looked quite pleasant in the sharp, frosty sun this morning.

Familiar as this piece of blazonry was to the vicar’s eyes, hanging over the edge of the road, exactly opposite the porch of the George Inn, the good clergyman thought that the valiant knight’s casque and mail, and the dragon’s scales, splendid in Dutch gold, and the gorgeous crimson throat of the monster, down which the saint of the azure cloak and red cross had insinuated his gilded lance, never looked more; becomingly. The animated spires of the reptile’s burnished tail, and the good-humoured grace with which the saint tickled rather than pierced its vermillion interior, gave an air of amicable frolic to the encounter, which quite took away any unpleasantness in the affair.

“Brilliant day, Mr. Turnbull,” said the vicar, with brilliant Saint George and the Dragon still in his eye; “and how is the poor woman today?”

“She freats a deal after the bairn, sir,” said the innkeeper; “but the doctor says she’s better this morning, and she’s wearying to see you.”

“She shan’t weary long then,” said the vicar cheerily.

And in a few minutes more he stood in the sick woman’s room.

“How does Mrs. Pullen today?” he asked. “I’m glad to hear the doctor says you are better.”

“I wish I could see it, sir; I thank you all the same,” whimpered Hileria, who liked the sympathy due to sickness. “I’m very weak, sir. I hope I may leave this bed alive, sir.”

“Would you rather that I looked in another time, Mrs. Pullen? I live close by.”

“Please, sir, how is the poor darling baby?” she inquired. “They are taking every care of it; and the doctor shall look after it until it is quite well again, which I trust may be very soon.”

“Thank God, sir. It’s a sweet little thing, sir. May heaven bless and keep it. My heart’s a-breakin’ – I miss it so.”

And Hileria, not finding her pocket-handkerchief at the moment, hastily applied the hem of the sheet to her eyes.

“You will be sufficiently recovered, I trust, very soon, Mrs. Pullen, to come and see the child; and if not, the child will very soon be well enough to come and see you.”

“I’m thinking, sir, that can hardly be. I’m afraid, sir – I’m afraid of my life – of that man. I’m well off, sir: I’m well to do – thanks to the poor mistress. She left me by her will five hundred pounds, and I have my savings beside; and I’ll be easy for the rest of my days, I hope; and I’ll keep out of sight, sir, please, till this thing’s blowed over; for he’s a bad man, I’m afraid, sir; and he’s driven nigh desperate by losses and crosses lately, they say; and I should not wonder at anything he may do – he’s that savage; and ’twould be a mercy almost he drew his razor across his throat, and made away with himself.”

“You speak of – of whom?” said the vicar.

“Captain Torquil, sir. He has not been here yet, but he will, I’m sure o’ that; and Mr. Turnbull has promised he won’t let him suppose I’m here. And you, sir, won’t neither; for he’s in a mad state, he is, and till I’m away, and out of his reach, I don’t count my life safe.”

“I’m shocked to hear you so speak of Captain Torquil. Not that I’m acquainted with him, or know anything particularly about him; but, everything considered, it is very shocking to think there should have been anything to give a colour in your mind to such language.”

“I’ll tell you, sir – I’ll tell you all,” said Hileria. “That is one reason has brought me here. If you can spare time now, ’twill be best you should hear it at once. And I’d like to have it off my mind, sir; for I sometimes think ’twill set me mad, striving to keep it to myself.”

“You need not hurry yourself, I can afford you plenty of time,” said the vicar. “Shall I take a chair?”

“Please, sir; and I’ll tell you the best I can. I’m very weak, sir, as you see, but I’ll try and tell it as short as I can, sir.”

Hileria Pullen, with a lean, bilious face and very black eyes, was sitting up in the bed, with a wrapper on and a shawl drawn round her angular figure; a nightcap, with a broad, faded silk ribbon pinned tightly about it, round her head; and some black hair, streaked with white, peeping from under this pale ligature of lilac and faint green.

“Thank you, sir,” said she, and she hemmed to clear her voice, as the vicar took his seat near the foot of the bed, crossing his gaitered leg, and holding his hat and stick on his knee as he inclined an attentive ear towards the sick woman who had a story to tell.

CHAPTER VIII

HILERIA PULLEN’S ACCOUNT
OF CAPTAIN AND MRS. TORQUIL

“You don’t know that family, sir, Captain and Mrs. Torquil?” she began.

“No, I’ve never seen them,” said he.

“After the poor mistress died, sir, the captain came down hot foot to Snedley with his lawyer – his lady, Mrs. Torquil, being named in the will for something – and he took a deal on him, and directed all things; and, not having no copy of the will at the time, which I have one now, I could not gainsay nothing. And he ordered me and the child away to Mrs. Torquil at Guildford.”

“And weren’t you comfortable there?” asked the vicar.

“Yes, sir, well enough in a way, but there was things against it; comfortable in a manner, but not a house such as quiet folk would like to live in. Captain Torquil was a very nice-spoken gentleman at first, but no one likes him long; and he’s scarce ever at Guildford, always in London. So much the better for them as lives in t’other place. A very violent-tempered, dangerous gentleman.”

“But Mrs. Torquil, you found her kind, I dare say?” said the vicar.

“Mrs. Torquil, sir, is nothing in her own house,” said she.

“Oh! controlled by her husband, I suppose?” he suggested.

“Well, sir, I may mention to you, she’s scarce ever out of her bedroom. The fact is, sir – what I wouldn’t on no account tell to another – the poor lady has her failin’, and it’s come to that she’s scarce ever out of her bed.

“She’s too fond of drinkin’, sir, and has ruined her ’ealth, which she cannot last very long, sir; and ’twill not fret them much, I’m afraid, that should fret most. ’Tis a bad world, sir, and a sorrowful; and I’m told, poor lady, if she had bin happier mated she’d a bin very different in many ways.”

“Dear me! poor thing! that’s very sad,” said the clergyman, with something of wonder as well as of pain. “That such things are, who could believe if one didn’t see them? Ah, Mrs. Pullen, in the midst of life we are in death – that spiritual death, which is so unspeakably more terrible for us than its awful physical image. It is very sad indeed, Mrs. Pullen, what you tell me.”

“So it is, sir, and he leading such a life they do say – gambling, and every other wickedness – and no servants stops there any length of time; and often not the price of a loaf in that house for days together, and credit hard to get for that house, I can tell you, sir.”

“But how did Mrs. Mildmay, of Queen’s Snedley, come to admit him at her house?”

“Law love you, sir, she knew nothing. If she had a knewn what sort he was, or she, poor lady, she’d a’ never left them nothing in her will, nor suffered him nigh the house. But he had a way with him, and flattered her, poor good lady; she was too simple for such like. It wasn’t till I came to Guildford that I got a copy of the will from Mr. Tute, the lawyer. I have it here, sir, in this bag, by my bed; and I’d be glad, sir, if you’d read it, or get a copy took, since the poor darling child is under your care, which, as you will hear, is the saving of its life, no less, the blessed baby.”

“Pray explain – do, my good friend, explain what you mean.”

“What I mean, sir, please, is just this. The poor mistress has left all she can, except about fifty pounds a year, to her cousin, Mrs. Torquil, which she would as soon have burnt her hand in the fire as have done it, if she had a knewn that the poor lady was always more or less in liquor, and seldom out of her bedroom, or fit to speak to no one, I’m sorry to say, sir.”

The vicar raised his hands and eyes, and shook his head slowly. “She had in her power to leave about a thousand a year, which she has left to the darling child, Miss Laura; and if the dear baby should die unmarried, it is all to go, you will see, sir, when you come to read the will, to her afflicted cousin – little she thought what was afflicting of her – Mrs. Torquil.”

“Is Captain Torquil appointed guardian to the child?”

“Not he, sir.”

“Then he has no more right to the custody of that child than he has to the custody of you or me!” said the vicar. “He has no more right than Mr. Turnbull, the innkeeper here – less in fact; because if anything happened to the child he would have a great accession of fortune. He is, for that reason, the very last person who should have charge of the child; no selection could possibly be more improper.”

“Well, sir, I’ll tell you just what happened; but please, sir, you’ll promise not to get me into no trouble for speaking so plain; for, indeed, sir, except to show you how the matter really is, and what a sin it would be in the sight of God to give the child back to that bad man, I would not open my lips to no one on the matter.”

“I see what you mean – that is, I can understand why Captain Torquil, as I have said, should, on consideration, most gladly rid himself of all responsibility about the child.”

“Ah! sir, that ain’t what the captain wants. But I don’t like it no ways, and I could not stay no longer at Guildford, at no price. I could not allow him to take to doctoring the baby, sir.” And she looked darkly at the vicar, and nodded.

“Eh? I don’t quite understand,” hesitated the good man.

“This was it, you must know, sir. He didn’t trouble us out at Guildford much with his company, no more than his money, and he never paid a shilling nowhere without disputing and fighting over it like a dog and cat; but that’s neither here nor there. He did come out to Guildford about ten days after we got there, and he spoke me fair, and made me a present, and for all that there was something about him I did not like, and I could not know myself what it was, only there was. What I then saw first against him was the way he used to walk into poor Mrs. Torquil’s room; just shove open the door and walk in, as if ’twas a stable, and look at her as if he’d like to strangle her; and never a good morning, nor how do you do; and she all of a tremble while he was there, and no word, I am sorry to say, sir, too bad to call her. And whatever she may be, poor lady, it isn’t for him to call her them dreadful names – before servants more especially, when ’twas his own bad treatment that brought her to it; and she there with never a word, nothing but just crying and sobbing, poor thing, as if her heart would break; and whatever money there was, everyone knew ’twas with her it came. Well, he never stayed long, I must say, in her room, only to rummage about for her letters, and reading every scrap of paper he could find.

“Well, sir, the first time Captain Torquil came out I did not know him so well, and he walked upstairs right to the nursery – a queer place for a gentleman to be poking into – and he was very nice-spoken and smiling, and he asked how I was, and hoped I was comfortable, and told me to ask for whatever I wanted. And he said he heard the child had a cold. And I said it had, but was getting better; and he said smiling, ‘You know, nurse, I’m a great doctor,’ which I told him I did not know it before.

“‘Yes,’ said he. ‘Would you mind putting it to bed, and I’ll have it quite well by tomorrow. It is feverish, and till that is right it can’t get better.’

“Well, sir, it was only wrapped round with its flannels and my quilted shawl, and the little cot all ready, so I did as he bid me; and said he, ‘The thing it wants is James’s powder, and you know how to manage it.’

“And then he went downstairs, and came back, and divided the powder he brought, with him in two; and he said he’d come back and see how it did. And I gave it that powder – he standing by – and it never was the same since.”

“H’m!” said the vicar, with his eyes fixed on a knot in the floor.

And a little silence followed.

“Well, sir, you see, he was angry when I refused to give the child the t’other half of the powder; and when he frowns, and laughs, and turns white, as he does when he’s vexed, he looks very bad, and I could not get his face out of my head, although he did not stay long, nor make much of the matter. But lately he’s bin coming up again to the nursery, and he says the child isn’t thriving with me, which I know well what it was as disagreed with the darling infant, and he wanted me to give it a bottle he had made up in his coat pocket, and I said I’d rayther not, and he pulled off the wrapper and showed me the label with ‘Daffy’s Elixir’ on it, and the name of the apothecary; and he said, ‘You must give it the medicine, the child will die else;’ and I said, ‘I won’t give it no physic, except what the doctor over the way orders and makes up;’ and with that he laughed and called me a fool, and slapt his hand down on the table, and told me to be ready to quit the house and give up the child to a new nurse the next morning; and he gave me a look that frighted me, and I heard him laughing very angry as he ran down the stairs.

“Now, if that stuff in the bottle was really ‘Daffy’s Elixir’ and nothing mixed in it, why mightn’t he a’ left it where he had put it, on the table, instead of taking it away again in his pocket? Mind ye, sir, I don’t say nothing, but I know what I thought. I was as cold as lead, and trembling all over, and I think I’d a took a fit, only I looked at the poor darling little baby, and I burst out a-cryin’, and that I think saved me.”

Here Hileria Pullen paused, and the vicar said what is told in the next chapter.

CHAPTER IX

HILERIA PULLEN’S ADVENTURES

“You are right, Mrs. Pullen, to be very cautious in what you say, because there is no proof, nothing but suspicion. You may depend upon me. You were right to be frank, and you have acted perfectly right. How soon after that did you leave?”

“I’ll tell you all, sir, please. I never was so frightened in all my days. It was easy enough for me to take care of myself. It was just the thing he’d a liked best, for me to take myself off, and leave him to say what he liked of me, and have his will of the darling babby. I knowed well enough what I was afraid of, and who to hinder him? La, sir, you would not think the taking I was in.”

“I can well understand it, Mrs. Pullen, well; go on, pray, I’m all attention,” said the vicar.

“I was ill, sir, and that made matters worse,” said Mrs. Pullen, “much worse. I wasn’t good for nothing; there wasn’t ‘amost no life in me. I thought of this thing and that, as well as I could, with my poor head; and I’d a blessed God, if an angel had come into the room, and told me that me and the baby was to die that night. But God knows best what’s fit for us all.”

“Very true, Mrs. Pullen; that is our best consolation, come what may. If we could only believe that ‘God is Love,’ we should bear the afflictions of this life with serener hearts,” interposed the good vicar.

“I soon made up my mind,” continued Hileria Pullen, “that, come what would, the baby I would not leave. But then, where was the good of my staying there till the captain came back, with his screeching curses, and his bottles, and powders, and a new nurse – nurse, indeed! Hileria Pullen would not have been long for that nursery! And the darling babby would have been in strange arms, and a bad business at the ‘old Hall’ before a week, and, most like, no talk about it; or, if there was, some awful story trumped up to fix the blame on me. May the Lord deliver us from all evil!”

“It is a world of sorrow, Mrs. Pullen,” observed the vicar. “It is a world of wickedness, sir,” said Hileria.

“That it is, also,” allowed Dr. Jenner; “sin and sorrow, twin offspring of the Fall. Go on, pray.”

“The thought came to me – I trust in the Lord it may have been from Him – that as there I could not stay, and, moreover, as leave the babby I loved, better, I may say, than myself, in that place, to them that was going to take it in hand, I could not; which it would have been nothing less but to lend a hand in what was intended to be done, which God forbid.”

“Amen, amen,” murmured the clergyman.

“So there was nothing left me, but one chance for it. I made up my mind I’d take the child with me, or lose my life,” said Hileria Pullen. “Being as you are, you can’t understand, sir, how I felt. If you was me, in that dismal place, undertaking that great risk, with the chance of meeting Captain Torquil, who was drove desperate almost by his crosses and losses, being one of them wicked men that would not stop at nothing, you would know what it was to fear for your life like I did. As he now is, I really think he would do or say anything almost.”

“I hope not; I trust not. Still it was, you know, a great venture, under any circumstances; it was, you know, irregular, and appearances might be held to be against you; but undoubtedly you did right, and I think you a heroine, Mrs. Pullen,” said the clergyman.

“So I am, sir, I hope, and all my papers and discharges correct. A good nurse I have bin to the poor babby, according to my opportunities. Well, sir, the end of it was, having made my mind up, sir, to try it, and having, by the mercy of heaven, some money in my box; that night, I said nothing to anyone living, and I took the child, poor little thing, and I dressed it, as you see. And, ill though I was, I stole away with the baby, and no one missed me till next morning, I take it – for that was a house where most people did as they liked, except when the master was there – and none cared about their own business – much less other people’s.”

“But you said Captain Torquil followed you. How was that?”

“We were two hours late the second day, at a small town called Twinton, when I got out with the baby, meaning to cross to this.”

“Two hours late, were you? How was that?” asked the vicar.

“We had thirty mile of snow on the way, sir,” said Hileria, looking as miserable as she could, “and north of that, some of the road all one sheet of ice.”

“Yes, to be sure; so I heard; there was a fall of snow between Scardon and Derby. We shall have it here soon, I dare say,” observed Mr. Jenner, looking toward the windows.

“You’ll mind the inn at Twinton, sir?” said she.

“To be sure, ‘The Guy of Warwick.’ You found it a comfortable place, I’m sure. It is a kinsman of Mr. Turnbull, our host here, who keeps it,” said Mr. Jenner.

“Yes; good fires they had, sir. It was there we stopped. I was afraid to stay downstairs in the public room, and I kept the child under my cloak, so that the people downstairs could not see it; for I could not tell who might be asking them questions by-and-by. So up the stairs I went, and the chambermaid put me into a big room over the door, and there was a fire at the far end; but I could not keep away from the big bow window looking along the white frosty road, towards London. La! sir, everything that came up that way, how my heart went thump and flutter, flutter and thump!”

“Why did you stay so long on such dangerous ground?” inquired the vicar.

“There was a coach expected every minute that would bring me more than half way to Golden Friars, and I could get out at a place called Scardon Hall, where there was horses.

“I thought if the captain came up, what should I do, me and the child, if he should hear at Twinton there was anyone had ordered a shay for Golden Friars. He’d have questioned them all, through and through, right and left, up and down, he’d ’a bin out in the stable, and up in the garrets, and if I was hid in the cock-loft, he’d have ferreted me out, and heaven ‘ave mercy on me then! So I thought, as there might be a delay, ’twould be wiser to say little, and keep out of observation, and just take the coach, when it came up, as far as Scardon Hall. The coach was a bit late, and every minute seemed as long as an hour to me, thinking I never could be out of the highway soon enough.

“The baby was asleep, poor little thing. I laid it on the bed, not far from the fire. I could not eat a mouthful, I was too much afraid for that; I could not stay near the fire, cold as I was; I could do but one thing, and that was, to stand in the window, and watch the road, holding my breath, and counting the minutes by my watch.

“I was there more than an hour I should think, and it was moonlight still, and I saw a chaise and four pull up at the door, and Captain Torquil put his head out of the window, and he asked how long it was since the mail-coach passed, and they told him. They were wetting the horses’ mouths, and though it was a frosty night, they were steaming up in a cloud with heat; and he asked how far on was the place where they changed horses, and they told him five miles only; and he said, ‘They have left that, I suppose, half an hour ago;’ and they said, ‘That at least;’ and he said, ‘They were behind time here;’ and they said they lost time by the ice on the road, where the floods were – which was true – and they were bringing it up now. Then he asked them how long the next stage was, and they told him thirteen miles; and he said, ‘We shan’t overtake them next stage, then;’ and they said, hardly.”

“You remember all this very distinctly,” said the vicar.

“Every word of it went into my ear like a penknife, I’ll never forget word or look, or turn or sight of the four minutes that passed then. I was standing with the baby in the big window over the door, and in the broad moonlight, and I could no more move from where I stood than the post outside with the painted sign swinging to it.

“I did not feel myself nor the child for the time, nor as if I had a body at all, but only just eye and ear, and like to fall down dead with fear of him, for you don’t know all I’ve heard of that man. Well, sir, you may guess how I felt when he raised his eyes to the very window where me with the baby in my arms was standing.

“I felt my eyes growing as big as saucers in my head, staring at him; and the captain leaned out, and made as if he was going to open the door. But, heaven be thanked, he did not see me. I think ’twas the shine of the moonlight back again from the panes of glass that hid me. He held his watch in the light of the moon, leaning out, and he called to the postboys to be off; and, I thank God, I saw them drive on at a great pace the next minute. I had been trembling the whole journey, in fear of him overtaking me, for I knew that he would think I had taken the northern coach, having a sister married in Edinburgh, and he knew she wanted me to go to live with her; and I do suppose he went right to the coach office when he heard I was gone, and found out what passengers went, and then he followed. I mentioned you to him, also, once, sir, as one that should be consulted; and when he finds I haven’t gone on by the coach, I know he’ll make straight for this.”

“Not unlikely. Give me the copy of the will, and I will have our lawyer’s opinion as to its effect; and – there is Mr. Turnbull. I hear him in the lobby.”

And he called in the innkeeper, and gave him a solemn charge, in case of inquiries after Mrs. Pullen, to withhold all information, which that grave person undertook to do.

“My people doesn’t know her name, and I’ll give them directions to say nothing.”

“And should Captain Torquil, or anyone on his behalf, make inquiry about the child, please say that I have taken that matter in hand, and refer him to my attorney, Mr. Tarlcot. And now I’ll take the copy of the will, ma’am – thanks; and I’ll bring it back to you when he has made a note of it.”

So he bid her good-bye, and was approaching the door, when suddenly she screamed, starting upright in the bed, “Oh law, sir, he’s come!”

“Hush! Captain Torquil do you mean?”

“Oh! yes, sir. I hear his voice.”

CHAPTER X

CAPTAIN TORQUIL

The vicar leaned over the banisters, and heard a clear and somewhat sharp voice talking in the hall with Mr. Turnbull, and his own name mentioned.

At this time of year few strangers passed through Golden Friars, and having never before heard those clear resolute tones in which he was named, he concluded that the visitor could be no other than Captain Torquil.

So that worthy divine put his hat on his head, and with a dignified air went down the back stair, and through the inn yard, with swift paces to the attorney’s house.

Brevity was urgent, for although there was nothing excited in the gentlemanlike accents which he had overheard, Mr. Turnbull, of the George, would at once, as agreed, send Captain Torquil on to the attorney. It would be awkward to be surprised there, and the clerical costume, the good vicar pointedly observed, would make identification inevitable.

Mr. Luke Tarlcot, the attorney, was a good-natured fellow enough – a man of sixty years and upwards, a serious man, a fat man, cautious and taciturn, and diplomatic on occasion.

Holding this gentleman by the corner of his coat collar, he poured, as briefly as he could, into his ear the strange story of Hileria Pullen and Captain Torquil, and produced the late Mrs. Mildmay’s will, which, happily, was very short.

I’ll get away, I won’t meet him; he’ll be here in no time. Let me out through your garden; come – come – quickly.” And out the back way, through Mr. Tarlcot’s leafless plum-trees and winter cabbages, and under the thick ivied arch into the lane, the clergyman marched quickly, and so away by the hard pathway, with his back to the lake and the town, towards the solemn mountains, at whose foot lay the farmstead of his sick parishioner, Farmer Bligh, trusting that by the time of his return at sunset, Captain Torquil would be many miles beyond the outlines of the purple mountains that surround Golden Friars.

Mr. Tarlcot returned thoughtfully to his room, which was somewhat darksome, and had an old-fashioned and grimy air, and sat himself down in his office chair, and slipped the copy of the will into the drawer before him. And almost at the same moment he heard a gentlemanlike voice say, “This way?” And before the maid could announce him, a handsome man, with an air of fashion, very black hair, very delicately-chiselled features, which had something the effect of a carving in ivory, a little yellowed by time, entered the room.

This gentleman had his hat in his hand, and an exquisite little walking-stick, and he carried a sort of light drape wrapper across his arm. The attorney observed this gentleman’s French boots and French gloves, and also that he appeared quite unconscious how much finer he was than the figures that usually walked about the purlieus of the George in Golden Friars.

He made a slight bow, and walked towards the table, at which the attorney had risen to receive him.

“I’ve looked in about a very odd affair, Mr. Tarlcot. My name is Torquil. Your clergyman here, Mr. Jenner, has probably mentioned Captain Torquil. The most extraordinary piece of villainy has been practised upon me and my wife, Mrs. Torquil, by a servant who has kidnapped – may I sit down?” said the captain, not waiting, however, for leave – “kidnapped I may say our child – a young child consigned to our care by the will of its mother, a widow, a very near relation of my wife’s. I have had an infinity of trouble. I’ve followed all the way from London forty miles north of this place, and found on overtaking the coach that she had got out, and come across, as I rightly conjectured, here. At your hotel, round the comer, they tell me that she did so, and brought the infant with her. They say they don’t know what’s become of her, but that your – your the Reverend Mr. Jenner makes himself responsible for the child.”

Here was a little silence. The attorney did not break it. He looked down industriously on his desk, and leaned a little forward.

“Am I rightly informed?” asked Captain Torquil.

“If you will permit me, when you have quite done, I shall then state all I am at liberty to state on the subject.”

“Oh! exactly; then I shan’t say another word. The child has been stolen, and your client, the rector, or whatever he is, says I’m to look to him, and refers me to you, so here I am.”

“Is there any particular question you wish to put to me?” asked Mr. Tarlcot.

“Certainly. Being the guardian of the child, I demand its restoration. Where shall I find it?”

“I can’t tell you where the child is to be found, Captain Torquil. But the Reverend Mr. Jenner is differently advised as to your position in relation to that child; and his information is fortified by the copy of the will of the late Mrs. Mildmay, of Queen’s Snedley, Mrs. Jenner’s relative.”

“Your copy can hardly be better than a – a – quiz, sir, if it omits that. But it is perfectly immaterial to me. I know my rights and powers, and once for all, and to save your client the ruinous consequences into which you are about to run him, I demand that the child be replaced in my hands.”

“I have not got it, sir, and I may as well be quite explicit. If that child were in my custody I should not feel warranted in placing it in your hands; and I should decline to do so,” said the old attorney firmly.

“Then you know where it is.”

“I don’t say that, sir.”

“And you refuse to restore or to disclose it,” continued the captain.

The attorney was silent.

“You refuse to give me any information?”

“I don’t say that I have any to give, sir; but if I had I should refuse it,” said Mr. Tarlcot.

The captain stared at him fixedly, with whitening face, and eyes that gleamed for a few moments.

“Very well, sir,” said the captain, with a sudden effort. “Your client adopts the outrage of that servant, and receives and conceals my kidnapped ward. Very good, sir, I suppose you understand your own business. We’ll try that. I’ll open your eyes. You shall hear from me, you may tell your parson.”

“You may possibly hear from us first, sir,” said Mr. Tarlcot, determined not to be bullied.

“What do you mean by that, sir?” asked the captain, in an icy tone, leaning the knuckles of both hands on the desk, and advancing his sharp and pallid features towards the attorney. “It seems to me, sir, that you would not object to my losing my temper and striking you. I’ll not make any such fool of myself. You shan’t get your hand into my pocket for damages. I’ll make short work with your clerical patron. I’ll drive off to that town – what’s its name? – nine miles away, and I’ll get the police here.”

The attorney bowed. He did not wish further to heat his enemy, who had arrived already at the candescent point.

Grasping his hat, stick, and wrapper, which he had laid down on the table, he flung from the room, laughing and grinding his teeth as he passed through the hall; and before the attorney who followed him to do the honours, could overtake him, he had clapped the door with a clang that made the whole house vibrate.

CHAPTER XI

APPROACHING

His chaise had followed him to the steps, and he sprang into it, shut the door himself, pulled up the window, and leaned back. He was not long in collecting his ideas, for the attorney, standing in the middle of his room, saw him let down the front window and call something to the driver, who forthwith got his horses into motion.

Mr. Tarlcot, watching the vehicle as it drove away, observed that it turned the comer, not in the direction of the town he had named, but of the George.

“Forgot something there,” conjectured the lawyer. “Oh! hey? why he may be going on to the vicar’s house, and upon my life there’s no one there but a parcel of women to meet him.”

In haste he put on his hat, and was out on the steps in a moment, and trotted down to the comer, with an anxious face.

There one commands a view across the front of the George inn, and of some houses beyond it, along the margin of the lake, to the vicar’s house.

The elm trees and the two grey piers, capped with stone balls, stained and worn with the rains and suns of two centuries, stood hardly four hundred yards away.

It was with a very uncomfortable sensation that he saw the chaise draw up at the vicar’s house, and Captain Torquil spring out and run up to the hall door.

Mr. Tarlcot was nothing short of very much frightened when he saw this. He was a serious man, and never swore – and the “bless my soul!” with which he witnessed the occurrence very inadequately expressed the intensity of his feeling. The attorney looked this way and that, in his perplexity; and he bethought him of Tom Shackles, whom he saw at that moment striding into the George. So he followed him in, and talked a little with him in the hall.

In the meantime, the vicar’s house had received this sinister visitor.

When he knocked at the door, good Mrs. Jenner was in the scene of her new and delightful interest. The baby was in a sound sleep – Mrs. Jolliffe pronounced it very refreshing – and Mrs. Jenner and Kitty Bell, with their souls in their eyes, smiled down benedictions and thanksgivings in breathless silence upon the little slumberer. When the knock was heard at the hall door, Mrs. Jenner, with a shudder, wondered how anyone could be so brutal as to run such a risk as that of drumming a double-knock just at the hour when it might be supposed the little darling was asleep.

She stole softly out on the lobby, and listened. She heard the stranger inquire for her, and Mall answer that she was at home. She then heard them both go up to the drawing-room and the visitor say “Captain Torquil.”

A sudden faintness overcame Mrs. Jenner for a moment on hearing that dreaded name. But her very terror strung up her energies; and with a light step, and pale face, she entered the nursery, and said—

“Here’s a man come about the baby. Lock the door on the inside, when I go, and keep my precious darling safe.”

“Agoy!” exclaimed Kitty, popping her head out at the nursery door, with round eyes, and round mouth, and good honest round cheeks. “What shall we do wi’ t’ bab, ma’am? We can’t get down wi’t, ’twould begin bledderin’, and he’d be sure to catch it. If I had but the sword that’s in the master’s study, ma’am.”

“Be quiet, Kitty – don’t talk like a mafflin’. Get into the room, and open to no one till I tell you.”

And with these words, Mrs. Jenner assumed her stateliest air; and shaking out her brown silk dress a little, she went downstairs to the drawing-room with as dauntless a demeanour as she could command, and an awful tremor at her heart.

Mrs. Jenner was quite a lady, though something of that stiff school which has quite passed away.

With her a curtsey was no make-believe, but a dignified salutation, during which you might leisurely count four, or walk across the room. She saw a man lightly and elegantly made, and strikingly handsome, though not young.

He turned about from the window, where he stood as she entered, looking across the lake at the mountains that seemed so towering and so near, and made her a grand-seigneur bow, as ceremonious and more graceful than her own old English curtsey.

She was agreeably surprised! There was here something so deferential, so graceful, so engaging.

Captain Torquil introduced himself, and made many apologies for disturbing her. Ladies in the country, who were known to be really kind and charitable, he knew, had hardly ever an hour to themselves.

He was so glad, he said, that this little excursion to look after a foolish runaway servant should have led him back, though only for a moment, to Golden Friars. When he was a boy he had been here for three months, every year, for three years in succession; and had walked over those beautiful mountains again and again; and knew every rivulet and ravine, every curve and hollow, especially of that huge clump of mountains that overhung the lake. He remembered this house so well; that was long before her time. It was a Mr. Drayton, he thought, that had it then. A change very much for the better when Mr. Jenner came.

This he said pointedly.

And particularly he remembered Mrs. Drayton. She was not at all liked down here. Country people are very discriminating; they know a lady. It would be a great pleasure to his poor wife, who was a sad invalid, to hear how her cousin at Golden Friars was. What this delightful air and exquisite scenery can do for people! A paradise that communicates its own immortality. He wished so much he could get his poor wife into some such exquisite panorama, and vivifying atmosphere.

“She’s not old. Still, I need not tell you, a young woman, poor Janet might be almost in her best looks at this moment; and if she had lived in a place like this, she would have been. You and she are contemporaries, I know.”

Good Mrs. Jenner was six years her senior.

“And I find it certainly very hard to believe. My poor wife so often speaks of you. I felt as if I knew you; as if – I hope I was not very impertinent – I had a kind of right, almost, to come in in this unceremonious way. And there is my particular friend, General Donnington – Sir Edward Donnington he is now, you know, and very rich – a great sum, Indian prize-money. Of course you heard. Poor fellow! He never married, and never will, I suppose. He had his romance, and his grief; I know all about that,” said he, very low, looking down on the carpet.

“And he’s another friend who talks to me, more than I need say, about Golden Friars, and our relations there.”

Mrs. Jenner always blushed easily, and she blushed now, looking down with a faint little smile, and a gentle sigh; and she thought what a melancholy music was in Captain Torquil’s voice, and what a charming person he was, and what nice simple tastes and feelings he seemed to have.

“I am thinking of getting away from town life, I’m tired of London. There is nothing on earth, I think, I should so entirely enjoy as living in a place like this – in this very place – living and dying here.”

There was here a pause, as he looked pensively across the lake to the grand background of mountain.

“And,” he continued, “we have had a little responsibility – a very pleasant one – thrown upon us by poor dear Alice Mildmay. You have heard of her death, of course, poor thing. She was fond of my wife, and honoured me with her confidence and good opinion, and consulted me latterly about everything, and her poor little girl, only eighteen months old, she has left in our charge; and it would be so delightful to have it here – close to you – and perhaps, sooner or later, we might induce you to take it altogether under your care. The fact is, my poor wife’s miserable health would quite unfit her, except for a short time, for the anxieties and trouble of such a charge. But it would be a very ungracious thing to refuse, and for a few months, I suppose, we must submit and comply with so solemn a request, until we find – I should be so delighted if it were eventually in this house – a suitable protectress for the poor little thing. At present I have had to follow down here a person whom I wish I could describe as simply foolish – in fact, a particularly wicked and audacious woman, who has stolen the child. I detest having to punish anyone – in fact, if you knew me, you would understand that it is downright torture to me, the bare idea of doing so. But that wicked woman – it is a duty one can’t get over to stop such doings peremptorily; and I’m come all this way, you see, to do that. Her name is Hileria Pullen. Is she in the house?”

“No, certainly,” said Mrs. Jenner, who, as the crisis seemed to approach, flushed very much, and grew plainly very uncomfortable. “I never saw her – she never was in this house.”

“But the little child is; Doctor Jenner says so, and in a better place it could not possibly be,” said Captain Torquil, “nor under more admirable superintendence or kinder care. You’ll kindly allow me, however, to see the child, and assure myself that it is the very child, and all safe, and quite out of the hands of that wicked woman. And, being once assured upon these points, I would ask you kindly to take pity upon me, who have no servant with me capable of taking charge of the infant, and to permit it to remain here, in your kind hands, as much longer as will consist with your convenience and liking.” Here was a polite and plausible speech enough. But what was that in the captain’s dark greedy eye – in his thin lips, and finely-cut pallid features, that affrighted Mrs. Jenner with a sudden sense of treachery and danger!

CHAPTER XII

CAPTAIN TORQUIL
LEAVES THE DRAWING-ROOM

Captain Torquil smiled. The smile was not at all like the smile of theatrical villainy. It was intended to be genial and reassuring. He was handsome, and doing his best; yet the smile inexplicably alarmed Mrs. Jenner.

Certain shadows that had crossed his face immediately before it, had, no doubt, something to do with the sudden eclipse of the celestial Captain Torquil, and the vague revelation of a counterpart more or less infernal.

The captain, I think, saw the unpleasant change in Mrs. Jenner’s mind, and he tried to restore her happier impressions.

“I see, Mrs. Jenner, we are entirely agreed as to the cruelty of punishing people, and the fact is that I should be immensely relieved if you and Mr. Jenner would join in advising me not to put the law in motion against her. Hileria Pullen is one of the most entirely unscrupulous persons on earth. She fancied she had got poor Mrs. Mildmay entirely in her hands. She hated me because she saw that her mistress consulted me. She fancied that I had an influence. Perhaps she was right. But if I had, the will, leaving but a miserable fifty pounds a year to my wife, shows how I used it. The woman was bitterly disappointed at the amount of her own legacy – handsome as it was. Furious with her late mistress, furious with me, furious with my poor wife, enraged at seeing her prey slip through her fingers, she framed a plan to abscond with the child. She’s a woman of profound dissimulation – intensely artful and vindictive, beyond your power to conceive. I don’t care a farthing, of course, what she says of me. It can’t be worse than she has already said, again and again, when it suited her purpose, of her dead mistress and benefactress. I have detected her in so many and such awful untruths, that one word she utters I don’t believe. In consequence of these – which justice to the memory of poor Alice Mildmay compelled me to notice – I told her she should leave our service next morning, and she ran away over night with the infant, which she had with her own ears heard poor Alice Mildmay consign, in the most solemn and passionate terms, to my care. This – and I suppose the usual cloud of slanders – she proposes for her revenge, and a mode of accounting for her abrupt departure, and perhaps ultimately of extorting money from more persons than one.”

As he spoke, the lady, over whom was stealing again a mist of perplexity, raised her eyes quite suddenly, and detected those of Captain Torquil fixed upon her with an expectant look that was cunning and intense; it was triumphant, and shocked her. She returned it unconsciously with a fixed stare of fear.

The fascination of this stare continued for little more than a second. It was dispelled; but an ineffaceable lesson remained.

The lady stood up, and very coldly but pointedly asked—

“With respect to poor Alice Mildmay’s child, be good enough, Captain Torquil, to say exactly what you wish?”

“I want you kindly to direct your servant to bring down the child, so as to enable me to satisfy myself by actual inspection that the child is really here. Will you do so?”

“I will not, sir.”

The captain, beginning to forget his politeness, laughed a short, dangerous laugh.

“And may I ask,” said the captain, his eyes beginning to gleam, and his features to grow sharper and whiter, “your reason for that particularly unsustainable resolution?”

The captain leaned a little forward as he put his question, his fingers clenched on each side upon the brim of his hat, which he held firmly to his waistcoat, while the crown was presented for the inspection of Mrs. Jenner.

He peered in her face with a look of the intensest fury, which trembled under strong momentary restraint, at the very point of explosion.

With the crisis Mrs. Jenner’s courage had come. She was terrified; she was excited; she was resolute.

“I won’t have the child brought down, because you might seize it and take it away. Nothing on earth will induce me to part with it until the law has determined who shall keep it. You shan’t see the child, sir; and be good enough to let your visit end.”

“Have you quite decided, Mrs. Jenner?”

“Quite, sir.”

He bowed with a kind of shrug and a fixed smile, and backed towards the door, at which he made her another bow.

This simple lady made him one of her curtseys, fancying that he was taking his departure, and had her hand upon the bell, when it was arrested by a sound which called her instantly to the lobby.

Captain Torquil was not descending, but mounting the stairs, with long and rapid steps, and as she came out on the lobby he was striding up the second staircase.

As luck would have it, the baby was crying, and the sound too surely conducted him to the nursery door. With a loud scream, the affrighted lady followed.

CHAPTER XIII

“I love thee, I doat on thy features so fine,

I must and will have thee, and force makes thee mine.”

Mrs. Jenner quite forgot her dignity, and actually ran up the stairs after the gentleman who was scaling them.

Had careless Kitty Bell actually locked the door? Was anyone in the nursery except the darling who was bawling? What would that incensed gentleman do when he got in? Would he murder the child outright, or carry it off, swinging by the feet, as the man in the “Promessi Sposi” did the live turkeys?

A thousand dreadful conjectures whirled in the eddy of that moment through her brain, and she shrieked as she ran up—

“Kitty, lock the door; Kitty, lock the door!”

And the baby wailed; and, to her comfort, the women’s voices also were heard from within.

The captain’s hand was on the handle of the door, which he twisted about with a few violent jerks.

It was a clumsy oak door, with a keyhole almost as big as a modern hall door; and Mrs. Jenner almost fainted with sudden relief when she saw that it resisted.

“Open the door,” said Captain Torquil.

“Oh! no, no, no, no,” cried Mrs. Jenner.

The women’s voices were hushed, and in a tone of undisguised fury Captain Torquil cried again—

“Open the door!”

And Mrs. Jenner’s distracted accompaniment of “No, no, oh! no, no, no, no-o-o!” resounded and quivered through staircase, hall, and passage.

The captain struck the door a furious blow with his foot; but it was none of those flimsy defences which fall down before a popgun; but mingled with the ba-a-a-ing of the child came now the frightened whimper of women from within. Captain Torquil recoiled three or four steps, and, with a rush, sprang with his shoulder and side against the door, and – heaven and earth! What is this?

Admirable door this is: heart of oak; solid as the wooden walls of England! Here is a lock and key strong and clumsy as Vulcan himself.

If people hold that locks and keys are necessary to their doors – and what more effectual security against the miscreant on the lobby?-it is worth seeing that the mechanism is in working order. Here the door was right, the key was right, the lock, properly so called, was right; but, alas! the iron socket that receives the bolt, which in rude fashion was there screwed to the doorpost, stripped by the worthy vicar, in an emergency when screws were wanted and not elsewhere at hand, of all its screws but one, yielded to the weight of the captain’s charge, and flew in with ominous clatter among the garrison, and with a tremulous swing, door, key, and lock revolved, and the beseiger, white with rage, strode in through the breach.

Mrs. Jenner, rushing forward with her new-found motherly instincts all alive, screamed wildly; Mrs. Jolliffe, with her palms raised and fingers extended, screamed also. Kitty Bell bawled “By Jen! The deaul take thee,” and dealt the ogre a lusty thump over the head with her shut fist, which made the captain’s small ears sing under the close curls of his black perfumed hair.

Captain Torquil was not accustomed to such handling, and he loosed the hold which Kitty had laid upon his collar with so little ceremony that the heroic girl spun halfway round, and sat involuntarily, with the whole force of her plump person, upon the nurse’s chair of state, from which, for a moment, she gazed bewildered; while Captain Torquil, stooping at the child’s bedside, before any one of the women had recovered the power of action, dived his hands under the infant.

So all seemed over – conclamatum est. In two seconds more the captain would have been running down the vicar’s stairs with his short, vile laugh and the prize in his arms, to spring with it into the chaise, and drive from Golden Friars as fast as the whip of a bribed postboy could speed him.

But it was not to be this time. A powerful chuck at the nape of his neck whisked the captain at this critical moment backward, staggering with a good apparent likelihood of tumbling on the floor.

“Here’s douce wark, clamperin’ through the vicar’s house!” said the stentorian bass of Tom Shackles.

If the captain had thought upon the question of odds at that moment, he would have seen at a glance that Tom was altogether too huge and sinewy to leave him a chance against that modern athlete. But Captain Torquil was for the moment beside himself with anger, and rallying, he struck with all his force at Tom’s face.

The women screamed appeals to heaven at this renewal of the battle, and Tom caught the blow on his open hand; and having a vague idea that the captain was a relation of the family, and therefore to be treated with tenderness, he returned it, not with his formidable knuckles, but with the same open hand he dealt him a slap on the cheek and ear such as is happily seldom heard in a nursery; and the captain staggered against the wall, where he looked for a moment as if he was going to sleep.

“By my sang, my lad, I’ve a mind to gie thee a gud bevellin’,” said Tom; and to the women he said, pointing to the door that opened into an inner room, “take the bairn in there, and shut the door, and don’t stand gapin’ here; ’t may be killed else.”

“Give up that child!” cried Captain Torquil, again staggering forward – a manifestation which although Tom Shackles placed himself between, hurried the movements of the women, who, with the child in a hasty roll of blankets, scurried into the inner room, through the door and shut it.

At the same moment, grinning happily from ear to ear, the bluff face of Dick Wykes, who had come clanking up in shoes of four pound weight apiece to have his share of the mill, entered the nursery.

“Is thee him?” Dick inquired. “Hoot, man! Lap up! I thout there wor fower o’ ye. Why, I’d thraa thee out o’ t’ window wi’ yan hand!” said this smiling intruder, of whose speech Captain Torquil understood nothing but the good-humoured contempt expressed in his face and demeanour.

He eyed the two Herculean fellows over. Even in his then state of mind he saw the folly of any attempt to cope with their united strength.

Mrs. Jenner stood staring wildly from the lobby on the strange scene which had for a minute or so profaned the homely roof of the vicarage. The captain looked from one Titan to the other, and collected enough sense not to make a fool of himself by fighting. He was quivering with passion nevertheless.

“You have taken the child; you’ve assaulted me, you-hoo-oo scoundrel! As I hope for heaven, I’ll make every one of you suffer! I’ll have the police here in half an hour.”

He ran downstairs; he roared a curse or two at the postboy, and jumped into the chaise, and sat for a few seconds bewildered, looking first out at one window and then out at the other; and then, seeing that some idlers had collected about the vicar’s door, perceiving that something odd was occurring within, he lowered the front window, and bawled to the driver—

“You go – you drive – ha, ha! – drive towards the place you came from.”

And he pulled up the window, and leaned back, and stared wickedly in the faces of the people who were looking there. And Captain Torquil sped away, leaving wild and sinister impressions of himself, and no material memento of his visit except a piece of wrenched iron and his hat on the nursery floor.

Captain Torquil drove away at a great pace – it was to be supposed, in hot haste to accomplish some scheme. Of course, a man with his ear tingling from a blow, and with such a case as regarded the child, and in the state of intense exasperation in which he was, and with his hat impounded in the vicar’s nursery, could hardly have gone away with threats so fierce against all parties without very resolute intentions.

But when the vicar returned after sunset to his hysterical household, the captain had not reappeared.

The vicar, like a wise governor, took prompt measures in this state of affairs. He sealed up Captain Torquil’s hat in a bandbox, lest there should be litigation with respect to that property. He caused Tom Shackles to make a note of the captain’s sayings and doings. He locked up the twisted iron which attested his violence, and he retained Tom as a garrison, keeping up through the night a sharp lookout in the moonlight, lest the enemy should return and attempt a surprise.

But that night passed over quietly. And the next day came and went without tidings of or from the captain, and a week or more, without even a letter from a London attorney.

CHAPTER XIV

AGITATIONS

There came an odd letter from Mrs. Torquil, to her cousin Mrs. Jenner.

It dwelt in an affectionate strain upon old recollections, and deplored the unhappy occurrences in which the name of her dear cousin at Golden Friars was involved, and which had placed her own dear husband in an attitude of, she feared, very determined antagonism to hers.

Her husband could not in the least conceive what motive actuated Mr. Jenner in sanctioning the conduct of that flagitious servant, Hileria Pullen, and in disputing his (Captain Torquil’s) right to the custody of the child. That right does not rest upon the language of the will, but upon the earnest entreaty of poor Alice, conveyed, not in conversation only, but in repeated letters of a conclusive and unmistakeable kind. These, of course, would be put in evidence at the proper time. To her, nothing could have occurred more painful than that their husbands should stand mutually in such relations, especially as it had been her cherished hope and project to come down to Golden Friars, and to make it their headquarters; and so coon as the dear child had been with them a sufficient time to satisfy the solemn promises under which they were both bound to poor Alice, to endeavour to induce her (Mrs. Jenner) to undertake the care of the dear infant, which she felt would severely task her own strength.

All this, to her inexpressible grief, had been frustrated by the wickedness of one artful servant. Her husband was supported by a wealthy relation in the expensive – and, to Mr. Jenner she feared, the ruinous – litigation into which they were about to plunge. Her husband, Captain Torquil, was very angry; and all she implored of her dear cousin was charitably to dissociate her from the oppressive litigation which the captain was about to direct against the Reverend Hugh Jenner. She hoped to hear from her to say that she would view these miserable proceedings in the same charitable way.

This letter, somehow, produced an unpleasant effect even upon the vicar. It was so very plausible – even so alarming. He went down with it in his pocket to Mr. Tarlcot, who, with the suspicion of his craft, treated it simply as a piece of cajolery and brag – the concoction of a cunning terrorist.

“It never was she who wrote that letter, Mr. Jenner. It’s not a lady’s letter. That letter, sir, was written by Captain Torquil, and copied by his wife; and it satisfies me that he has no notion of going on; he has not means for such a thing. I happen to know of an execution against him for four hundred and eighteen pounds. He’s in no position to throw away money; and he knew all along he had not a leg to stand on. Suppose we go down and ask Mrs. Pullen what she thinks of it?”

“But – but – don’t you see, we really know nothing about this Mrs. Pullen,” said the vicar.

“Don’t be influenced by that letter, my dear sir. That woman is as straight as an arrow. I wish I had such a witness in Hazel and Wrangham. She’s as honest as the sun.”

“You understand such people better than I. I confess I thought her a most respectable person; and I’m quite sure it was this letter that made me hesitate. Let us go to the George and see her.”

Mrs. Pullen was a great deal better, and sitting up, and about to set out on her travels next day.

“Well, Mrs. Pullen, what do you think of that letter?” inquired the attorney, so soon as the vicar, having read it aloud, replaced it in his pocket. “Mrs. Torquil must like writing letters, else she’d hardly write so long a one.”

“Bless you, sir,” said Hileria Pullen disdainfully, “the poor lady has never wrote a line of that letter. Allow me to see, sir, please, whether it is even in her handwriting. Well, yes, I know her writing,” she resumed after inspection. “I think it is. But that was wrote for her – every word. She daren’t write a line of any such thing of her own will – she dursn’t – oh, no, no!” And she shook her head slowly with a melancholy scorn. “Why, sir, she never writes a line if she can help it; and that she dursn’t write. Why, if you knewed, sir, she’d as ready put her hand in the fire as write a line of that, without she was, I may say, ordered to do it by master.”

So the attorney looked and nodded gravely to the vicar, who said, returning his nod—

“Yes, I dare say you are right.”

And the vicar walked away with a sense of relief – very delightful relief – in thinking that he was in no serious danger of being involved in the tremendous eddy of litigation.

Even Tom Shackles had suffered mentally under apprehensions of a similar sort, being a responsible man, and clerk of Golden Friars, and conscious of that box on the ear which he had dealt the desperate captain.

Kitty Bell, too, had given him what she called a bang on his black, curly pate, and cried serious tears at the chaff with which Dick Wykes threatened her with transportation for “walin’” a soger.

The relief was therefore general when, a fortnight having passed, nothing had occurred to corroborate the captain’s threats uttered when, in Kitty Bell’s phrase, “he banged out o’ t’ dure, and we saa na meyar on him.”

But these holloaing folk were not quite out of the wood yet, for, like a brief, stern clap of thunder, that made his ears ring, there came an attorney’s letter from a firm in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, to the vicar, demanding to be put in communication with his “solicitor.”

Still Mr. Tarlcot was sceptical. He communicated, and so did the vicar by return.

CHAPTER XV

LAURA MILDMAY

So the field was clear, and battle coming.

Here was the peace of tranquil Golden Friars broken, and the world again by the ears, all by the supreme influence and waywardness of women; old Hileria Pullen’s wild escapade,” and good Mrs. Jenner’s fancy for adopting other people’s progeny; the baby itself being of the same unlucky sex.

But notwithstanding these alarms, the sceptical attorney of Golden Friars was right – nothing followed.

With the great and distant metropolis was, indeed, thus spun the one fine thread of interest that connected it with the isolation of Golden Friars, and henceforward any bit of news respecting the movements of Captain Torquil was discussed with good appetite in the drawing-room and nursery of the vicar’s house, in the snuggery of Tom Shackles, in the humble dwelling of jolly Dick Wykes, and in the office of shrewd old Tarlcot from whose London correspondents, who had themselves had some unpleasant dealings with the captain, these little bits of news were derived.

I am making a little chronicle, and shall jot down all I ever heard of this captain, while in due chronological order noting, also, such occurrences as illustrate Golden Friars during the brief period of my story.

In the first place, then, without any show of opposition, the good vicar was appointed to take care of this little ward of Chancery, by the decree of that High Court. And now, cedant arma togoe. The vicar might snap his fingers at the captain.

He was, like some others I have heard of, a married gentleman, who, without pretending to be single, lives like a bachelor, and puts his incumbrance quite out of view, like a by-gone indiscretion and sin of his youth.

He was an Eton man, a member of good clubs, and had started well enough. His patrimony was gone, but he did not trouble anyone with maunderings about that misfortune, and nobody ever asked after it. He paid his debts of honour lightly, and was one of the best dressed men about town. He lived, I dare say, on his luck and skill.

I don’t know exactly what it was, but Torquil grew to be not quite so well liked, and some men were a little shy of him, and his temper at Guildford was tremendous.

The fact is that Captain Torquil was fast caught in that vice, the winch of which is twisted tighter and tighter hourly, and whose metallic bite whitens with hell-fire. He was in the torture of debt, and, worse, of the frightful shifts into which that agony drives some minds.

He was in that selfish agony, quivering on the edge of despair, with just one devil’s throw for it; and he threw, as we know, and lost it.

And now, in the dust and crash of a hideous ruin, Captain Torquil had vanished. After a time he turned up in Spain, where two royal pretenders were at that time campaigning and enlisting free lances.

Then Captain Torquil was wounded; a very bad wound, for it knocked his eye out.

“He was, as you know, such a handsome fellow,” said the writer of the letter, “and now you never beheld such an object. A glass eye the doctor says he can’t use, and I assure you it is a perfect chasm. I suppose they will stick a patch or something over it, but, so far as appearance goes, he is done for.”

Shortly after came a letter to the vicar, saying that Captain Torquil’s friends were, in his present forlorn state, making up a little purse for him, and trusted that, being connected with his family, he would be so good as to contribute something. The good vicar sent five pounds, and Mr. Tarlcot said that a fool and his money are soon parted.

Then it was stated that a legacy had been left him by an aunt of his, but no one seemed to know how much.

About five years after that, a letter reached the vicar’s wife from Mrs. Torquil; not very long, but extremely plaintive, in which occurred this passage: “Since the death of my unhappy husband, Captain Torquil, I have suffered much distress of mind and body, if you thought your good husband who was so kind to mine, could,” &c. &c.

And so it appeared, that with that fierce and selfish spirit, “life’s fitful fever” was over.

Poor Mrs. Torquil, not very long after, embraced the Roman Catholic faith, and was received into a charitable institution. This event was, perhaps, the saving of her life, for she could now no longer procure alcohol.

Years had now passed, and the delights of good Mrs. Jenner’s vicarious maternity seemed always increasing.

How had this little child – so windered, as Kitty Bell had said, with the “blea’”, or, in more familiar phrase, the pale, livid complexion, the suspected gloo, or squint, and whose little figure was held, by the same authority, to be all a-cracked, or, as we say, crooked – how had this poor misthriven, blasted flower lived through this time? and what did it look like now?

“Well,” said Kitty Bell, now, after the flight of eighteen years, a little less light of foot, with streaks of grey in her brown hair, and lines traced deep enough across her once smooth forehead, and others etched about her kindly eyes – “well, who’d a thought the night she came here, when I held the can’le by her poor little pined face – an ill-favvert bab it was; poisoned, the doctor said – ’twould ever a chirp’d up sooa? The weeny thing we used to see snoozlin’ in the weeny bed – lookin’ just like as if it was going to dee – who’d a thought ’twould ever a spired up and stiffened like that? She’s t’ bonniest and t’ canniest lass that ever set foot in Golden Friars – and the kindest.”

She was now a beautiful girl, lithe and slender, with rich brown hair, and large, long-lashed eyes of blue, and lips so crimson, and cheeks so clear, and such a pretty oval formed her face, that Laura Mildmay was really one of the prettiest creatures that ever lover dreamed of.

A little shy – with something wild and fiery in those dark eyes, proud and often sad, and sometimes merry – if you had seen her walking those mountain paths with a step like the deer’s, you might have taken her for the genius of those beautiful solitudes. I am going to tell you something of this young lady, who has risen from her temporary death to this beautiful shape, to be the late-found heroine of this little tale.

CHAPTER XVI

SUITORS APPEAR

It is not to be supposed that a heroine like Laura Mildmay, even in this sublime solitude, was quite without adorers.

There were no doubt many who, for obvious reasons, never told their love. But two there were who in their different degrees were quite eligible; and in watching the movements of these rivals, good Mrs. Jenner discovered a new delight, and a perfectly novel exercise of the maternal instinct.

What good woman is there without that sort of active benevolence which the coarse world calls matchmaking? I put the question to any good lady with enough experience to answer it – is not the fact so with regard to her neighbours? And as regards herself, I inquire, is there any other construction of castles in the air so entirely absorbing, preposterous, and enchanting?

Allow me to tell in half a dozen lines something of the situation and the persons. I could easily make a volume of them, for they talked and felt, and had features and clothes, and there was a good deal of love, and some jealousy. And good Mrs. Jenner saw both sides of the question, on each of which much was to be said; and being of a nature that overflowed, with compassion, her heart bled alternately for each, as the fortune of war favoured this or that pretender. Her romance was with the younger man, but the elder paid her more court, and had other points in his favour.

Among the persons who prayed every Sunday in the variegated light of the stained glass eastern windows of the church at Golden Friars, and listened to – or at least heard – Doctor Jenner’s sermons, were to be seen middle-aged Sir John Mardykes and young Mr. Charles Shirley.

Sir John is a bachelor of some fifty years. There is nothing hideous about him. His height hardly attains the average of mankind, and his figure is gently oval, being plump, and the effect assisted by a cutaway coat; the outline is of the pear or peg-top form. His face is plump and oblong. He is not yet grey, and curls his small whiskers with great punctuality. His hair is close and smooth, and at top decidedly thin. He carries himself very erect, and if not elegant, is at least dapper. He is grave, but very polite to ladies, and not being quick at the interpretation of puzzles, jokes, and the like deep sayings, he is reserved, not to say suspicious, in general society, and a man of few words, as well as of few ideas.

Sir John’s place, about five miles away upon the lake, is beautiful, and his rental is five thousand a year, and something more; and his ancestors can be traced about the same covers and sheepwalks for five hundred years and upwards.

Sir John’s father is buried in the church, which is within ten minutes’ walk of his gate. His state pew is there, and the walls are eloquent with the virtues and dignities of his ancestors. But he drives away four miles and attends the church at Golden Friars every Sunday.

Charles Shirley is quite a young fellow, not five-and-twenty, certainly handsome, tall and lithe, very good-natured, very merry, and with always a great deal to say for himself. The Shirleys are just as old a family as the Mardykes, but the young man’s rental is but a quarter of the worthy baronet’s.

The young lady was, on a moderate scale, an heiress. During her minority her revenues had improved, and had now reached more than a thousand a year. The great estates of her family had, however, passed in the male line to a remote kinsman.

Stated in a gross, commercial way, the facts and figures are thus:

Miss Laura Mildmay – annual value, £1,300.

Sir John Mardykes – annual value, £5,600.

Charles Shirley – annual value, £1,400.

The young lady was still a ward of Chancery. Doctor Jenner was not sure that the sort of flirtation that was attempted might not be of the nature of a contempt. The lady, he assumed, still walked the beautiful paths of this grand solitude in maiden meditation fancy free, and he insisted on holding the suitors, during her minority, at arm’s length.

The minority had now so nearly expired, that the vicar, who was punctual and orderly in all things, directed his London attorney (for our serious friend, Luke Tarlcot, was by this time sleeping soundly in Golden Friars churchyard, with a mural tablet over the family pew, containing a very handsome certificate of his virtues, the feelings of his sorrowing friends, and his own general importance) to take the best opinion procurable upon certain queries which he thought the will of her deceased mother, Mrs. Mildmay of Queen’s Snedley, suggested. He also asked him to request Mrs. Torquil’s attorney to submit a case on her behalf to counsel, as there was no doubt that she was by the will to succeed absolutely to the property in the event of Laura Mildmay dying unmarried before the age of thirty.

Mrs. Torquil, of whose being still alive the vicar had some doubts, years having passed without any sign from her, turned out to be alive, and a great deal better and more active than she had been twenty years before, and she seemed to have a very keen sense indeed of the value of her reversion.

“It is proper,” he wrote to Mrs. Torquil’s attorney, “that all these points should be clearly ascertained as promptly as may be, as I am satisfied that on Miss Mildmay’s coming of age, which will be in eleven weeks from this time, she will receive more than one eligible proposal of marriage.”

“Now,” said he to Mrs. Jenner, holding one of the rather cunning letters of Mrs. Torquil’s attorney by the comer, as he stood at the window where he had been reading it, “I see the Jesuit in all these letters. That poor woman no more inspires them than I do. She has got herself into their hands, and they want her money for a college or a mission; and do you recollect the smooth-faced man with the spectacles, and the oddly-made coat, and the collar, you know, who came down here by way of looking at the scenery? I pointed him out to you. That gentleman came down, depend upon it, to make enquiries, and ascertain exactly what we were all about. Well were it for our church if we had one-half their activity.”

All things contrary, one against the other. There was a counterpoise here; for the ecclesiastical invasion alluded to was more than compensated for by a visit promised in a letter from his admirable friend the Dean of Crutchley Abbey.

“I have made acquaintance with a charming person, a Mr. Burton, an enthusiastic church extensionist. He is about visiting the northern counties, and goes furnished with introductions. If you have any movement of that kind on foot just now, I think you will find him able and willing to give you a lift. I showed him the ground plan and elevations of our little building at Crutchley Abbey, and he instantly subscribed. He would have put himself down for fifty pounds if we had not limited our subscription, as I told you. As he is going northward, and loves the picturesque, I recommended him to visit your beautiful town, which he very likely will in a few days; and I ventured to give him a line of introduction to you, as one who could tell him where to find all that is curious and beautiful about Golden Friars.”

The vicar had his secret misgivings, and his wife her private hopes that the visitor might prove a new suitor to Laura. Upon this point suspense was soon ended.

CHAPTER XVII

MR. BURTON

Mr. Burton arrived at night at the George, where he put up. He saw his landlord, and intimated his particular likings and dislikings. Also it came out that he meant to stay a few days – possibly weeks – under his comfortable roof. He inquired about the vicar, to whom he had a letter, and heard that he was well, but that Mrs. Jenner had sprained her ankle the other day in a foolish scramble among the mountains.

Mr. Burton had no servant with him, but the nature and magnificence of his correspondence more than made up for this. He had sat up writing till past eleven, and the letters which he sent down in the morning for the little post-office struck honest Mr. Turnbull with very great respect. There was one to a Sir Somebody Something, Bart.; there were two to noble lords – peers of the realm; and there was one, big enough to require two stamps, to his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury.

At the same time, no person could be more modest in his demeanour, and in all respects less a troublesome inmate than Mr. Burton.

He was affable, even chatty, with his host, who could not fail to perceive in a little time that Mr. Burton was a man in whose mind religion, though never obtruded, was always present.

He felt a very great respect, under all the circumstances, for Mr. Burton.

Shortly after breakfast, the stranger made an early call at the vicar’s, being anxious to find him at home. It was a beautiful summer morning, and he stood on the vicar’s steps, smiling at the noble mountains on the other side of the lake, as if they had been beloved and long-lost friends.

Mr. Burton was announced. It was a venerable man who entered the vicar’s study, rather tall – not infirm – bald, but not very bald, and with the finest silken white hair, rather long, and a ruddy complexion and a smiling countenance, and a manner very gracious and urbane.

The vicar received him as a hospitable man of God should. They chatted very agreeably on all manner of subjects. The stranger seemed much interested about the state of religion in the region with which the vicar was best acquainted, and asked leave to make a note or two of some facts which he told him.

They then went out, and saw the town and the church, about which Mr. Burton, to the great delight of the vicar, became quite enthusiastic.

“It is quite a gem, a treasure, this little church. To think that we should not have known a word about it in London! You are quite right, though; your predecessors have obscured, and even injured, some parts of the building. Do you know Lord Complines?”

No, the vicar had not that honour.

“Oh! Then I must write to him myself. He’s one of us. We are a little society of some fifteen people, and in the way of restoration and that sort of thing we have been doing, you’d say, a good deal. I’ll write to him tonight, and tell him all about it; and when I get back to town, if you entirely approve, we’ll get an architect to run down and look at it; and I can answer for it, if you’ll give us leave, and aid us with advice and direction, it shall be one of the very earliest things we undertake.”

The vicar was charmed with his new friend, and soon Miss Mildmay was equally pleased. This old man was so accomplished, and was, in a very pleasant way, able to interest and instruct her so very much, by new lights and curious facts and anecdotes, on the subjects she liked best, that if he had been only some thirty years younger, I think Charles Shirley and Sir John Mardykes would have suspended their mutual jealousies, and turned their united animosities upon the fortunate Mr. Burton.

The old gentleman did not care very much for dining out, but very often he dropped in to tea. Here Charles Shirley, who lived hardly two miles away from the town, very often made one of the party.

Bitter was the chagrin with which this, among other advantages attendant on the young man’s proximity to Golden Friars, inspired the sensitive baronet, who lived in Mardyke Hall, four miles away, and could not, without exciting undue observation, be at all as perpetually as he liked in the purlieus of Golden Friars.

It was rather hard that Mr. Burton, the quietest of mortals, here in the seclusion of his “Happy Valley,” should be involved indirectly, but very uncomfortably, in a sort of quarrel.

Mr. Burton was in church on Sunday, a pattern of attention, solemnity, and benignity, to all good church-goers.

From the Mardykes’ pew, the clear and solemn accents of this venerable man, whom Sir John politely harbours, with himself, in that sanctuary, as it were dominates the responses which the clerk leads. The solemn and silvery tones were distinguishable in every nook of the church; and, indeed, from most parts of it was visible the reverend white head of that tall worshipper.

In the town, so far as he was known, he was highly esteemed. He had already made out two or three cases of poverty and suffering, which, after due inquiry, he unostentatiously relieved. It was his principle that a wayfarer, like himself, should become a citizen, in all points, during the time of his sojourn; he thus took care, that while enjoying his holiday, he did not divest himself of the charitable offices of a Christian, nor wrong the place of his temporary abode of the advantage of an inhabitant. In all matters of duty he was a little severe with himself.

He took Mr. Turnbull, of the George and Dragon, into council, and talked over many things with him that concerned the town, and made notes of the information he obtained.

“I like the town, I like the people,” he would say; “and before I take my leave, I should like to do it and you a service. You are not to talk about what I say – it is between you and me; but you want a little money down here. For instance – it’s a trifle, but still, to the ‘George’ it is something – the little jetty and the three boats that, I am told, were at the service of the inn in old times, have disappeared, the boats altogether, and the jetty nothing but the piles left. Well, that’s a pity. The town paid two-thirds of the cost, while it was a borough, and the George and Dragon one-third, in old times. But that arrangement is over and gone, and your inn has neither boats nor jetty. Now, six or seven hundred pounds would restore all that, and I’ll see that the money is forthcoming. Before I leave this, I’ll have people down here to look after it, and we’ll make the boats the property of the inn; do you understand, for the use of the innkeeper for the time being. I’m so placed with relation to some people of influence, and with so handsome a fund to act with, that I can undertake for that and a great deal more. I’m charmed with your town. I haven’t seen so pretty a thing in England, and I have only to make the proper representations to have things undertaken here, and an outlay of some six thousand pounds in improving the beauty and convenience of the place. We have been doing wonders elsewhere, and I like this better than any place I have visited. You need not mind telling the people here, you know, that anything of the kind is intended.”

But in spite of all his cautions, honest Mr. Turnbull could not keep all this quite to himself, and Mr. Burton began to be looked at across the street, and even in church, with more reverence than was awarded to common mortals.

Dr. Lincote especially admired him. He had paid that physician a visit about the projected dispensary, asked many questions, and finally put down his name for two hundred pounds, which he would be happy to pay when the right time came. A letter would always reach him under cover to his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, wherever he might be, which would not be very distant, and he might reckon upon his cheque within a week after.

“He’s in correspondence with the Archbishop, I know that from old Turnbull,” swore Doctor Lincote, “and with half the swells in England; I tell you it was not the worst thing that ever happened for Golden Friars, Mr. Burton’s coming down here; and I think you’ll find he won’t stop at the Dispensary!”

On this particular Sunday Mr. Burton was as devout as usual in Sir John Mardyke’s pew. Devout enough for both, the worthy baronet seemed to think, for his eyes and thoughts were engaged very agreeably by a graceful figure in the vicar’s pew across the aisle.

After church he walked up to the vicar’s with Sir John Mardykes and beautiful Miss Laura Mildmay. On the other side walked Charles Shirley. Two rivals for supporters. The baronet looked very sulky. Did not pretty Miss Laura incline more to the younger man? Heaven send there be not a bloody hand, in earnest, in the matter!

After luncheon, Miss Mildmay went up to sit with good Mrs. Jenner. Mr. Burton and the vicar fell into talk; and the baronet and Charles Shirley, having nothing to say to one another, said good-bye to their host and departed.

When Mr. Burton, a little after, had taken his leave of the vicar, a gloom came over him, and he walked silently by the shore, not of the far-resounding deep, but of the stirless lake, in which were reflected the sky and mountains.

I can understand the strange sense of relief with which an old traveller, into whose pleasant book I lately happened to look, exclaims, on losing sight of the Alps, “Thank heaven, I have at length quite escaped from these terrible mountains!”

Very distant mountains convey no idea of the sombre fascination and awe of mountain scenery. You are barred and ribbed in by huge purple ramparts, furrowed by ravines, swelling into rocky curves, or sinking into deep murky shadow. The steep and solitary ascent mounts upward and upward still, until fainter as it soars, its summits plae into shadows, or show their white pinnacles sheeted in snow faintly against the sky.

Here, at Golden Friars, on a more contracted scale, the same influence is felt. This pretty village of many gables and steep roofs, clumped round with noble trees, among which rises eminent the grey church tower, standing at the margin of the lake, and overtopped nearly on every side by mountains near and high, has an air of solitude that is overpowering.

Those impressions, of course, lose something of their force by habit. But I have never stayed there long enough to impair them; and although the people are not wanting in cheerfulness, there is, it always seemed to me, a spirit of quietude and solemnity over the people themselves.

For me, this place has always had the glory of a paradise, but with a sense of imprisonment also. I have looked round with the thrill and elevation that brings tears to the eyes, and yet with a heart oppressed with a strange gloom. The forms and habitations of man seem to dwindle to nothing in such an amphitheatre, and looking up its huge and solitary sides, the imagination stills and quails.

Was it the effect of the scenery, or was it the shadow of a coming annoyance? Mr. Burton sat down in what seemed unusual gloom upon the trunk of a fallen tree, and leaning his chin upon his hand, looked across the lake with a darkened countenance, not like that ever cheerful benevolence which charmed the little circle of Golden Friars.

CHAPTER XVIII

MR. BURTON IN DESHABILLE

It was some hours later, and a fine moonlight night. The afternoon service was long over, and what cause on earth could have induced Sir John Mardykes to mount his taxcart, and drive at the best pace of his famous trotter, Flying Dutchman, who won the wager on the Brighton road, back again at this hour all the way from Mardykes Hall to Golden Friars?

Sir John was glowering and sniffing and purpling in the moonlight; such was his resentment as he flew along the beautiful road that winds by the margin of the lake.

A letter had reached him late that evening. It had come with others, and his servant had brought it from the neighbouring post-office.

It was written in a vulgar hand and ill-spelled, and the story it told was this: That Charles Shirley had amused Miss Laura Mildmay less than a week before by telling her how he (Sir John) dyed his whiskers, and twisted in curl-papers so much hair as Time had left him; how his insteps were entirely composed of cotton wadding, his feet being “as flat as flounders”; how his shoulders were formed of the same material, nature having denied him any; how he was known to rouge at the race and hunt balls, and practised dancing with old Mrs. Hinchley, his housekeeper, in a deserted garret at Mardykes Hall, with a great deal more that was ridiculous and insulting; and how all this was said in presence of Mr. Burton, who could not deny it.

A two-pint pot, although it may hold many quarts of beer in succession, cannot hold more than one quart at a time. The measure of the capacity of Sir John Mardykes’ head was represented by one idea. That it could hold – but not a second, without displacing the first.

Sir John was too full of his one subject to think of artificial proprieties – to think of anything else, in fact.

Up the stairs of the George he trotted, hot and serious, and, with the ceremony of a knock, but without waiting for an answer, he opened Mr. Burton’s door and walked in, saying—

“How d’ye do, Mr. Burton – how do you do, sir? I – oh!”

Sir John stopped short in the middle of the room.

It was Mr. Burton’s habit to lock his door when he came up for the evening. He could have sworn he had done so on this occasion. But Homer nods – and Mr. Burton had palpably neglected to turn his key as usual in his door.

He was sitting with his dressing-gown on, in an easy-chair, with a bottle of brandy and some water, and a glass before him; a half-smoked cigar smouldered between his fingers, and a pair of candles burned on his table. But Sir John was a good deal startled.

Mr. Burton’s teeth were gone, and his left eye was out, and a deep ugly hole was in the place of that organ. He had screwed his mouth into a grim grimace, and his face looked ever so broad, and ever so short.

His whole face was crimson with the fire of brandy, not brandy-and-water, for the aroma was fiercer than even moderate dilution would account for. His lips were pursed and working, as they will over toothless gums. The blank eye puzzled the baronet, and the other pierced him with a gleam of fire.

On the dressing-table close by were two tumblers of water, in one of which were Mr. Burton’s teeth, and in the other his glass eye.

The loss of these unsuspected auxiliaries made a very disconcerting change in Mr. Burton’s appearance – a transformation, indeed, that absolutely astounded Sir John Mardykes; and perhaps the discovery a little abashed and irritated the stranger, who, still staring hard at the baronet, rose, and both remained for some seconds silent.

“I’m afraid I’ve somehow put my foot in it, sir,” said Sir John bluntly; “I’m awfully sorry, Mr. Burton, that I should have interrupted you.”

“You have interrupted nothing, sir. I don’t know what you mean. I intend, if you allow me, to go on with my cigar; and my doctor tells me I must sip a little brandy-and-water. Will you try a cigar? or will you take a little brandy-and-water? or may I tell them to bring a little sherry and a biscuit?”

Was it fancy, or was it the loss of Mr. Burton’s teeth? It seemed to the baronet that that excellent man was speaking ever so little thickly.

“You’re very good, but – no, thank you very much, nothing. I came – I was very anxious – to say a few words; but I’m afraid I’m rather in your way; am I?”

“Dear me, Sir John, not in the least. I hope I should be found always ready to confess any infirmity; but personal infirmities I can’t conceive anyone’s being ashamed of. For the sake of articulation I use those things over there, and to prevent my being quite shocking to my friends, I use the glass eye. I lost my eye in a trifling accident in a railway carriage, on my way to our great and interesting meeting about the Jewish mission. Looking out of the window, a particle of iron, hardly so large as the point of a pin, flew into my eye. I neglected it, an ulcer formed, the cornea was perforated, and – and the thing was done. It is a comfort, Sir John, we know that everything is ordered, and all for the best, for those who rest their hopes where alone is safety, and peace, and happiness. Won’t you sit? (he placed a chair for his visitor), and can I be useful in any way?”

Mr. Burton, who had been fidgeting about the room, had by this time got to the door.

“You don’t object, Sir John, to my making this a little more – more—” and he bolted the door. “I usually do. I don’t care to be surprised in my – ha! ha! ha! – déshabille by the waiters and people of the house.”

“You’re very good, sir – very kind. I shan’t detain you long. I – this thing reached me, Mr. Burton, and I don’t mind it – not much – but I thought I might as well show it to you.”

And he handed him the letter from “Felix Friendly,” and Mr. Burton took it, and using his spectacles like an eyeglass, applied a lens to his extant eye, and read the paper through, his lips pursing and working as he did so, and Sir John watching these indications from the seat of vision. The living eye was turned away from him, and nothing but the sunken crater to speculate upon.

When he had finished the letter, lowering the hand which held it to the table with a little emphasis, and directing a vivid glance which showed a good deal of the white eyeball across the bridge of his nose, upon Sir John, he said, a little sternly—

“And who the – who on earth can this person be, who takes the liberty of mixing my name up in a local affair of this nature? But no, I shan’t allow myself to be ruffled by it. Naturally a hot-tempered man, Sir John, I am thankful that I have learned to watch over and to resist my impulses.”

He returned the letter with a slight bow. Sir John took it, but did not put it up.

“But, Mr. Burton, you know, sir – don’t you see? I can’t let it rest so. I came here, sir, in consequence of it. I came to ask, is it so? I want to know, Mr. Burton, whether the letter says fact or no?”

Sir John was excited, red, and a little confused; but still his one idea filled his head with great stolidity.

“Sir John, you are a man of the world, too sensitive of ridicule, and if you will, contempt. Why not imitate me? My personal infirmities, wherever discovered, have been laughed at. It has troubled me little, my thoughts are elsewhere. Your view is directed too much upon the level of earth. Why not, Sir John, look a little more on and up – on and up?”

“But, a – aw, that’s all very well about a fellow’s religion, or his soul; but this, don’t you see, is about my person; and, zounds – I beg you pardon, but really, it is, you know, a sort of thing a fellow can’t afford to – to – to – and, in short, I have a right to know—”

“Dear me! how unfortunate! Don’t you see, my dear Sir John, how likely such a thing is to produce ill-feeling? Why should you ask me?”

“Why – whaw – haw – aw – eh, don’t you see? Because – you happen to know, and I don’t see why you should be ashamed or afraid to say the truth.”

“The truth? Ha, yes, you have me there, Sir John. Aye, you have. Dear, dear, dear! I do so wish I had my dear friend Marvel here, he always takes so clear, simple, and decided a view of duty. He is such a guide; but I think I know what he would say. He’d say, as he always does, ‘Truth first, consequences afterward’; especially where, as here, worse consequences would probably follow upon silence. But – oh, shame that such things should be!”

“Whaw-aw – what things?” demanded the baronet.

“Anonymous informers – spies – traitors. Sir, you must kindly promise that you will not mention my name, should you ever speak upon this subject to anyone.”

“Certainly not, Mr. Burton – not the least occasion. But is that – that tissue” – and he knocked the back of his disengaged fingers upon the letter, with a reddening face – “that – that, is it true, sir – is it true, Mr. Burton?”

“Well, Sir John, as you put it to me that way – and most distressing it is – I’ll tell you. It is true – the statement is true, but it was most unjustifiable, and it must have come from some extremely low person; and great allowances are to be made for a young man so much in love and so much alarmed at rivalry, and so anxious to enlist the young lady’s feeling of elegance and sense of ridicule in his favour. They all do it. Pray, let there be no more said about it.”

The baronet was staring at him with very goggle eyes and a purpling face, and before he could speak, seemed to swallow down a big bit of hot bread.

He cleared his voice, and said—

“Thank you, thank you very much. It’s all plain sailing now.”

“And it is a foolish affair,” said Mr. Burton. “You’ll not think of it – I may tell him so?”

“You may tell him, with my compliments, he’s a blackguard and a liar!”

“Sir!”

“That is, of course, I mean anyone may tell him, and I shall be very much obliged.”

“But, dear Sir John Mardykes, surely you’ll modify these dreadful terms, which include everything? You will withdraw them, I am very sure?” pleaded Mr. Burton.

“I think he’s all that, sir. Mr. Burton, I hold to it! and I think he’s a coward, sir, beside – a nasty dog, sir – a sneak and a coward, Mr. Burton, and – and I shouldn’t the least wonder if he had prejudiced me.”

“Oh, you’ll sleep on it, Sir John. Do you stay here?”

“No, sir; I’m going home.”

“You’ll look in at the vicar’s house?”

“Straight home – certainly not. I’m going home, sir. I – I – know what I think. Good night, Mr. Burton,” he added, stopping suddenly at the door – he had nearly omitted that courtesy. “I may have a talk with the vicar tomorrow – a shabby scoundrel! I’m off, Mr. Burton. Good night, sir.”

“And you kindly don’t mention my name, Sir John?”

“Certainly not. Farewell, Mr. Burton.”

“Heaven bless you!” said Mr. Burton, very kindly. And bolting his door again, he swallowed what remained of the brandy he had been sipping, and looked from his window and saw the baronet drive away at a very hard pace back again towards Mardykes.

CHAPTER XIX

MR. BURTON MEDIATES

In five minutes more, good Mr. Burton having quite recovered his eye and his teeth, and looking very much as usual, only a little more florid, was walking in the moonlight by the margin of the lake, smiling in a luxury of contemplation across its luminous surface, toward those sublime headlands that rise like phantoms, built up of aerial shadow and light, into the sky.

He paused now and then, with his hands raised a little in a sort of silent worship.

The vicar’s windows were open, and from the drawing-room faintly came voices and laughter pleasant to hear.

The edge of the lake is not many yards away from the road that passes the front of the vicar’s house, and from the window the vicar’s voice called to him, and the maid came running down with a message asking him to join their little tea-party.

Mr. Burton complied. Candles were lighted there, and the moon shone in at the open windows, through which the glorious prospect showed like the unsubstantial scenery of an enchanted land.

Quaint and clumsy as was this old stone house, the drawing-room looked positively elegant; such is the effect of a profusion of flowers, and the presence of so beautiful a girl as Laura Mildmay, who sat in the window, oddly lighted in part by the moon, in part by the candles – a study for the painter. Charles Shirley was there, chatting very gaily, and supremely happy. Mrs. Jenner was not yet in the drawing-room. She was better, and old Mrs. Twiss was paying her a visit in her bedroom.

The conversation was, I suppose, about as clever as other conversations in like circumstances, and I never heard more of it than this, that Mr. Burton said—

“Today, Miss Mildmay, walking on that ridge that you see in that direction, I discovered several specimens of the beautiful little flower” – and he named its name, which I forget – “that you so wished to light upon; and I, old as I am, climbed a little critical bit and got one, which, however, was afterwards spoiled in my hand as I got over the fence. I intended it for your book; but you are such an enthusiastic botanist, and know what the mountains are so well, that perhaps you would like to make that your tomorrow’s ramble, and permit an old fellow, but a good pedestrian, to act as your guide. It is very rare, as you know. I have not found six specimens in all my mountain rambles in England.”

Miss Laura’s pretty face lighted up so at the news, that the sight was more than sufficient reward for Mr. Burton’s little gallantry.

Certainly she would go – delighted, and so very much obliged.

Handsome Charles Shirley looked at the vicar. That good man, but prudent, knew what was in his mind; but, like a wise man, the vicar leaned to Sir John Mardykes, who could not be old, of course, for did not the vicar remember him in short frocks, and trousers made of pea-green jean – a hideous costume, which had impressed his memory – and in all other respects was he not immensely to be preferred? The vicar, therefore, looked a little sternly at the mountain at the other side of the lake, and Charles knew that there would be danger in his proposing to be of the party.

“No one treads a mountain path as you do,” said the old gentleman gallantly to the pretty girl. “It is a beautiful accomplishment, that of walking with grace. The Spanish ladies have it – the gipsies often have it – Taglioni had it. But our English women, as a rule, they don’t walk – they stump. When one’s eye has become accustomed to the true nymph-like tread, it is positively shocking to see the other thing. I involuntarily contract my foot as one of them pounds by.”

“My wife walks a hillside very gracefully,” said the good vicar.

I wish kind Mrs. Jenner could have heard his little interpolation. She would have remembered it a long time, and often thought of it, and often, mayhap, as she did with other little admiring sentences, asked the beloved vicar, with a smile, if he remembered having said one evening, so-and-so. And, indeed, it is well to speak out these honest little compliments that are so sweet to remember. Don’t let them die untold in the love where they sound like music, never forgotten, and the heart they have made to tremble with an exquisite and untold delight, will soon enough be cold. These little sayings are treasured and found again, long after, among the pages of the past, like a violet given by a beloved hand, when the book is opened.

“No doubt,” said Mr. Burton, “Miss Mildmay is a relation, you told me, and nothing is more characteristic of a family than their mode of walking. There is something indescribably delightful in walking the heights of mountains,” he continued, modifying his theme a little. “When I was young I never lost an opportunity, and, on a grander scale, once, for I was one of the few young Englishmen who, as they say, made the ascent of Mont Blanc. But I am an old fellow, now. I can’t do much; still I find myself strong enough for these fells, as we call them here.”

“In that case, Mr. Burton, you are strong enough for anything,” said the vicar.

Mr. Burton laughed and shook his head.

“No, no; I speak of fair walking upon the heather; but when I remember what I used to do in the Highlands long ago, and look at the things that pull me up, now, I see the difference. I can’t climb anything. I’m no longer a mountaineer. I’m just a good uphill pedestrian for a fellow of my years. But I dare no more follow Miss Mildmay’s lead upon those hills now, than she could have followed mine five-and-twenty years ago on the Alps.”

The conversation then turned on something else; we need not follow it.

And now the hour had come for “prayers,” and the worthy man assembled his little household, and opened the ponderous Bible and the little book of “family prayer.” Mr. Burton closed his lids devoutly, over his live eye and his glass one, of which latter no soul at Golden Friars suspected anything, except Sir John Mardykes, who had by chance seen the ugly chasm behind it.

And when they had risen, the benignant, florid old man smiled till his teeth, that Sir John had seen in the tumbler, glimmered in the moonlight as he arranged an hour with Miss Mildmay for their next day’s floral ramble; and then he prayed “Heaven bless her,” and kindly shook the vicar’s hand, and smiled round the room, and begged to be remembered to Mrs. Jenner, “though that is a little unreasonable, I fear, as I have not yet had the honour of being introduced,” he added.

He and Charles Shirley passed down the steps together, and paused for a moment at the piers of the outer gate, looking at the sublime picture before them, and each thinking of something totally different.

The young man stole a glance over his shoulder at the house he was leaving. His heart was heavy with an untold care, and the vagueness and darkness of the future made him sigh.

“Too early for you to sigh, and so deeply, my young friend,” said the old man gently, with an old man’s privilege. “I had something on my mind – shall we walk this way? – but I hesitated to say it. Somehow, that sigh has decided me. It is only a word of caution. May I speak it?”

Charles Shirley looked in his face, doubtful whether he had heard him aright. He had scarcely an acquaintance with Mr. Burton. It seemed odd his proposing to make a warning confidence.

“Certainly, very much obliged,” said the young man.

“You are going to be put in a very disagreeable position, I’m afraid,” said Mr. Burton.

“May I ask how, sir?” inquired Charles Shirley.

“You have incurred the displeasure of a gentleman who, I’m afraid, means to call you to account,” said Mr. Burton.

“I! I have not an idea. Do you mean a hostile message?” inquired Charles smiling.

“I should not wonder,” said the old gentleman in a low tone, “come a little this way, please. You have drawn down upon you the resentment of Sir John Mardykes.”

“I don’t mean, sir, to take any step to conciliate Sir John Mardykes”; said Mr. Shirley. “I don’t understand what he can possibly mean; and I don’t care a farthing.”

“It seems to me, however, if you allow me to say so, that you ought. Let us get a little nearer to the lake: how beautiful it is!-you ought to apologise to Sir John Mardykes – you ought indeed.”

“Apologise! I don’t see what you mean,” said Charles, with a start, a little sharply.

“What I mean is to prevent unpleasantness.”

“There is none whatever, sir,” said the young man.

“Believe me, it is coming, though, unless you do as I say.”

“This is certainly something new,” said Charles, with a slight uncomfortable laugh.

They were walking now very slowly on the margin of the lake, over which the moonlight was trembling.

“You have enemies in this part of the world, I’m afraid, Mr. Shirley. Some mischievous person overheard, and has reported to Sir John Mardykes, some inconsiderate expressions you employed one evening when you and I and Miss Mildmay were sitting at the drawing-room window up there; and there were some fellows, I quite forget who, talking to Mr. Jenner – a clerk and someone else, and two servants bringing in tea and things. I remember, for I ventured once or twice to talk about something else; but unfortunately, as it now seems, you went on – some fun about his dyeing his whiskers, and I don’t know what else; and his informant was good enough to refer him to me for confirmation of his story – the whole thing is so low and disgusting! But he put it on me as a matter of truth – and, in fact, he got me into a comer, for I found that my silence was confirming him in the belief that every syllable he had recounted had been literally uttered by you, while in reality what you said was comparatively harmless. So as he was extremely angry, I thought it best to be frank. I could not help admitting what was true; but the greater part of his information, I assured him, was utterly false.”

“I’m sure I’m very much obliged, and very sorry you should have had any trouble on my account. But I’ll tell you frankly, I don’t care one farthing what Sir John Mardykes thinks about me; and I should not myself have walked from this to the lake there to undeceive him. I think him a stupid old ridiculous fool. I really forget what I said of him, but I’ll say that, and everything else I believe of him, with pleasure, and fifty times more, so that he need not employ spies to listen, if he wants to hear all I think of him.”

“Come, come, my dear Mr. Shirley, surely you can’t think this either wise or Christian. Oh! my dear young friend, let me entreat – don’t you know to what a situation you may be reduced? Sir John can look back thirty years, to his early manhood; in those days I can tell you gentlemen were only too ready to appeal to the pistol, and I never saw a man more angry. I assure you the language he used is still painfully ringing in my ears.”

“He spoke of me, did he?”

“Why, to be sure he did.”

“Not in a very complimentary way, I suppose.”

Mr. Burton shrugged, and then sighed with a “heigh-ho!” as if he were tired of the world.

“I suppose he said I did not speak truth?” said Charles.

“I should have no hesitation in telling you what he said, because it would show you how very threatening it is, and on what uncomfortable ground you stand; but I should insist on your giving me your word of honour that my name should not be mentioned in the matter, nor any allusion to the circumstance.”

“Oh, sir, I should not dream of such a thing.”

“Well, sir, he did say something to that effect, and a great deal more that it pained me to hear, and which I mention only to show you that the matter is becoming serious, and to support my entreaty that you will, just like a frank Christian gentleman, beg his pardon, for he has termed you, among other things, a liar, a blackguard, and a fool – from which you will gather how transported he is with anger, and how likely this miserable misunderstanding is to be carried into consequences that are direful and sinful; and I may add that he is likely to repeat those phrases, or their equivalents, where you would least like to have them heard. Now do, I implore, my dear young friend, do humble your proud heart a little; ask his forgiveness, and allow me to enjoy the happiness and the blessing of the peacemaker.”

“Did he ask you to tell me all that?” said the young man.

“I can’t say that he did; but I may tell you that I think he would wish you to know exactly how he feels.”

“I see,” said the young man, with a little laugh, and throwing a pebble that was in his fingers a yard or two into the water. “Thank you very much. I think I must get home. Shall I walk with you to your hotel?”

“You are very good. No, thanks. I’ll say good-night – and all will be well and happy, I hope. Good-night.”

And so they parted. And there hung over that quiet scene the cloud of coming battle.

CHAPTER XX

A GHOST STORY

When Laura Mildmay ran upstairs, after prayers, to sit a little and talk with Mrs. Jenner; she found that old lady still in her chair, and good Mrs. Jolliffe in the room.

Twenty years have passed since you last saw Mrs. Jolliffe’s tall slim figure. She is now past seventy, and can’t have many milestones more to count on the journey that will bring her to her long home. The hair has grown white as snow, that is parted under her cap, over her shrewd, but kindly face. But her figure is still straight, and her step light and active.

She has taken of late years to the care of adult invalids, having surrendered to younger hands the little people who inhabit cradles, and crawl on all-fours. Those who remember that good-natured face among the earliest that emerge from the darkness of nonentity, and who owe to her their first lessons in the accomplishment of walking, and a delighted appreciation of their first babblings and earliest teeth, have “spired up” into tall lads and lasses, now. Aye, by’r lady, and some of them shew streaks of white by this time, in the brown locks, “the bonny gouden” hair, that she was so proud to brush and shew to admiring mothers, who are seen no more on the green of Golden Friars, and whose names are traced now on the flat grey stones in the churchyard.

So time is ripening some, and searing others; and the saddening and tender sunset hour has come; and it is evening with the kind old north-country dame, who nursed pretty Laura Mildmay, who now stepping into the room, smiles so gladly, and throws her arms round the old woman’s neck, and kisses her twice.

“Now, this is so lucky!” said Mrs. Jenner, “you have just come in time to hear a story.”

“Really! That’s delightful.”

“Na, na, od wit it! no story, ouer true for that, I sid it a’ wi my aan eyen. But the bairn here, w’ould not like, at these hours, just goin’ to her bed, to hear tell of freets and boggarts.”

“Ghosts? The very thing of all others I should most like to hear of.”

“Well, dear,” said Mrs. Jenner, “if you are not afraid, sit ye down here, with us.”

“She was just going to tell me all about her first engagement to attend a dying old woman,” says Mrs. Jenner, “and of the ghost she saw there. Now, Mrs. Jolliffe, make your tea first and then begin.”

The good woman obeyed, and having prepared a cup of that companionable nectar, she sipped a little, drew her brows slightly together to collect her thoughts, and then looked up with a wondrous solemn face to begin.

Good Mrs. Jenner, and the pretty girl, each gazed with eyes of solemn expectation in the face of the old woman, who seemed to gather awe from the recollections she was summoning.

The old room was a good scene for such a narrative, with the oak-wainscoting, quaint, and clumsy furniture, the heavy beams that crossed its ceiling, and the tall four-post bed, with dark curtains, within which you might imagine what shadows you please.

Mrs. Jolliffe cleared her voice, rolled her eyes slowly round, and began her tale in these words:

MADAM CROWL’S GHOST.

“I’m an ald woman now; and I was but thirteen, my last birthday, the night I came to Applewale House. My aunt was the housekeeper there, and a sort o’ one-horse carriage was down at Lexhoe waitin’ to take me and my box up to Applewale.

“I was a bit frightened by the time I got to Lexhoe, and when I saw the carriage and horse, I wished myself back again with my mother at Hazelden. I was crying when I got into the ‘shay’ – that’s what we used to call it – and old John Mulbery that drove it, and was a good-natured fellow, bought me a handful of apples at the Golden Lion to cheer me up a bit; and he told me that there was a currant-cake, and tea, and pork-chops, waiting for me, all hot, in my aunt’s room at the great house. It was a fine moonlight night, and I ate the apples, lookin’ out o’ the shay winda.

“It’s a shame for gentlemen to frighten a poor foolish child like I was. I sometimes think it might be tricks. There was two on ’em on the tap o’ the coach beside me. And they began to question me after nightfall, when the moon rose, where I was going to. Well, I told them it was to wait on Dame Arabella Crowl, of Applewale House, near by Lexhoe.

“‘Ho, then,’ says one of them, ‘you’ll not be long there!’

“And I looked at him as much as to say ‘Why not?’ for I had spoken out when I told them where I was goin’, as if ’twas something clever I hed to say.

“‘Because,’ says he, ‘and don’t you for your life tell no one, only watch her and see – she’s possessed by the devil, and more ’an half a ghost. Have you got a Bible?’

“‘Yes, sir,’ says I. For my mother put my little Bible in my box, and I knew it was there: and by the same token, though the print’s too small for my ald eyes, I have it in my press to this hour.

“As I looked up at him saying ‘Yes, sir,’ I thought I saw him winkin’ at his friend; but I could not be sure.

“‘Well,’ says he, ‘be sure you put it under your bolster every night, it will keep the ald girl’s claws aff ye.’

“And I got such a fright when he said that, you wouldn’t fancy! And I’d a liked to ask him a lot about the ald lady, but I was too shy, and he and his friend began talkin’ together about their own consarns, and dowly enough I got down, as I told ye, at Lexhoe. My heart sank as I drove into the dark avenue. The trees stand very thick and big, as ald as the ald house almost, and four people, with their arms out and fingertips touchin’, barely girds round some of them.

“Well my neck was stretched out o’ the winda, looking for the first view o’ the great house; and all at once we pulled up in front of it.

“A great white-and-black house it is, wi’ great black beams across and right up it, and gables lookin’ out, as white as a sheet, to the moon, and the shadows o’ the trees, two or three up and down in front, you could count the leaves on them, and all the little diamond-shaped winda-panes, glimmering on the great hall winda, and great shutters, in the old fashion, hinged on the wall outside, boulted across all the rest o’ the windas in front, for there was but three or four servants, and the old lady in the house, and most o’ t’rooms was locked up.

“My heart was in my mouth when I sid the journey was over, and this the great house afoore me, and I sa near my aunt that I never sid till noo, and Dame Crowl, that I was come to wait upon, and was afeard on already.

“My aunt kissed me in the hall, and brought me to her room. She was tall and thin, wi’ a pale face and black eyes, and long thin hands wi’ black mittins on. She was past fifty, and her word was short; but her word was law. I hev no complaints to make of her; but she was a hard woman, and I think she would hev bin kinder to me if I had bin her sister’s child in place of her brother’s. But all that’s o’ no consequence noo.

“The squire – his name was Mr. Chevenix Crowl, he was Dame Crowl’s grandson – came down there, by way of seeing that the old lady was well treated, about twice or thrice in the year. I sid him but twice all the time I was at Applewale House.

“I can’t say but she was well taken care of, notwithstanding; but that was because my aunt and Meg Wyvern, that was her maid, had a conscience, and did their duty by her.

“Mrs. Wyvern – Meg Wyvern my aunt called her to herself, and Mrs. Wyvern to me – was a fat, jolly lass of fifty, a good height and a good breadth, always good-humoured and walked slow. She had fine wages, but she was a bit stingy, and kept all her fine clothes under lock and key, and wore, mostly, a twilled chocolate cotton, wi’ red, and yellow, and green sprigs and balls on it, and it lasted wonderful.

“She never gave me nout, not the vally o’ a brass thimble, all the time I was there; but she was good-humoured, and always laughin’, and she talked no end o’ proas over her tea; and seeing me sa sackless and dowly, she roused me up wi’ her laughin’ and stories; and I think I liked her better than my aunt – children is so taken wi’ a bit o’ fun or a story – though my aunt was very good to me, but a hard woman about some things, and silent always.

“My aunt took me into her bedchamber, that I might rest myself a bit while she was settin’ the tea in her room. But first she patted me on the shouther, and said I was a tall lass o’ my years, and had spired up well, and asked me if I could do plain work and stitchin’; and she looked in my face, and said I was like my father, her brother, that was dead and gone, and she hoped I was a better Christian, and wad na du a’ that lids.

“It was a hard sayin’ the first time I set my foot in her room, I thought.

“When I went into the next room, the housekeeper’s room – very comfortable, yak (oak) all round – there was a fine fire blazin’ away, wi’ coal, and peat, and wood, all in a low together, and tea on the table, and hot cake, and smokin’ meat; and there was Mrs. Wyvern, fat, jolly, and talkin’ away, more in an hour than my aunt would in a year.

“While I was still at my tea my aunt went upstairs to see Madam Crowl.

“‘She’s agone up to see that old Judith Squailes is awake,’ says Mrs. Wyvern. ‘Judith sits with Madam Crowl when me and Mrs. Shutters’ – that was my aunt’s name – ‘is away. She’s a troublesome old lady. Ye’ll hev to be sharp wi’ her, or she’ll be into the fire, or out ‘o t’ winda. She goes on wires, she does, old though she be.’

“‘How old, ma’am?’ says I.

“‘Ninety-three her last birthday, and that’s eight months gone,’ says she; and she laughed. ‘And don’t be askin’ questions about her before your aunt – mind, I tell ye; just take her as you find her, and that’s all.’

“‘And what’s to be my business about her, please, ma’am?’ says I.

“‘About the old lady? Well,’ says she, ‘your aunt, Mrs. Shutters, will tell you that; but I suppose you’ll hev to sit in the room with your work, and see she’s at no mischief, and let her amuse herself with her things on the table, and get her her food or drink as she calls for it, and keep her out o’ mischief, and ring the bell hard if she’s troublesome.’

“‘Is she deaf, ma’am?’

“‘No, nor blind,’ says she; ‘as sharp as a needle, but she’s gone quite aupy, and can’t remember nout rightly; and Jack the Giant Killer, or Goody Twoshoes will please her as well as the king’s court, or the affairs of the nation.’

“‘And what did the little girl go away for, ma’am, that went on Friday last? My aunt wrote to my mother she was to go.’

“‘Yes; she’s gone.’

“‘What for?’ says I again.

“‘She didn’t answer Mrs. Shutters, I do suppose,’ says she. ‘I don’t know. Don’t be talkin’; your aunt can’t abide a talkin’ child.’

“‘And please, ma’am, is the old lady well in health?’ says I.

“‘It ain’t no harm to ask that,’ says she. ‘She’s torflin a bit lately, but better this week past, and I dare say she’ll last out her hundred years yet. Hish! Here’s your aunt coming down the passage.’

“In comes my aunt, and begins talkin’ to Mrs. Wyvern, and I, beginnin’ to feel more comfortable and at home like, was walkin’ about the room lookin’ at this thing and at that. There was pretty old china things on the cupboard, and pictures again the wall; and there was a door open in the wainscot, and I sees a queer old leathern jacket, wi’ straps and buckles to it, and sleeves as long as the bedpost hangin’ up inside.

“‘What’s that you’re at, child?’ says my aunt, sharp enough, turning about when I thought she least minded. ‘What’s that in your hand?’

“‘This, ma’am?’ says I, turning about with the leathern jacket. ‘I don’t know what it is, ma’am.’

“Pale as she was, the red came up in her cheeks, and her eyes flashed wi’ anger, and I think only she had half a dozen steps to take, between her and me, she’d a gev me a sizzup. But she did gie me a shake by the shouther, and she plucked the thing out o’ my hand, and says she, ‘While ever you stay here, don’t ye meddle wi’ nout that don’t belong to ye,’ and she hung it up on the pin that was there, and shut the door wi’ a bang and locked it fast.

“Mrs. Wyvern was liftin’ up her hands and laughin’ all this time, quietly, in her chair, rolling herself a bit in it, as she used when she was kinkin’.

“The tears was in my eyes, and she winked at my aunt, and says she, dryin’ her own eyes that was wet wi’ the laughin’, ‘Tut, the child meant no harm – come here to me, child. It’s only a pair o’ crutches for lame ducks, and ask us no questions mind, and we’ll tell ye no lies; and come here and sit down, and drink a mug o’ beer before ye go to your bed.’

“My room, mind ye, was upstairs, next to the old lady’s, and Mrs. Wyvern’s bed was near hers in her room, and I was to be ready at call, if need should be.

“The old lady was in one of her tantrums that night and part of the day before. She used to take fits o’ the sulks. Sometimes she would not let them dress her, and at other times she would not let them take her clothes off. She was a great beauty, they said, in her day. But there was no one about Applewale that remembered her in her prime. And she was dreadful fond o’ dress, and had thick silks, and stiff satins, and velvets, and laces, and all sorts, enough to set up seven shops at the least. All her dresses was old-fashioned and queer, but worth a fortune.

“Well, I went to my bed. I lay for a while awake; for a’ things was new to me; and I think the tea was in my nerves, too, for I wasn’t used to it, except now and then on a holiday, or the like. And I heard Mrs. Wyvern talkin’, and I listened with my hand to my ear; but I could not hear Mrs. Crowl, and I don’t think she said a word.

“There was great care took of her. The people at Applewale knew that when she died they would every one get the sack; and their situations was well paid and easy.

“The doctor come twice a week to see the old lady, and you may be sure they all did as he bid them. One thing was the same every time; they were never to cross or frump her, any way, but to humour and please her in everything.

“So she lay in her clothes all that night, and next day, not a word she said, and I was at my needlework all that day, in my own room, except when I went down to my dinner.

“I would a liked to see the ald lady, and even to hear her speak. But she might as well a’ bin in Lunnon a’ the time for me.

“When I had my dinner my aunt sent me out for a walk for an hour. I was glad when I came back, the trees was so big, and the place so dark and lonesome, and ’twas a cloudy day, and I cried a deal, thinkin’ of home, while I was walkin’ alone there. That evening, the candles bein’ alight, I was sittin’ in my room, and the door was open into Madam Crowl’s chamber, where my aunt was. It was, then, for the first time I heard what I suppose was the ald lady talking.

“It was a queer noise like, I couldn’t well say which, a bird, or a beast, only it had bleatin’ sound in it, and was very small.

“I pricked my ears to hear all I could. But I could not make out one word she said. And my aunt answered:

“‘The evil one can’t hurt no one, ma’am, bout the Lord permits.’

“Then the same queer voice from the bed says something more that I couldn’t make head nor tail on.

“And my aunt med answer again: ‘Let them pull faces, ma’am, and say what they will; if the Lord be for us, who can be against us?’

“I kept listenin’ with my ear turned to the door, holdin’ my breath, but not another word or sound came in from the room. In about twenty minutes, as I was sittin’ by the table, lookin’ at the pictures in the old Aesop’s Fables, I was aware o’ something moving at the door, and lookin’ up I sid my aunt’s face lookin’ in at the door, and her hand raised.

“‘Hish!’ says she, very soft, and comes over to me on tiptoe, and she says in a whisper: ‘Thank God, she’s asleep at last, and don’t ye make no noise till I come back, for I’m goin’ down to take my cup o’ tea, and I’ll be back i’ noo – me and Mrs. Wyvern, and she’ll be sleepin’ in the room, and you can run down when we come up, and Judith will gie ye yaur supper in my room.’

“And with that away she goes.

“I kep’ looking at the picture-book, as before, listenin’ every noo and then, but there was no sound, not a breath, that I could hear; an’ I began whisperin’ to the pictures and talkin’ to myself to keep my heart up, for I was growin’ feared in that big room.

“And at last up I got, and began walkin’ about the room, lookin’ at this and peepin’ at that, to amuse my mind, ye’ll understand. And at last what shud I do but peeps into Madam Crowl’s bedchamber.

“A grand chamber it was, wi’ a great four-poster, wi’ flowered silk curtains as tall as the ceilin’, and foldin’ down on the floor, and drawn close all round. There was a lookin’-glass, the biggest I ever sid before, and the room was a blaze o’ light.

I counted twenty-two wax candles, all alight. Such was her fancy, and no one dared say her nay.

“I listened at the door, and gaped and wondered all round. When I heard there was not a breath, and did not see so much as a stir in the curtains, I took heart, and walked into the room on tiptoe, and looked round again. Then I takes a keek at myself in the big glass; and at last it came in my head, ‘Why couldn’t I ha’ a keek at the ald lady herself in the bed?’

“Ye’d think me a fule if ye knew half how I longed to see Dame Crowl, and I thought to myself if I didn’t peep now I might wait many a day before I got so gude a chance again.

“Well, my dear, I came to the side o’ the bed, the curtains bein’ close, and my heart a’most failed me. But I took courage, and I slips my finger in between the thick curtains, and then my hand. So I waits a bit, but all was still as death. So, softly, softly draws the curtain, and there, sure enough, I sid before me, stretched out like the painted lady on the tomb-stean in Lexhoe Church, the famous Dame Crowl, of Applewale House. There she was, dressed out. You never sid the like in they days. Satin and silk, and scarlet and green, and gold and pint lace; by Jen! ’twas a sight! A big powdered wig, half as high as herself, was a-top o’ her head, and, wow!-was ever such wrinkles?-and her old baggy throat all powdered white, and her cheeks rouged, and mouse-skin eyebrows, that Mrs. Wyvern used to stick on, and thae she lay proud and stark, wi’ a pair o’ clocked silk hose on, and heels to her shoon as tall as ninepins. Lawks! But her nose was crooked and thin, and half the whites o’ her eyes was open. She used to stand, dressed as she was, gigglin’ and dribblin’ before the lookin’-glass, wi’ a fan in her hand, and a big nosegay in her bodice. Her wrinkled little hands was stretched down by her sides, and such long nails, all cut into points, I never sid in my days. Could it ever a bin the fashion for grit fowk to war their finger-nails so?

“Well, I think ye’d a-bin frightened yourself if ye’d a sid such a sight. I couldn’t let go the curtain, nor move an inch, nor take my eyes off her; my very heart stood still. And in an instant she opens her eyes, and up she sits, and spins herself round, and down wi’ her, wi’ a clack on her two tall heels on the floor, facin’ me, ogglin’ in my face wi’ her two great glassy eyes, and a wicked simper wi’ her old wrinkled lips, and lang fause teeth.

“Well, a corpse is a natural thing; but this was the dreadfullest sight I ever sid. She had her fingers straight out pointin’ at me, and her back was crooked, round again wi’ age. Says she:

“‘Ye little limb! what for did ye say I killed the boy? I’ll tickle ye till ye’re stiff!’

“If I’d a thought an instant, I’d a turned about and run. But I couldn’t take my eyes off her, and I backed from her as soon as I could; and she came clatterin’ after like a thing on wires, with her fingers pointing to my throat, and she makin’ all the time a sound with her tongue like zizz-zizz-zizz.

“I kept backin’ and backin’ as quick as I could, and her fingers was only a few inches away from my throat, and I felt I’d lose my wits if she touched me.

“I went back this way, right into the corner, and I gev a yellock, ye’d think saul and body was partin’, and that minute my aunt, from the door, calls out wi’ a blare, and the ald lady turns round on her, and I turns about, and ran through my room, and down the stairs, as hard as my legs could carry me.

“I cried hearty, I can tell you, when I got down to the housekeeper’s room. Mrs. Wyvern laughed a deal when I told her what happened. But she changed her key when she heared the ale lady’s words.

“‘Say them again,’ says she.

“So I told her.

“‘Ye little limb! What for did ye say I killed the boy? I’ll tickle ye till ye’re stiff.’

“‘And did ye say she killed a boy?’ says she.

“‘Not I, ma’am,’ says I.

“Judith was always up with me, after that, when the two older women was away from her. I would a jumped out at winda, rather than stay alone in the same room wi’ her.

“It was about a week after, as well as I can remember, Mrs. Wyvern, one day when me and her was alone, told me a thing about Madam Crowl that I did not know before.

“She being young, and a great beauty, full seventy year before, hed married Squire Crowl, of Applewale. But he was a widower, and had a son about nine years old.

“There never was tale or tidings of this boy after one mornin’. No one could say where he went to. He was allowed too much liberty, and used to be off in the morning, one day, to the keeper’s cottage and breakfast wi’ him, and away to the warren, and not home, mayhap, till evening; and another time down to the lake, and bathe there, and spend the day fishin’ there, or paddlin’ about in the boat. Well, no one could say what was gone wi’ him; only this, that his hat was found by the lake, under a haathom that grows thar to this day, and ’twas thought he was drowned bathin’. And the squire’s son, by his second marriage, with this Madam Crowl that lived sa dreadful lang, came in far the estates. It was his son, the ald lady’s grandson, Squire Chevenix Crowl, that owned the estates at the time I came to Applewale.

“There was a deal o’ talk lang before my aunt’s time about it; and ’twas said the stepmother knew more than she was like to let out. And she managed her husband, the ald squire, wi’ her whiteheft and flatteries. And as the boy was never seen more, in course of time the thing died out of fowks’ minds.

“I’m going to tell ye noo about what I sid wi’ my own een.

“I was not there six months, and it was winter time, when the ald lady took her last sickness.

“The doctor was afeard she might a took a fit o’ madness, as she did fifteen years befoore, and was bucked up, many a time, in a strait-waistcoat, which was the very leathern jerkin I sid in the closet, of my aunt’s room.

“Well, she didn’t. She pined, and windered, and went off, torflin’, torflin’, quite enough, till a day or two before her flittin’, and then she took to rabblin’, and sometimes skirlin’ in the bed, ye’d think a robber had a knife to her throat, and she used to work out o’ the bed, and not being strong enough, then, to walk or stand, she’d fall on the flure, wi’ her ald wizened hands stretched before her face, and skirlin’ still for mercy.

“Ye may guess I didn’t go into the room, and I used to be shiverin’ in my bed wi’ fear, at her skirlin’ and scrafflin’ on the flure, and blarin’ out words that id make your skin turn blue.

“My aunt, and Mrs. Wyvern, and Judith Squailes, and a woman from Lexhoe, was always about her. At last she took fits, and they wore her out.

“T’sir (parson) was there, and prayed for her; but she was past praying with. I suppose it was right, but none could think there was much good in it, and sa at lang last she made her flittin’, and a’ was over, and old Dame Crowl was shrouded and coffined, and Squire Chevenix was wrote for. But he was away in France, and the delay was sa lang, that t’ sir and doctor both agreed it would not du to keep her langer out o’ her place, and no one cared but just them two, and my aunt and the rest o’ us, from Applewale, to go to the buryin’. So the old lady of Applewale was laid in the vault under Lexhoe Church; and we lived up at the great house till such time as the squire should come to tell his will about us, and pay off such as he chose to discharge.

“I was put into another room, two doors away from what was Dame Crowl’s chamber, after her death, and this thing happened the night before Squire Chevenix came to Applewale.

“The room I was in now was a large square chamber, covered wi’ yak pennels, but unfurnished except for my bed, which had no curtains to it, and a chair and a table, or so that looked nothing at all in such a big room. And the big looking-glass, that the old lady used to keek into and admire herself from head to heel, now that there was na muir o’ that wark, was put out of the way, and stood against the wall in my room, for there was shiftin’ o’ many things in her chamber ye may suppose, when she came to be coffined.

“The news had come that day that the squire was to be down next morning at Applewale; and not sorry was I, for I thought I was sure to be sent home again to my mother. And right glad was I, and I was thinkin’ of a’ at hame, and my sister Janet, and the kitten and the pymag, and Trimmer the tike, and all the rest, and I got sa fidgetty, I couldn’t sleep, and the clock struck twelve, and me wide awake, and the room as dark as pick. My back was turned to the door, and my eyes toward the wall opposite.

“Well, it could na be a full quarter past twelve, when I sees a lightin’ on the wall befoore me, as if something took fire behind, and the shadas o’ the bed, and the chair, and my gown, that was hangin’ from the wall, was dancin’ up and down on the ceilin’ beams and the yak pannels; and I turns my head ower my shoulther quick, thinkin’ something must a gone a’ fire.

“And what shud I see, by Jen! but the likeness o’ the ald beldame, bedizened out in her satins and velvets, on her dead body, simperin’, wi’ her eyes as wide as saucers, and her face like the fiend himself. ’Twas a red light that rose about her in a fuffin low, as if her dress round her feet was blazin’. She was drivin’ on right for me, wi’ her ald shrivelled hands crooked as if she was goin’ to claw me. I could not stir, but she passed me straight by, wi’ a blast o’ cald air, and I sid her, at the wall, in the alcove as my aunt used to call it, which was a recess where the state bed used to stand in ald times, wi’ a door open wide, and her hands gropin’ in at somethin’ was there. I never sid that door befoore. And she turned round to me, like a thing on a pivot, flyrin’, and I standin’ at the far side o’ the bed; I don’t know how I got there, and I found my tongue at last, and if I did na blare a yellock, rennin’ down the gallery and almost pulled Mrs. Wyvern’s door off t’ hooks, and frighted her half out o’ wits.

“Ye may guess I did na sleep that night; and wi’ the first light, down wi’ me to my aunt, as fast as my two legs cud carry me.

“Well, my aunt did na frump or flite me, as I thought she would, but she held me by the hand, and looked hard in my face all the time. And she telt me not to be feared; and says she:

“‘Hed the appearance a key in its hand?’

“‘Yes,’ says I, bringin’ it to mind, ‘a big key in a queer brass handle.’

“‘Stop a bit,’ says she, lettin’ go ma hand, and openin’ the cupboard-door. ‘Was it like this?’ says she, takin’ one out in her fingers, and showing it to me, with a dark look in my face.

“‘That was it,’ says I, quick enough.

“‘Are ye sure?’ she says, turnin’ it round.

“‘Sart,’ says I, and felt like I was gain’ to faint when I sid it.

“‘Well, that will do, child,’ says she, saftly thinkin’, and she locked it up again. ‘The squire himself will be here today, before twelve o’clock, and ye must tell him all about it,’ says she, thinkin’, ‘and I suppose I’ll be leavin’ soon, and so the best thing for the present is, that ye should go home this afternoon, and I’ll look out another place for you when I can.’

“Fain was I, ye may guess at that word.

“My aunt packed up my things for me, and the three pounds that was due to me, to bring home, and Squire Crowl himself came down to Applewale that day, a handsome man, about thirty years ald. It was the second time I sid him. But this was the first time he spoke to me.

“My aunt talked wi’ him in the housekeeper’s room, and I don’t know what they said. I was a bit feared on the squire, he bein’ a great gentleman down in Lexhoe, and I dam’t go near till I was called. And says he, smilin’:

“‘What’s a’ this ye a sen, child? it mun be a dream, for ye know there’s na sic a thing as a be or a freet in a’ the world. But whatever it was, ma little maid, sit ye down and tell all about it from first to last.’

“Well, so soon as I med an end, he thought a bit, and says he to my aunt:

“‘I mind the place well. In old Sir Olivur’s time lame Wyndel told me there was a door in that recess, to the left, where the lassie dreamed she saw my grandmother open it. He was past eighty when he telt me that, and I but a boy. It’s twenty year sen. The plate and jewels used to be kept there, long ago, before the iron closet was made in the arras chamber, and he told me the key had a brass handle, and this ye say was found in the bottom o’ the kist where she kept her old fans. Now, would not it be a queer thing if we found some spoons or diamonds forgot there? Ye mun come up wi’ us, lassie, and point to the very spot.’

“Loth was I, and my heart in my mouth, and fast I held by my aunt’s hand as I stept into that awsome room, and showed them both how she came and passed me by, and the spot where she stood, and where the door seemed to open.

“There was an ald empty press against the wall then, and shoving it aside, sure enough there was the tracing of a door in the wainscot, and a keyhole stopped with wood, and planed across as smooth as the rest, and the joining of the door all stopped wi’ putty the colour o’ yak, and, but for the hinges that showed, a bit when the press was shoved aside, ye would not consayt there was a door there at all.

“‘Ha!’ says he, wi’ a queer smile, ‘this looks like it.’

“It took some minutes wi’ a small chisel and hammer to pick the bit o’ wood out o’ the keyhole. The key fitted, sure enough, and, wi’ a strang twist and a lang shreak, the boult went back and he pulled the door open.

“There was another door inside, stranger than the first, but the lacks was gone, and it opened easy. Inside was a narrow floor and walls and vault o’ brick; we could not see what was in it, for ’twas dark as pick.

“When my aunt had lighted the candle, the squire held it up and stept in.

“My aunt stood on tiptoe tryin’ to look over his shouther, and I did na see nout.

“‘Ha! ha!’ says the squire, steppin’ backward. ‘What’s that? Gi’ ma the poker – quick!’ says he to my aunt. And as she went to the hearth I peeps beside his arm, and I sid squat down in the far corner a monkey or a flayin’ on the chest, or else the maist shrivelled up, wizzened ald wife that ever was sen on yearth.

“‘By Jen!’ says my aunt, as, puttin’ the poker in his hand, she keeked by his shouther, and sid the ill-favoured thing, ‘hae a care, sir, what ye’re doin’. Back wi’ ye, and shut to the door!’

“But in place o’ that he steps in saftly, wi’ the poker pointed like a swoord, and he gies it a poke, and down it a’ tumbles together, head and a’, in a heap o’ bayans and dust, little meyar an’ a hatful.

“’Twas the bayans o’ a child; a’ the rest went to dust at a touch. They said nout for a while, but he turns round the skull, as it lay on the floor.

“Young as I was, I consayted I knew well enough what they was thinkin’ on.

“‘A dead cat!’ says he, pushin’ back and blowin’ out the can’le, and shuttin’ to the door. ‘We’ll come back, you and me, Mrs. Shutters, and look on the shelves by-and-by. I’ve other matters first to speak to ye about; and this little girl’s goin’ hame, ye say. She has her wages, and I mun mak’ her a present,’ says he, pattin’ my shouther wi’ his hand.

“And he did gimma a goud pound, and I went off to Lexhoe about an hour after, and sa hame by the stagecoach, and fain was I to be at hame again; and I nivver sid Dame Crowl o’ Applewale, God be thanked, either in appearance or in dream, at-efter. But when I was grown to be a woman, my aunt spent a day and night wi’ me at Littleham, and she telt me there was na doubt it was the poor little boy that was missing sa lang sen, that was shut up to die thar in the dark by that wicked beldame, whar his skirls, or his prayers, or his thumpin’ cud na be heard, and his hat was left by the water’s edge, whoever did it, to mak’ belief he was drowned. The clothes, at the first touch, a’ ran into a snuff o’ dust in the cell whar the bayans was found. But there was a handful o’ jet buttons, and a knife with a green heft, together wi’ a couple o’ pennies the poor little fella had in his pocket, I suppose, when he was decoyed in thar, and sid his last o’ the light. And there was, amang the squire’s papers, a copy o’ the notice that was prented after he was lost, when the ald squire thought he might ‘a run away, or bin took by gipsies, and it said he had a green-hefted knife wi’ him, and that his buttons were o’ cut jet. Sa that is a’ I hev to say consarnin’ ald Dame Crowl, o’ Applewale House.”

CHAPTER XXI

THE MEETING

Never did morning dawn more glorious. There was just cloud enough in the still sky here and there to dapple the steep sides of the towering mountains, and to give to the face of some bold projection a character of gloom and menace.

At the appointed time Mr. Burton stood at the outer gate, raised his hat from his snow-white hair, and smiled at the young lady in the drawing-room window, who, smiling in return, ran down to join him.

“It is so kind of you, Mr. Burton,” she said, as she came down the steps, “to take all this trouble; and the walk will be, I’m afraid, so tiresome to you who took it only on Saturday. It’s too good-natured of you.”

“If I were a younger man I should now make ever so many pretty speeches,” said Mr. Burton; “I shall only answer, however, that it is to me an ever new delight scaling those magnificent hills. I never could tire of them, and I can honestly say, beside, that your society will greatly add to the charm of the walk. Richard Wyke’s boat is waiting, and once at the other side, the distance is really nothing. By-the-by, have you got your little tin case to put the flowers in?”

“Oh, yes, thank you, everything.”

So they went on their way chatting together very cheerfully, for she felt quite at ease in the society of this kind, communicative, and accomplished old man.

The row across the lake was delightful, and the village of Golden Friars from this point of view, diminished but distinct in the distance, with its new background of mountain, and the lake in front, and its dark elms standing in groups or singly about the old-fashioned gables, presents a singularly picturesque feature in the landscape.

And now, chatting pleasantly, the old man with his stick in his hand, and the young lady listening to his stories about foreign flowers, and Alpine, Pyrenean, and Himalayan wonders, ascended the foot of the mountain that rises from the very margin of the lake, and they crossed the little shingle road – as old, possibly, as the days of the Picts – that coils its way over the hills; and by its side they walked on, and though, ascending, still pretty nearly parallel to the margin of the lake. The mountain grows steeper from that base as they proceed.

Thus, in good Mr. Burton’s phrase of the evening before, ‘on and upward’ they proceeded at a gentle pace, ascending above the sounds of life – its sights, also, growing perceptibly more remote, as they entered a lighter and breezier air. The bold mountain side rose steep at their right, and with a gentler declivity slanted down to the water.

The old man laughed at himself and shook his head, but he confessed that for the first time since his arrival at Golden Friars he began to feel the mountains a little too much for him, and now and then, asking Laura Mildmay’s leave, he sat down for a minute or two on the roadside bank to rest.

“We old fellows, we find it out, sometimes suddenly, we are not quite what we were. On Saturday – it seems so ridiculous I should be so easily knocked up now – I could have walked to the very top of the mountain and over it, with more ease than I have accomplished this little walk. You are not a bit tired. I’m quite ashamed; but now I’m at your command again. Suppose we go on.”

So on they went.

A few hundred yards below the point at which they had crossed this old road – if anything so narrow and inartificial deserved to be called so – the hill, shelving a little, forms a level platform, in diameter about a hundred yards. With no floral purposes, and by no means in search of the picturesque, quite another party, consisting of five gentlemen, were assembled, and a little encampment of traps – three of these – and horses, and one vehicle, nondescript, with C springs, which had conveyed the doctor from Dingham. There were servants with these horses and vehicles, which were screened from the little green area on which the gentlemen were assembled by a projecting bank, overgrown with birch and white-thorn.

No more convenient or secluded spot for a duel could have been selected, and should a combatant happen to be wounded, there was the very gentle descent of the road from this point, on the level turf, beside which a carriage might run as softly as over the pile of half a dozen Turkey carpets.

Outside this little knot of persons, not a human being anywhere, except perhaps one, suspected an assemblage of gentlemen for any purpose, much less this, upon the green platform I have described, and which, lying in a gentle hollow, was fenced from distant view. This place, for its facilities of access and departure, was selected by shrewd old Doctor Jollock, who, when affairs of this kind were more frequent, had acquired a serviceable experience.

My reader and I have lighted upon them at a critical moment. That trying interval spent by the seconds in discussing and determining arrangements was passed. Each had accomplished the process of loading the “saw-handles,” which the principals were about to level one at the other. The empty cases were on the ground – Sir John Mardykes’ an heirloom, made of rosewood, inlaid with brass, an extremely pretty article; and, indeed, we see no reason, observing the amount of decoration expended upon coffins by fashionable undertakers, why these other cases of death should not also borrow something from our sense of the beautiful and the elegant.

Another case, just as grisly, lay also upon the sward a little apart. It was that which contained honest Doctor Jollock’s surgical instruments. The doctor himself stood by – his jolly port-wine complexion bleached to yellow by the suspense – for the decisive moment had come. The stout little baronet, in a green “cutaway” coat, with gilt buttons, a hat exquisitely brushed, and Wellington boots, that shone intensely in the sun, was standing in the spot where his “friend” had just placed him, with a pistol already in his hand, looking very pale and glowering.

About twelve steps away stood Charles Shirley, receiving a word or two, spoken low, from his second a tall, slight, elderly gentleman, with a rather red sharp nose, and a resolute and important air, and his coat buttoned across his chest. His nose was near Charles’s ear as he whispered, and he held a pistol in each hand, with the butt uppermost. And now he retires backward about a dozen steps, and takes his handkerchief from his pocket. The baronet’s second, a short, plump man, with a short high nose, and a double chin, an eyeglass and a white hat, stood at the other side.

Doctor Jollock, a little in the second’s rear, stands motionless, with his lips tightly screwed together, and frowning hard, as if he expected a box on the ear – staring breathless and still on the combatants.

“Gentlemen, are you both ready?” cries the second, with the handkerchief in his fingers.

Each adjusts himself and says “yes,” or “all right.”

“Now mind, gentlemen, when I drop it.”

There ensued one dreadful second of suspense, and – blowing his nose violently in the fatal handkerchief – to the surprise of each, the tall thin second steps hurriedly between them, and with the incoherence of a madman, as he stuffs the handkerchief into his pocket, cries across to his brother “second,” in a loud voice—

“Now stick your cane in the ground, and mind, the best shooting in six shots wins the hundred, and you begin, Sir John.”

And then, waving his hand forward a little, he called, “Please steady for a moment; only twelve shots, and you can pass; but there’s a wager here. Will you kindly wait for a very few minutes?”

Now this last speech was addressed to a tall “scraggy” man, with a very long neck, and a black frock-coat on, that somehow looked at once new and seedy – dyed, perhaps, and smoothed by some process into an unnatural gloss. This man drew a paper from his pocket as he rounded the little screen of bushes, and was closely followed by two equally oddly got-up gentlemen.

The “friend” with the red nose, who had seen such apparitions before, had no difficulty in recognising a “detective,” and “policemen in plain clothes”; and, with excellent presence of mind, he had lied cheerfully, as we have heard.

The tall stranger with the long neck beckoned to him, saying, “I beg your pardon, sir,” as he fumbled with his paper, and still advanced.

“Well?” said the second, making up his mind and stepping forward to meet him.

The stranger may have had his suspicions, but he was upon quite other game.

“Did you happen to see Mr. Burton, that’s stopping down here at the George, sir, going this way?” he asked.

“No.”

The detective had a word to say to him aside; and when it was said, the “friend” beckoned to his brother “second,” who heard likewise, and called, “Sir John, do come here for a moment”; and to the policeman he added, “Sir John Mardykes is a magistrate of our county.”

Sir John arrived, and also heard the murmured words of the detective; and Charles Shirley drew near, and heard likewise.

“Good heavens!” exclaimed Charles, very pale; “he is gone up the hill with Miss Mildmay.”

“This thing’s at an end, of course,” said the “friend” with the nose, drawing his associate apart by the arm.

“Of course,” whispered the fat friend in the white hat energetically, “resting upon such a basis!”

They both agreed, as they brought their principals quietly together. Those “principals,” at the instance of their friends shook hands, but, I am bound to say, rather coldly, and instantly the united party moved up the hill, following the line of the road, for Charles, who had seen them set out in the boat, rightly conjectured whereabout they must be.

CHAPTER XXII

GIDDY

Old Mr. Burton, with his companion, had got on, languid and smiling, but very agreeably, notwithstanding his occasional pauses for rest; and I shall now describe the point at which he said with a smile, and a sigh, and a little shrug—

“Ha, ha – at last – here we are!”

He looked pallid, tired, and in a dark reverie, from which, suddenly awakening, he said—

“You can see the flowers, there.”

With his stick he pointed; and she answered, delighted—

“Oh, dear! how beautiful – how wonderful! but how shall we get them?”

The old road, half-hidden, with its close nap of grass, and skirted with the spreading mantle of heath and ferns that cover the steeps that ascend at their right, is traced at the downward side by a half obliterated fence of peat and here and there of stones, which had in this spot been displaced. With a steep convexity, the hill bends downward here. The near horizon, as you look from the road, terminates in a sudden curve not ten steps down the descent.

“I am so unaccountably and absurdly knocked up today,” said he, “that I can do nothing. Do you see just there, not nine feet down the slope, that little ridge? I rested my feet upon that, and plucked the flower, and came up again; but today I am quite good-for-nothing, as you see – utterly done up – hardly able to walk; but if you are not afraid to do what an old fellow did only two days ago, you can hold the end of my stick, and with your feet resting on that little ledge and so pluck the flowers, as many as you like. It is perfectly easy, or I should not allow you to try.”

Laura Mildmay could walk those mountains, to which from her childhood she had been accustomed, like a chamois; but this was an unpleasant venture. Over the brow of the steep you could see, five hundred feet below, the distant town of Golden Friars like a tiny toy village beneath them, and a strip of the blue lake.

“Are you quite sure, Mr. Burton, that the little ridge there, as you call it, is perfectly firm?”

“As the mountain itself, my dear child. I stood upon it for five minutes on Saturday, of course leaning on the bank at the same time; and I weigh fourteen stone, and you hardly seven.”

“Oh, then, there can be no danger,” she said. “It would be so cowardly to return without the flowers; and if you kindly hold your stick to me, it will make me feel quite comfortable.”

In a moment it was arranged, and, kneeling on the slope, and holding fast to the end of the stick, she allowed herself to slide down till her feet rested on the prominence on which she relied for support.

It turned out to be merely a mass of peat, detached from its position at the edge of the road; and it instantly slipped under the pressure of her feet, and slid down the smooth turf, faster and faster, till it disappeared over the deepening edge.

“Hullo! what’s that! Good heaven!” cried Mr. Burton from above, as in her momentary panic she suddenly endeavoured to recover the summit by the aid of his stick, which escaped from his hold, and she found herself lying, without support, upon the smooth declivity, which was clothed with a short grass baked by the sun as brown and shiny as the hair on the back of a trunk.

“Don’t be frightened – be steady, it will be all right,” cried Mr. Burton. But the young lady was already slipping slowly down the glassy surface.

Her tremendous situation was now too plain, and a piercing scream burst from her lips and soared away through the wide vacuity.

She had turned on her side, her shoulder touching the smooth turf, trying vainly to bury her fingers in the hard surface. Thus, inch by inch, slowly she glided by the end of a huge mass of rock which hung close by her, flanking her descent, and then, within a foot, she caught a glimpse of that towards which, a little lower down, she was drifting. She was, as it were, slipping down the steep roof of a dome, and near enough to its side-edge to measure the fall to which she was hastening. There suddenly opened the sunny landscape beneath, the immense distance and the smooth stone precipice, that, with a slight convexity, curved darkly down five hundred feet to the verge of the lake, like a wall. She shut her eyes and screamed again.

A man passing by, summoned by that cry, ran to the spot, and, with a word or two of horror in his queer dialect, ran to his dwelling to fetch a rope.

At every yard the bank was steeper. Little hope there was. She felt herself still slipping. Her hand lighted on a solitary tuft of fern, and she caught it. She opened her eyes.

A crow came sailing slowly over, only a few feet above the level of the turf, and dived towards her as it passed, curiously, and so swooped over the airy ledge.

She heard the singing of some ladies in a boat, far below, upon the lake, rising sweet and faint, but distinct.

Every leaf and blade of vegetation on the slanting brink close under her eye, grew horribly sharp and exaggerated.

With white lips and eyes dimming with terror, she held by the frail stay her hand but encountered. It broke, and with it in her fingers she again slipped downward, a little more, and a little more, and now a good deal, and she felt that her feet had actually cleared the edge.

And now a frenzy seized Mr. Burton, who, in distraction, threw himself on his knees, crying aloud; and as he stood up and stamped about in his agony, a great stone, dislodged by him, bounded down so close that the earth shook under her, as it flew over the edge of the cliff.

Again her fingers encountered a resisting object, a little angle of rock peeped scarce an inch above the turf.

Once more Mr. Burton’s stampings and running hither and thither brought down a piece of rock which again bounded close by her.

She shut her eyes, and wildly she screamed the awful name of her Creator; her fingers scarcely felt the hold on which her next moment’s life depended.

But, heaven and earth! what is this?

Voices are heard above – many; one that she knew. It was Charles Shirley’s, approaching lower and lower, nearer and nearer, cheering, exhorting her; and now a strong arm is round her – firmly, convulsively.

A rope with a running knot, sustained by many hands from above, secures him.

At first, little by little, but now with better progress, they are making upward way – and still – and still – and the same powerful arm clasps her like a girdle of iron.

And now – thank Heaven! at last – at top, safe – on level ground; and Laura Mildmay knows no more for many minutes. She has fainted.

What has become of Mr. Burton, alias Blinks, alias Amyot, alias and truly Captain Torquil – alive, and still possessed with his sordid and murderous purpose? While every hand was employed in the rescue of Laura Mildmay, this man, accused of many forgeries and frauds, and crowning his guilt with this ferocious perfidy, has escaped.

CHAPTER XXIII

CONCLUSION

The whole town is alarmed. You may be sure the vicar’s house is in a pretty flutter at the news. Miss Laura, always something of an idol, is now, and for days after, worshipped with a frantic adoration.

Dr. Lincote and Mr. Tarlcot are at the George and Dragon with Mr. Turnbull; and these three wise men of Golden Friars are putting their heads together over this ghastly breakdown of their pattern philanthropist.

“I never was so deceived in man!” said the doctor. “’Pon my soul, it’s a nice knock to our dispensary! And Sir John says he found him with his teeth in one tumbler, and his eye in another, and a hole in its place you could put a turnip in, and his face like a nutcracker, and blazing like a furnace, and the old villain himself as drunk as a fiddler! He must be a heartless scoundrel, or he could not have played such a trick on the poor.”

“I never had occasion to advise anyone about him. It was only through the vicar and you, that I knew anything of him,” said Mr. Tarlcot. “He did not take me in, I promise you. I hope he has not hit you very hard, Mr. Turnbull – a stiff bill, I’m afraid?”

Mr. Turnbull scratched his head, and looked pompous, and perhaps a little sheepish.

“Might a’ bin worse, sir. There’s a big boxful o’ things upstairs; but I mun lose five pounds or more. Who’d a’ took him for such a ramscallion?”

“Did he get drunk here?” asked the doctor. “I think you should have put us a bit on our guard.”

“I never sid him nappy,” said Mr. Turnbull. “But he got through a deal o’ brandy, considering what an old man he was. I could a’ wished it less, sir,” said the innkeeper, and considering that it was not paid for, I can well believe him.

“But didn’t he correspond with half the swells in England?” inquired the attorney.

“Well, I was thinking o’ that. I’m not sa sure. He sent letters to the highest in the land, no doubt; no end o’ them. But I can’t mind that he got many letters in answer. I don’t think he did. Why, I could write to the Archbishop o’ Canterbury every week – what for no? – and to the Dook o’ Wellington, or the Lord Mayor o’ Lunnon, though I never sid one o’ the lot, and that, I do consayt, was that old boy’s case.”

“Not a bad notion,” said the attorney, with an attorney’s amused appreciation.

In the meantime, a full score of tall fellows from the town and about it, with hasty fury threw down sledge, or spade, or cricket-bat, and set off to scour the fells in search of the old miscreant.

Evening came. The elder townsmen were gathered on the margin of the water, and many glasses were directed to the opposite side of the lake, the bleak mountain sides, the jagged ravines, and angular summits. But a fog spread gradually down the sides of the mountains, and by-and-by shrouded the scene of the pursuit in white folds of vapour from their view.

It was late that night in the thick fog, which, creeping across the lake, had by this time enveloped the town, when, in broken detachments, by twos and threes, the police, with the other pursuers, dropped in, unsuccessful, and quite “done up.”

It was prodigious that the old villain should have foiled the police and a body of the most experienced mountaineers in Golden Friars!

The mysterious veil of fog was still hanging over the landscape next morning, when people peeped out of their bedroom windows in Golden Friars, in vain search for the outline of the fells. Hidden behind that curtain was the scene of Mr. Burton’s bivouac. One comfort was, that the most which impeded search, also very nearly precluded escape.

The fells are so precipitous at the further side that, the fog taken into account, it was next to impossible he could, walled in by those awful stone frontages, have found a passage among them to the level beneath.

The pursuers this morning divided their force into two parties; one beginning their march across the fells from the upper end of the lake, the other from the end nearest Golden Friars; and so soon as the mist began to clear, they commenced their movement from opposite ends of the range, in a long chain of scouts, each maintaining its respective communications by shouting and signalling from point to point.

They had taken their rations with them, and returned again to Golden Friars at nightfall, after a fatiguing and fruitless search.

If they had known the truth it would have saved them many renewed searches and many scourings of those steep and dangerous mountains.

Another week revealed it, and the swollen body of the old villain, drowned in the lake on the night of his attempt on the life of Miss Mildmay, in the endeavour, under cover of the mountain fog, to accomplish his escape, came to the surface, and was floated by the breeze to the shore, not far from Golden Friars.

Need I say what further happened; or how happy Laura and Charles Shirley are in the union that followed?

Chronicles Of Golden Friars (1871)

GREEN TEA

(1869)

PROLOGUE

Martin Hesselius,
the German Physician

Though carefully educated in medicine and surgery, I have never practised either. The study of each continues, nevertheless, to interest me profoundly. Neither idleness nor caprice caused my secession from the honourable calling which I had just entered. The cause was a very trifling scratch inflicted by a dissecting knife. This trifle cost me the loss of two fingers, amputated promptly, and the more painful loss of my health, for I have never been quite well since, and have seldom been twelve months together in the same place.

In my wanderings I became acquainted with Dr. Martin Hesselius, a wanderer like myself, like me a physician, and like me an enthusiast in his profession. Unlike me in this, that his wanderings were voluntary, and he a man, if not of fortune, as we estimate fortune in England, at least in what our forefathers used to term “easy circumstances.” He was an old man when I first saw him; nearly five-and-thirty years my senior.

In Dr. Martin Hesselius, I found my master. His knowledge was immense, his grasp of a case was an intuition. He was the very man to inspire a young enthusiast, like me, with awe and delight. My admiration has stood the test of time and survived the separation of death. I am sure it was well-founded.

For nearly twenty years I acted as his medical secretary. His immense collection of papers he has left in my care, to be arranged, indexed and bound. His treatment of some of these cases is curious. He writes in two distinct characters. He describes what he saw and heard as an intelligent layman might, and when in this style of narrative he had seen the patient either through his own hall door, to the light of day, or through the gates of darkness to the caverns of the dead, he returns upon the narrative, and in the terms of his art and with all the force and originality of genius, proceeds to the work of analysis, diagnosis and illustration.

Here and there a case strikes me as of a kind to amuse or horrify a lay reader with an interest quite different from the peculiar one which it may possess for an expert. With slight modifications, chiefly of language, and of course a change of names, I copy the following. The narrator is Dr. Martin Hesselius. I find it among the voluminous notes of cases which he made during a tour in England about sixty-four years ago.

It is related in series of letters to his friend Professor Van Loo of Leyden. The professor was not a physician, but a chemist, and a man who read history and metaphysics and medicine, and had, in his day, written a play.

The narrative is therefore, if somewhat less valuable as a medical record, necessarily written in a manner more likely to interest an unlearned reader.

These letters, from a memorandum attached, appear to have been returned on the death of the professor, in 1819, to Dr. Hesselius. They are written, some in English, some in French, but the greater part in German. I am a faithful, though I am conscious, by no means a graceful translator, and although here and there I omit some passages, and shorten others, and disguise names, I have interpolated nothing.

CHAPTER I

Dr. Hesselius Relates
how He Met the Rev. Mr. Jennings

The Rev. Mr. Jennings is tall and thin. He is middle-aged, and dresses with a natty, old-fashioned, high-church precision. He is naturally a little stately, but not at all stiff. His features, without being handsome, are well formed, and their expression extremely kind, but also shy.

I met him one evening at Lady Mary Heyduke’s. The modesty and benevolence of his countenance are extremely prepossessing.

We were but a small party, and he joined agreeably enough in the conversation, He seems to enjoy listening very much more than contributing to the talk; but what he says is always to the purpose and well said. He is a great favourite of Lady Mary’s, who it seems, consults him upon many things, and thinks him the most happy and blessed person on earth. Little knows she about him.

The Rev. Mr. Jennings is a bachelor, and has, they say sixty thousand pounds in the funds. He is a charitable man. He is most anxious to be actively employed in his sacred profession, and yet though always tolerably well elsewhere, when he goes down to his vicarage in Warwickshire, to engage in the actual duties of his sacred calling, his health soon fails him, and in a very strange way. So says Lady Mary.

There is no doubt that Mr. Jennings’ health does break down in, generally, a sudden and mysterious way, sometimes in the very act of officiating in his old and pretty church at Kenlis. It may be his heart, it may be his brain. But so it has happened three or four times, or oftener, that after proceeding a certain way in the service, he has on a sudden stopped short, and after a silence, apparently quite unable to resume, he has fallen into solitary, inaudible prayer, his hands and his eyes uplifted, and then pale as death, and in the agitation of a strange shame and horror, descended trembling, and got into the vestry-room, leaving his congregation, without explanation, to themselves. This occurred when his curate was absent. When he goes down to Kenlis now, he always takes care to provide a clergyman to share his duty, and to supply his place on the instant should he become thus suddenly incapacitated.

When Mr. Jennings breaks down quite, and beats a retreat from the vicarage, and returns to London, where, in a dark street off Piccadilly, he inhabits a very narrow house, Lady Mary says that he is always perfectly well. I have my own opinion about that. There are degrees of course. We shall see.

Mr. Jennings is a perfectly gentlemanlike man. People, however, remark something odd. There is an impression a little ambiguous. One thing which certainly contributes to it, people I think don’t remember; or, perhaps, distinctly remark. But I did, almost immediately. Mr. Jennings has a way of looking sidelong upon the carpet, as if his eye followed the movements of something there. This, of course, is not always. It occurs now and then. But often enough to give a certain oddity, as I have said, to his manner, and in this glance travelling along the floor there is something both shy and anxious.

A medical philosopher, as you are good enough to call me, elaborating theories by the aid of cases sought out by himself, and by him watched and scrutinised with more time at command, and consequently infinitely more minuteness than the ordinary practitioner can afford, falls insensibly into habits of observation, which accompany him everywhere, and are exercised, as some people would say, impertinently, upon every subject that presents itself with the least likelihood of rewarding inquiry.

There was a promise of this kind in the slight, timid, kindly, but reserved gentleman, whom I met for the first time at this agreeable little evening gathering. I observed, of course, more than I here set down; but I reserve all that borders on the technical for a strictly scientific paper.

I may remark, that when I here speak of medical science, I do so, as I hope someday to see it more generally understood, in a much more comprehensive sense than its generally material treatment would warrant. I believe the entire natural world is but the ultimate expression of that spiritual world from which, and in which alone, it has its life. I believe that the essential man is a spirit, that the spirit is an organised substance, but as different in point of material from what we ordinarily understand by matter, as light or electricity is; that the material body is, in the most literal sense, a vesture, and death consequently no interruption of the living man’s existence, but simply his extrication from the natural body – a process which commences at the moment of what we term death, and the completion of which, at furthest a few days later, is the resurrection “in power.”

The person who weighs the consequences of these positions will probably see their practical bearing upon medical science. This is, however, by no means the proper place for displaying the proofs and discussing the consequences of this too generally unrecognized state of facts.

In pursuance of my habit, I was covertly observing Mr. Jennings, with all my caution – I think he perceived it – and I saw plainly that he was as cautiously observing me. Lady Mary happening to address me by my name, as Dr. Hesselius, I saw that he glanced at me more sharply, and then became thoughtful for a few minutes.

After this, as I conversed with a gentleman at the other end of the room, I saw him look at me more steadily, and with an interest which I thought I understood. I then saw him take an opportunity of chatting with Lady Mary, and was, as one always is, perfectly aware of being the subject of a distant inquiry and answer.

This tall clergyman approached me by-and-by; and in a little time we had got into conversation. When two people, who like reading, and know books and places, having travelled, wish to discourse, it is very strange if they can’t find topics. It was not accident that brought him near me, and led him into conversation. He knew German and had read my Essays on Metaphysical Medicine which suggest more than they actually say.

This courteous man, gentle, shy, plainly a man of thought and reading, who moving and talking among us, was not altogether of us, and whom I already suspected of leading a life whose transactions and alarms were carefully concealed, with an impenetrable reserve from, not only the world, but his best beloved friends – was cautiously weighing in his own mind the idea of taking a certain step with regard to me.

I penetrated his thoughts without his being aware of it, and was careful to say nothing which could betray to his sensitive vigilance my suspicions respecting his position, or my surmises about his plans respecting myself.

We chatted upon indifferent subjects for a time but at last he said:

“I was very much interested by some papers of yours, Dr. Hesselius, upon what you term Metaphysical Medicine – I read them in German, ten or twelve years ago – have they been translated?”

“No, I’m sure they have not – I should have heard. They would have asked my leave, I think.”

“I asked the publishers here, a few months ago, to get the book for me in the original German; but they tell me it is out of print.”

“So it is, and has been for some years; but it flatters me as an author to find that you have not forgotten my little book, although,” I added, laughing, “ten or twelve years is a considerable time to have managed without it; but I suppose you have been turning the subject over again in your mind, or something has happened lately to revive your interest in it.”

At this remark, accompanied by a glance of inquiry, a sudden embarrassment disturbed Mr. Jennings, analogous to that which makes a young lady blush and look foolish. He dropped his eyes, and folded his hands together uneasily, and looked oddly, and you would have said, guiltily, for a moment.

I helped him out of his awkwardness in the best way, by appearing not to observe it, and going straight on, I said: “Those revivals of interest in a subject happen to me often; one book suggests another, and often sends me back a wild-goose chase over an interval of twenty years. But if you still care to possess a copy, I shall be only too happy to provide you; I have still got two or three by me – and if you allow me to present one I shall be very much honoured.”

“You are very good indeed,” he said, quite at his ease again, in a moment: “I almost despaired – I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Pray don’t say a word; the thing is really so little worth that I am only ashamed of having offered it, and if you thank me any more I shall throw it into the fire in a fit of modesty.”

Mr. Jennings laughed. He inquired where I was staying in London, and after a little more conversation on a variety of subjects, he took his departure.

CHAPTER II

The Doctor Questions Lady Mary
and She Answers

“I like your vicar so much, Lady Mary,” said I, as soon as he was gone. “He has read, travelled, and thought, and having also suffered, he ought to be an accomplished companion.”

“So he is, and, better still, he is a really good man,” said she. “His advice is invaluable about my schools, and all my little undertakings at Dawlbridge, and he’s so painstaking, he takes so much trouble – you have no idea – wherever he thinks he can be of use: he’s so good-natured and so sensible.”

“It is pleasant to hear so good an account of his neighbourly virtues. I can only testify to his being an agreeable and gentle companion, and in addition to what you have told me, I think I can tell you two or three things about him,” said I.

“Really!”

“Yes, to begin with, he’s unmarried.”

“Yes, that’s right – go on.”

“He has been writing, that is he was, but for two or three years perhaps, he has not gone on with his work, and the book was upon some rather abstract subject – perhaps theology.”

“Well, he was writing a book, as you say; I’m not quite sure what it was about, but only that it was nothing that I cared for; very likely you are right, and he certainly did stop – yes.”

“And although he only drank a little coffee here tonight, he likes tea, at least, did like it extravagantly.”

“Yes, that’s quite true.”

“He drank green tea, a good deal, didn’t he?” I pursued.

“Well, that’s very odd! Green tea was a subject on which we used almost to quarrel.”

“But he has quite given that up,” said I.

“So he has.”

“And, now, one more fact. His mother or his father, did you know them?”

“Yes, both; his father is only ten years dead, and their place is near Dawlbridge. We knew them very well,” she answered.

“Well, either his mother or his father – I should rather think his father, saw a ghost,” said I.

“Well, you really are a conjuror, Dr. Hesselius.”

“Conjuror or no, haven’t I said right?” I answered merrily.

“You certainly have, and it was his father: he was a silent, whimsical man, and he used to bore my father about his dreams, and at last he told him a story about a ghost he had seen and talked with, and a very odd story it was. I remember it particularly, because I was so afraid of him. This story was long before he died – when I was quite a child – and his ways were so silent and moping, and he used to drop in sometimes, in the dusk, when I was alone in the drawing-room, and I used to fancy there were ghosts about him.”

I smiled and nodded.

“And now, having established my character as a conjuror, I think I must say good-night,” said I.

“But how did you find it out?”

“By the planets, of course, as the gipsies do,” I answered, and so, gaily we said good-night.

Next morning I sent the little book he had been inquiring after, and a note to Mr. Jennings, and on returning late that evening, I found that he had called at my lodgings, and left his card. He asked whether I was at home, and asked at what hour he would be most likely to find me.

Does he intend opening his case, and consulting me “professionally,” as they say? I hope so. I have already conceived a theory about him. It is supported by Lady Mary’s answers to my parting questions. I should like much to ascertain from his own lips. But what can I do consistently with good breeding to invite a confession? Nothing. I rather think he meditates one. At all events, my dear Van L., I shan’t make myself difficult of access; I mean to return his visit tomorrow. It will be only civil in return for his politeness, to ask to see him. Perhaps something may come of it. Whether much, little, or nothing, my dear Van L., you shall hear.

CHAPTER III

Dr. Hesselius Picks Up
Something in Latin Books

Well, I have called at Blank Street.

On inquiring at the door, the servant told me that Mr. Jennings was engaged very particularly with a gentleman, a clergyman from Kenlis, his parish in the country. Intending to reserve my privilege, and to call again, I merely intimated that I should try another time, and had turned to go, when the servant begged my pardon, and asked me, looking at me a little more attentively than well-bred persons of his order usually do, whether I was Dr. Hesselius; and, on learning that I was, he said, “Perhaps then, sir, you would allow me to mention it to Mr. Jennings, for I am sure he wishes to see you.”

The servant returned in a moment, with a message from Mr. Jennings, asking me to go into his study, which was in effect his back drawing-room, promising to be with me in a very few minutes.

This was really a study – almost a library. The room was lofty, with two tall slender windows, and rich dark curtains. It was much larger than I had expected, and stored with books on every side, from the floor to the ceiling. The upper carpet – for to my tread it felt that there were two or three – was a Turkey carpet. My steps fell noiselessly. The bookcases standing out, placed the windows, particularly narrow ones, in deep recesses. The effect of the room was, although extremely comfortable, and even luxurious, decidedly gloomy, and aided by the silence, almost oppressive. Perhaps, however, I ought to have allowed something for association. My mind had connected peculiar ideas with Mr. Jennings. I stepped into this perfectly silent room, of a very silent house, with a peculiar foreboding; and its darkness, and solemn clothing of books, for except where two narrow looking-glasses were set in the wall, they were everywhere, helped this sombre feeling.

While awaiting Mr. Jennings’ arrival, I amused myself by looking into some of the books with which his shelves were laden. Not among these, but immediately under them, with their backs upward, on the floor, I lighted upon a complete set of Swedenborg’s “Arcana Caelestia,” in the original Latin, a very fine folio set, bound in the natty livery which theology affects, pure vellum, namely, gold letters, and carmine edges. There were paper markers in several of these volumes, I raised and placed them, one after the other, upon the table, and opening where these papers were placed, I read in the solemn Latin phraseology, a series of sentences indicated by a pencilled line at the margin. Of these I copy here a few, translating them into English.

“When man’s interior sight is opened, which is that of his spirit, then there appear the things of another life, which cannot possibly be made visible to the bodily sight.” …

“By the internal sight it has been granted me to see the things that are in the other life, more clearly than I see those that are in the world. From these considerations, it is evident that external vision exists from interior vision, and this from a vision still more interior, and so on.” …

“There are with every man at least two evil spirits.” …

“With wicked genii there is also a fluent speech, but harsh and grating. There is also among them a speech which is not fluent, wherein the dissent of the thoughts is perceived as something secretly creeping along within it.”

“The evil spirits associated with man are, indeed from the hells, but when with man they are not then in hell, but are taken out thence. The place where they then are, is in the midst between heaven and hell, and is called the world of spirits – when the evil spirits who are with man, are in that world, they are not in any infernal torment, but in every thought and affection of man, and so, in all that the man himself enjoys. But when they are remitted into their hell, they return to their former state.” …

“If evil spirits could perceive that they were associated with man, and yet that they were spirits separate from him, and if they could flow in into the things of his body, they would attempt by a thousand means to destroy him; for they hate man with a deadly hatred.” …

“Knowing, therefore, that I was a man in the body, they were continually striving to destroy me, not as to the body only, but especially as to the soul; for to destroy any man or spirit is the very delight of the life of all who are in hell; but I have been continually protected by the Lord. Hence it appears how dangerous it is for man to be in a living consort with spirits, unless he be in the good of faith.” …

“Nothing is more carefully guarded from the knowledge of associate spirits than their being thus conjoint with a man, for if they knew it they would speak to him, with the intention to destroy him.” …

“The delight of hell is to do evil to man, and to hasten his eternal ruin.”

A long note, written with a very sharp and fine pencil, in Mr. Jennings’ neat hand, at the foot of the page, caught my eye. Expecting his criticism upon the text, I read a word or two, and stopped, for it was something quite different, and began with these words, Deus misereatur mei – “May God compassionate me.” Thus warned of its private nature, I averted my eyes, and shut the book, replacing all the volumes as I had found them, except one which interested me, and in which, as men studious and solitary in their habits will do, I grew so absorbed as to take no cognisance of the outer world, nor to remember where I was.

I was reading some pages which refer to “representatives” and “correspondents,” in the technical language of Swedenborg, and had arrived at a passage, the substance of which is, that evil spirits, when seen by other eyes than those of their infernal associates, present themselves, by “correspondence,” in the shape of the beast (fera) which represents their particular lust and life, in aspect direful and atrocious. This is a long passage, and particularises a number of those bestial forms.

CHAPTER IV

Four Eyes Were Reading the Passage

I was running the head of my pencil-case along the line as I read it, and something caused me to raise my eyes.

Directly before me was one of the mirrors I have mentioned, in which I saw reflected the tall shape of my friend, Mr. Jennings, leaning over my shoulder, and reading the page at which I was busy, and with a face so dark and wild that I should hardly have known him.

I turned and rose. He stood erect also, and with an effort laughed a little, saying:

“I came in and asked you how you did, but without succeeding in awaking you from your book; so I could not restrain my curiosity, and very impertinently, I’m afraid, peeped over your shoulder. This is not your first time of looking into those pages. You have looked into Swedenborg, no doubt, long ago?”

“Oh dear, yes! I owe Swedenborg a great deal; you will discover traces of him in the little book on Metaphysical Medicine, which you were so good as to remember.”

Although my friend affected a gaiety of manner, there was a slight flush in his face, and I could perceive that he was inwardly much perturbed.

“I’m scarcely yet qualified, I know so little of Swedenborg. I’ve only had them a fortnight,” he answered, “and I think they are rather likely to make a solitary man nervous – that is, judging from the very little I have read – I don’t say that they have made me so,” he laughed; “and I’m so very much obliged for the book. I hope you got my note?”

I made all proper acknowledgements and modest disclaimers.

“I never read a book that I go with, so entirely, as that of yours,” he continued. “I saw at once there is more in it than is quite unfolded. Do you know Dr. Harley?” he asked, rather abruptly.

In passing, the editor remarks that the physician here named was one of the most eminent who had ever practised in England.

I did, having had letters to him, and had experienced from him great courtesy and considerable assistance during my visit to England.

“I think that man one of the very greatest fools I ever met in my life,” said Mr. Jennings.

This was the first time I had ever heard him say a sharp thing of anybody, and such a term applied to so high a name a little startled me.

“Really! and in what way?” I asked.

“In his profession,” he answered.

I smiled.

“I mean this,” he said: “he seems to me, one half, blind – I mean one half of all he looks at is dark – preternaturally bright and vivid all the rest; and the worst of it is, it seems wilful. I can’t get him – I mean he won’t – I’ve had some experience of him as a physician, but I look on him as, in that sense, no better than a paralytic mind, an intellect half dead. I’ll tell you – I know I shall sometime – all about it,” he said, with a little agitation. “You stay some months longer in England. If I should be out of town during your stay for a little time, would you allow me to trouble you with a letter?”

“I should be only too happy,” I assured him.

“Very good of you. I am so utterly dissatisfied with Harley.”

“A little leaning to the materialistic school,” I said.

“A mere materialist,” he corrected me; “you can’t think how that sort of thing worries one who knows better. You won’t tell anyone – any of my friends you know – that I am hippish; now, for instance, no one knows – not even Lady Mary – that I have seen Dr. Harley, or any other doctor. So pray don’t mention it; and, if I should have any threatening of an attack, you’ll kindly let me write, or, should I be in town, have a little talk with you.”

I was full of conjecture, and unconsciously I found I had fixed my eyes gravely on him, for he lowered his for a moment, and he said:

“I see you think I might as well tell you now, or else you are forming a conjecture; but you may as well give it up. If you were guessing all the rest of your life, you will never hit on it.”

He shook his head smiling, and over that wintry sunshine a black cloud suddenly came down, and he drew his breath in, through his teeth as men do in pain.

“Sorry, of course, to learn that you apprehend occasion to consult any of us; but, command me when and how you like, and I need not assure you that your confidence is sacred.”

He then talked of quite other things, and in a comparatively cheerful way and after a little time, I took my leave.

CHAPTER V

Dr. Hesselius is Summoned to Richmond

We parted cheerfully, but he was not cheerful, nor was I. There are certain expressions of that powerful organ of spirit – the human face – which, although I have seen them often, and possess a doctor’s nerve, yet disturb me profoundly. One look of Mr. Jennings haunted me. It had seized my imagination with so dismal a power that I changed my plans for the evening, and went to the opera, feeling that I wanted a change of ideas.

I heard nothing of or from him for two or three days, when a note in his hand reached me. It was cheerful, and full of hope. He said that he had been for some little time so much better – quite well, in fact – that he was going to make a little experiment, and run down for a month or so to his parish, to try whether a little work might not quite set him up. There was in it a fervent religious expression of gratitude for his restoration, as he now almost hoped he might call it.

A day or two later I saw Lady Mary, who repeated what his note had announced, and told me that he was actually in Warwickshire, having resumed his clerical duties at Kenlis; and she added, “I begin to think that he is really perfectly well, and that there never was anything the matter, more than nerves and fancy; we are all nervous, but I fancy there is nothing like a little hard work for that kind of weakness, and he has made up his mind to try it. I should not be surprised if he did not come back for a year.”

Notwithstanding all this confidence, only two days later I had this note, dated from his house off Piccadilly:

Dear Sir, – I have returned disappointed. If I should feel at all able to see you, I shall write to ask you kindly to call. At present, I am too low, and, in fact, simply unable to say all I wish to say. Pray don’t mention my name to my friends. I can see no one. By-and-by, please God, you shall hear from me. I mean to take a run into Shropshire, where some of my people are. God bless you! May we, on my return, meet more happily than I can now write.

About a week after this I saw Lady Mary at her own house, the last person, she said, left in town, and just on the wing for Brighton, for the London season was quite over. She told me that she had heard from Mr. Jenning’s niece, Martha, in Shropshire. There was nothing to be gathered from her letter, more than that he was low and nervous. In those words, of which healthy people think so lightly, what a world of suffering is sometimes hidden!

Nearly five weeks had passed without any further news of Mr. Jennings. At the end of that time I received a note from him. He wrote:

“I have been in the country, and have had change of air, change of scene, change of faces, change of everything – and in everything – but myself. I have made up my mind, so far as the most irresolute creature on earth can do it, to tell my case fully to you. If your engagements will permit, pray come to me today, tomorrow, or the next day; but, pray defer as little as possible. You know not how much I need help. I have a quiet house at Richmond, where I now am. Perhaps you can manage to come to dinner, or to luncheon, or even to tea. You shall have no trouble in finding me out. The servant at Blank Street, who takes this note, will have a carriage at your door at any hour you please; and I am always to be found. You will say that I ought not to be alone. I have tried everything. Come and see.”

I called up the servant, and decided on going out the same evening, which accordingly I did.

He would have been much better in a lodging-house, or hotel, I thought, as I drove up through a short double row of sombre elms to a very old-fashioned brick house, darkened by the foliage of these trees, which overtopped, and nearly surrounded it. It was a perverse choice, for nothing could be imagined more triste and silent. The house, I found, belonged to him. He had stayed for a day or two in town, and, finding it for some cause insupportable, had come out here, probably because being furnished and his own, he was relieved of the thought and delay of selection, by coming here.

The sun had already set, and the red reflected light of the western sky illuminated the scene with the peculiar effect with which we are all familiar. The hall seemed very dark, but, getting to the back drawing-room, whose windows command the west, I was again in the same dusky light.

I sat down, looking out upon the richly-wooded landscape that glowed in the grand and melancholy light which was every moment fading. The corners of the room were already dark; all was growing dim, and the gloom was insensibly toning my mind, already prepared for what was sinister. I was waiting alone for his arrival, which soon took place. The door communicating with the front room opened, and the tall figure of Mr. Jennings, faintly seen in the ruddy twilight, came, with quiet stealthy steps, into the room.

We shook hands, and, taking a chair to the window, where there was still light enough to enable us to see each other’s faces, he sat down beside me, and, placing his hand upon my arm, with scarcely a word of preface began his narrative.

CHAPTER VI

How Mr. Jennings Met His Companion

The faint glow of the west, the pomp of the then lonely woods of Richmond, were before us, behind and about us the darkening room, and on the stony face of the sufferer – for the character of his face, though still gentle and sweet, was changed – rested that dim, odd glow which seems to descend and produce, where it touches, lights, sudden though faint, which are lost, almost without gradation, in darkness. The silence, too, was utter: not a distant wheel, or bark, or whistle from without; and within the depressing stillness of an invalid bachelor’s house.

I guessed well the nature, though not even vaguely the particulars of the revelations I was about to receive, from that fixed face of suffering that so oddly flushed stood out, like a portrait of Schalken’s, before its background of darkness.

“It began,” he said, “on the 15th of October, three years and eleven weeks ago, and two days – I keep very accurate count, for every day is torment. If I leave anywhere a chasm in my narrative tell me.

“About four years ago I began a work, which had cost me very much thought and reading. It was upon the religious metaphysics of the ancients.”

“I know,” said I, “the actual religion of educated and thinking paganism, quite apart from symbolic worship? A wide and very interesting field.”

“Yes, but not good for the mind – the Christian mind, I mean. Paganism is all bound together in essential unity, and, with evil sympathy, their religion involves their art, and both their manners, and the subject is a degrading fascination and the Nemesis sure. God forgive me!

“I wrote a great deal; I wrote late at night. I was always thinking on the subject, walking about, wherever I was, everywhere. It thoroughly infected me. You are to remember that all the material ideas connected with it were more or less of the beautiful, the subject itself delightfully interesting, and I, then, without a care.”

He sighed heavily.

“I believe that everyone who sets about writing in earnest does his work, as a friend of mine phrased it, on something – tea, or coffee, or tobacco. I suppose there is a material waste that must be hourly supplied in such occupations, or that we should grow too abstracted, and the mind, as it were, pass out of the body, unless it were reminded often enough of the connection by actual sensation. At all events, I felt the want, and I supplied it. Tea was my companion – at first the ordinary black tea, made in the usual way, not too strong: but I drank a good deal, and increased its strength as I went on. I never experienced an uncomfortable symptom from it. I began to take a little green tea. I found the effect pleasanter, it cleared and intensified the power of thought so, I had come to take it frequently, but not stronger than one might take it for pleasure. I wrote a great deal out here, it was so quiet, and in this room. I used to sit up very late, and it became a habit with me to sip my tea – green tea – every now and then as my work proceeded. I had a little kettle on my table, that swung over a lamp, and made tea two or three times between eleven o’clock and two or three in the morning, my hours of going to bed. I used to go into town every day. I was not a monk, and, although I spent an hour or two in a library, hunting up authorities and looking out lights upon my theme, I was in no morbid state as far as I can judge. I met my friends pretty much as usual and enjoyed their society, and, on the whole, existence had never been, I think, so pleasant before.

“I had met with a man who had some odd old books, German editions in mediaeval Latin, and I was only too happy to be permitted access to them. This obliging person’s books were in the City, a very out-of-the-way part of it. I had rather out-stayed my intended hour, and, on coming out, seeing no cab near, I was tempted to get into the omnibus which used to drive past this house. It was darker than this by the time the ’bus had reached an old house, you may have remarked, with four poplars at each side of the door, and there the last passenger but myself got out. We drove along rather faster. It was twilight now. I leaned back in my corner next the door ruminating pleasantly.

“The interior of the omnibus was nearly dark. I had observed in the corner opposite to me at the other side, and at the end next the horses, two small circular reflections, as it seemed to me of a reddish light. They were about two inches apart, and about the size of those small brass buttons that yachting men used to put upon their jackets. I began to speculate, as listless men will, upon this trifle, as it seemed. From what centre did that faint but deep red light come, and from what – glass beads, buttons, toy decorations – was it reflected? We were lumbering along gently, having nearly a mile still to go. I had not solved the puzzle, and it became in another minute more odd, for these two luminous points, with a sudden jerk, descended nearer and nearer the floor, keeping still their relative distance and horizontal position, and then, as suddenly, they rose to the level of the seat on which I was sitting and I saw them no more.

“My curiosity was now really excited, and, before I had time to think, I saw again these two dull lamps, again together near the floor; again they disappeared, and again in their old corner I saw them.

“So, keeping my eyes upon them, I edged quietly up my own side, towards the end at which I still saw these tiny discs of red.

“There was very little light in the ’bus. It was nearly dark. I leaned forward to aid my endeavour to discover what these little circles really were. They shifted position a little as I did so. I began now to perceive an outline of something black, and I soon saw, with tolerable distinctness, the outline of a small black monkey, pushing its face forward in mimicry to meet mine; those were its eyes, and I now dimly saw its teeth grinning at me.

“I drew back, not knowing whether it might not meditate a spring. I fancied that one of the passengers had forgot this ugly pet, and wishing to ascertain something of its temper, though not caring to trust my fingers to it, I poked my umbrella softly towards it. It remained immovable – up to it – through it. For through it, and back and forward it passed, without the slightest resistance.

“I can’t, in the least, convey to you the kind of horror that I felt. When I had ascertained that the thing was an illusion, as I then supposed, there came a misgiving about myself and a terror that fascinated me in impotence to remove my gaze from the eyes of the brute for some moments. As I looked, it made a little skip back, quite into the corner, and I, in a panic, found myself at the door, having put my head out, drawing deep breaths of the outer air, and staring at the lights and tress we were passing, too glad to reassure myself of reality.

“I stopped the ’bus and got out. I perceived the man look oddly at me as I paid him. I dare say there was something unusual in my looks and manner, for I had never felt so strangely before.”

CHAPTER VII

The Journey: First Stage

“When the omnibus drove on, and I was alone upon the road, I looked carefully round to ascertain whether the monkey had followed me. To my indescribable relief I saw it nowhere. I can’t describe easily what a shock I had received, and my sense of genuine gratitude on finding myself, as I supposed, quite rid of it.

“I had got out a little before we reached this house, two or three hundred steps. A brick wall runs along the footpath, and inside the wall is a hedge of yew, or some dark evergreen of that kind, and within that again the row of fine trees which you may have remarked as you came.

“This brick wall is about as high as my shoulder, and happening to raise my eyes I saw the monkey, with that stooping gait, on all fours, walking or creeping, close beside me, on top of the wall. I stopped, looking at it with a feeling of loathing and horror. As I stopped so did it. It sat up on the wall with its long hands on its knees looking at me. There was not light enough to see it much more than in outline, nor was it dark enough to bring the peculiar light of its eyes into strong relief. I still saw, however, that red foggy light plainly enough. It did not show its teeth, nor exhibit any sign of irritation, but seemed jaded and sulky, and was observing me steadily.

“I drew back into the middle of the road. It was an unconscious recoil, and there I stood, still looking at it. It did not move.

“With an instinctive determination to try something – anything, I turned about and walked briskly towards town with askance look, all the time, watching the movements of the beast. It crept swiftly along the wall, at exactly my pace.

“Where the wall ends, near the turn of the road, it came down, and with a wiry spring or two brought itself close to my feet, and continued to keep up with me, as I quickened my pace. It was at my left side, so close to my leg that I felt every moment as if I should tread upon it.

“The road was quite deserted and silent, and it was darker every moment. I stopped dismayed and bewildered, turning as I did so, the other way – I mean, towards this house, away from which I had been walking. When I stood still, the monkey drew back to a distance of, I suppose, about five or six yards, and remained stationary, watching me.

“I had been more agitated than I have said. I had read, of course, as everyone has, something about ‘spectral illusions,’ as you physicians term the phenomena of such cases. I considered my situation, and looked my misfortune in the face.

“These affections, I had read, are sometimes transitory and sometimes obstinate. I had read of cases in which the appearance, at first harmless, had, step by step, degenerated into something direful and insupportable, and ended by wearing its victim out. Still as I stood there, but for my bestial companion, quite alone, I tried to comfort myself by repeating again and again the assurance, ‘the thing is purely disease, a well-known physical affection, as distinctly as smallpox or neuralgia. Doctors are all agreed on that, philosophy demonstrates it. I must not be a fool. I’ve been sitting up too late, and I daresay my digestion is quite wrong, and, with God’s help, I shall be all right, and this is but a symptom of nervous dyspepsia.’ Did I believe all this? Not one word of it, no more than any other miserable being ever did who is once seized and riveted in this satanic captivity. Against my convictions, I might say my knowledge, I was simply bullying myself into a false courage.

“I now walked homeward. I had only a few hundred yards to go. I had forced myself into a sort of resignation, but I had not got over the sickening shock and the flurry of the first certainty of my misfortune.

“I made up my mind to pass the night at home. The brute moved close beside me, and I fancied there was the sort of anxious drawing toward the house, which one sees in tired horses or dogs, sometimes as they come toward home.

“I was afraid to go into town, I was afraid of anyone’s seeing and recognizing me. I was conscious of an irrepressible agitation in my manner. Also, I was afraid of any violent change in my habits, such as going to a place of amusement, or walking from home in order to fatigue myself. At the hall door it waited till I mounted the steps, and when the door was opened entered with me.

“I drank no tea that night. I got cigars and some brandy and water. My idea was that I should act upon my material system, and by living for a while in sensation apart from thought, send myself forcibly, as it were, into a new groove. I came up here to this drawing-room. I sat just here. The monkey then got upon a small table that then stood there. It looked dazed and languid. An irrepressible uneasiness as to its movements kept my eyes always upon it. Its eyes were half closed, but I could see them glow. It was looking steadily at me. In all situations, at all hours, it is awake and looking at me. That never changes.

“I shall not continue in detail my narrative of this particular night. I shall describe, rather, the phenomena of the first year, which never varied, essentially. I shall describe the monkey as it appeared in daylight. In the dark, as you shall presently hear, there are peculiarities. It is a small monkey, perfectly black. It had only one peculiarity – a character of malignity – unfathomable malignity. During the first year it looked sullen and sick. But this character of intense malice and vigilance was always underlying that surly languor. During all that time it acted as if on a plan of giving me as little trouble as was consistent with watching me. Its eyes were never off me. I have never lost sight of it, except in my sleep, light or dark, day or night, since it came here, excepting when it withdraws for some weeks at a time, unaccountably.

“In total dark it is visible as in daylight. I do not mean merely its eyes. It is all visible distinctly in a halo that resembles a glow of red embers, and which accompanies it in all its movements.

“When it leaves me for a time, it is always at night, in the dark, and in the same way. It grows at first uneasy, and then furious, and then advances towards me, grinning and shaking, its paws clenched, and, at the same time, there comes the appearance of fire in the grate. I never have any fire. I can’t sleep in the room where there is any, and it draws nearer and nearer to the chimney, quivering, it seems, with rage, and when its fury rises to the highest pitch, it springs into the grate, and up the chimney, and I see it no more.

“When first this happened, I thought I was released. I was now a new man. A day passed – a night – and no return, and a blessed week – a week – another week. I was always on my knees, Dr. Hesselius, always, thanking God and praying. A whole month passed of liberty, but on a sudden, it was with me again.”

CHAPTER VIII

The Second Stage

“It was with me, and the malice which before was torpid under a sullen exterior, was now active. It was perfectly unchanged in every other respect. This new energy was apparent in its activity and its looks, and soon in other ways.

“For a time, you will understand, the change was shown only in an increased vivacity, and an air of menace, as if it were always brooding over some atrocious plan. Its eyes, as before, were never off me.”

“Is it here now?” I asked.

“No,” he replied, “it has been absent exactly a fortnight and a day – fifteen days. It has sometimes been away so long as nearly two months, once for three. Its absence always exceeds a fortnight, although it may be but by a single day. Fifteen days having passed since I saw it last, it may return now at any moment.”

“Is its return,” I asked, “accompanied by any peculiar manifestation?”

“Nothing – no,” he said. “It is simply with me again. On lifting my eyes from a book, or turning my head, I see it, as usual, looking at me, and then it remains, as before, for its appointed time. I have never told so much and so minutely before to anyone.”

I perceived that he was agitated, and looking like death, and he repeatedly applied his handkerchief to his forehead; I suggested that he might be tired, and told him that I would call, with pleasure, in the morning, but he said:

“No, if you don’t mind hearing it all now. I have got so far, and I should prefer making one effort of it. When I spoke to Dr. Harley, I had nothing like so much to tell. You are a philosophic physician. You give spirit its proper rank. If this thing is real—”

He paused looking at me with agitated inquiry.

“We can discuss it by-and-by, and very fully. I will give you all I think,” I answered, after an interval.

“Well – very well. If it is anything real, I say, it is prevailing, little by little, and drawing me more interiorly into hell. Optic nerves, he talked of. Ah! well – there are other nerves of communication. May God Almighty help me! You shall hear.

“Its power of action, I tell you, had increased. Its malice became, in a way, aggressive. About two years ago, some questions that were pending between me and the bishop having been settled, I went down to my parish in Warwickshire, anxious to find occupation in my profession. I was not prepared for what happened, although I have since thought I might have apprehended something like it. The reason of my saying so is this—”

He was beginning to speak with a great deal more effort and reluctance, and sighed often, and seemed at times nearly overcome. But at this time his manner was not agitated. It was more like that of a sinking patient, who has given himself up.

“Yes, but I will first tell you about Kenlis, my parish.

“It was with me when I left this place for Dawlbridge. It was my silent travelling companion, and it remained with me at the vicarage. When I entered on the discharge of my duties, another change took place. The thing exhibited an atrocious determination to thwart me. It was with me in the church – in the reading-desk – in the pulpit – within the communion rails. At last, it reached this extremity, that while I was reading to the congregation, it would spring upon the book and squat there, so that I was unable to see the page. This happened more than once.

“I left Dawlbridge for a time. I placed myself in Dr. Harley’s hands. I did everything he told me. He gave my case a great deal of thought. It interested him, I think. He seemed successful. For nearly three months I was perfectly free from a return. I began to think I was safe. With his full assent I returned to Dawlbridge.

“I travelled in a chaise. I was in good spirits. I was more – I was happy and grateful. I was returning, as I thought, delivered from a dreadful hallucination, to the scene of duties which I longed to enter upon. It was a beautiful sunny evening, everything looked serene and cheerful, and I was delighted. I remember looking out of the window to see the spire of my church at Kenlis among the trees, at the point where one has the earliest view of it. It is exactly where the little stream that bounds the parish passes under the road by a culvert, and where it emerges at the roadside, a stone with an old inscription is placed. As we passed this point, I drew my head in and sat down, and in the corner of the chaise was the monkey.

“For a moment I felt faint, and then quite wild with despair and horror. I called to the driver, and got out, and sat down at the roadside, and prayed to God silently for mercy. A despairing resignation supervened. My companion was with me as I re-entered the vicarage. The same persecution followed. After a short struggle I submitted, and soon I left the place.

“I told you,” he said, “that the beast has before this become in certain ways aggressive. I will explain a little. It seemed to be actuated by intense and increasing fury, whenever I said my prayers, or even meditated prayer. It amounted at last to a dreadful interruption. You will ask, how could a silent immaterial phantom effect that? It was thus, whenever I meditated praying; It was always before me, and nearer and nearer.

“It used to spring on a table, on the back of a chair, on the chimney-piece, and slowly to swing itself from side to side, looking at me all the time. There is in its motion an indefinable power to dissipate thought, and to contract one’s attention to that monotony, till the ideas shrink, as it were, to a point, and at last to nothing – and unless I had started up, and shook off the catalepsy I have felt as if my mind were on the point of losing itself. There are other ways,” he sighed heavily; “thus, for instance, while I pray with my eyes closed, it comes closer and closer, and I see it. I know it is not to be accounted for physically, but I do actually see it, though my lids are dosed, and so it rocks my mind, as it were, and overpowers me, and I am obliged to rise from my knees. If you had ever yourself known this, you would be acquainted with desperation.”

CHAPTER IX

The Third Stage

“I see, Dr. Hesselius, that you don’t lose one word of my statement. I need not ask you to listen specially to what I am now going to tell you. They talk of the optic nerves, and of spectral illusions, as if the organ of sight was the only point assailable by the influences that have fastened upon me – I know better. For two years in my direful case that limitation prevailed. But as food is taken in softly at the lips, and then brought under the teeth, as the tip of the little finger caught in a mill crank will draw in the hand, and the arm, and the whole body, so the miserable mortal who has been once caught firmly by the end of the finest fibre of his nerve, is drawn in and in, by the enormous machinery of hell, until he is as I am. Yes, Doctor, as I am, for a while I talk to you, and implore relief, I feel that my prayer is for the impossible, and my pleading with the inexorable.”

I endeavoured to calm his visibly increasing agitation, and told him that he must not despair.

While we talked the night had overtaken us. The filmy moonlight was wide over the scene which the window commanded, and I said:

“Perhaps you would prefer having candles. This light, you know, is odd. I should wish you, as much as possible, under your usual conditions while I make my diagnosis, shall I call it – otherwise I don’t care.”

“All lights are the same to me,” he said; “except when I read or write, I care not if night were perpetual. I am going to tell you what happened about a year ago. The thing began to speak to me.”

“Speak! How do you mean – speak as a man does, do you mean?”

“Yes; speak in words and consecutive sentences, with perfect coherence and articulation; but there is a peculiarity. It is not like the tone of a human voice. It is not by my ears it reaches me – it comes like a singing through my head.

“This faculty, the power of speaking to me, will be my undoing. It won’t let me pray, it interrupts me with dreadful blasphemies. I dare not go on, I could not. Oh! Doctor, can the skill, and thought, and prayers of man avail me nothing!”

“You must promise me, my dear sir, not to trouble yourself with unnecessarily exciting thoughts; confine yourself strictly to the narrative of facts; and recollect, above all, that even if the thing that infests you be, you seem to suppose a reality with an actual independent life and will, yet it can have no power to hurt you, unless it be given from above: its access to your senses depends mainly upon your physical condition – this is, under God, your comfort and reliance: we are all alike environed. It is only that in your case, the ‘paries,’ the veil of the flesh, the screen, is a little out of repair, and sights and sounds are transmitted. We must enter on a new course, sir, – be encouraged. I’ll give tonight to the careful consideration of the whole case.”

“You are very good, sir; you think it worth trying, you don’t give me quite up; but, sir, you don’t know, it is gaining such an influence over me: it orders me about, it is such a tyrant, and I’m growing so helpless. May God deliver me!”

“It orders you about – of course you mean by speech?”

“Yes, yes; it is always urging me to crimes, to injure others, or myself. You see, Doctor, the situation is urgent, it is indeed. When I was in Shropshire, a few weeks ago” (Mr. Jennings was speaking rapidly and trembling now, holding my arm with one hand, and looking in my face), “I went out one day with a party of friends for a walk: my persecutor, I tell you, was with me at the time. I lagged behind the rest: the country near the Dee, you know, is beautiful. Our path happened to lie near a coal mine, and at the verge of the wood is a perpendicular shaft, they say, a hundred and fifty feet deep. My niece had remained behind with me – she knows, of course nothing of the nature of my sufferings. She knew, however, that I had been ill, and was low, and she remained to prevent my being quite alone. As we loitered slowly on together, the brute that accompanied me was urging me to throw myself down the shaft. I tell you now – oh, sir, think of it! – the one consideration that saved me from that hideous death was the fear lest the shock of witnessing the occurrence should be too much for the poor girl. I asked her to go on and walk with her friends, saying that I could go no further. She made excuses, and the more I urged her the firmer she became. She looked doubtful and frightened. I suppose there was something in my looks or manner that alarmed her; but she would not go, and that literally saved me. You had no idea, sir, that a living man could be made so abject a slave of Satan,” he said, with a ghastly groan and a shudder.

There was a pause here, and I said, “You were preserved nevertheless. It was the act of God. You are in His hands and in the power of no other being: be therefore confident for the future.”

CHAPTER X

Home

I made him have candles lighted, and saw the room looking cheery and inhabited before I left him. I told him that he must regard his illness strictly as one dependent on physical, though subtle physical causes. I told him that he had evidence of God’s care and love in the deliverance which he had just described, and that I had perceived with pain that he seemed to regard its peculiar features as indicating that he had been delivered over to spiritual reprobation. Than such a conclusion nothing could be, I insisted, less warranted; and not only so, but more contrary to facts, as disclosed in his mysterious deliverance from that murderous influence during his Shropshire excursion. First, his niece had been retained by his side without his intending to keep her near him; and, secondly, there had been infused into his mind an irresistible repugnance to execute the dreadful suggestion in her presence.

As I reasoned this point with him, Mr. Jennings wept. He seemed comforted. One promise I exacted, which was that should the monkey at any time return, I should be sent for immediately; and, repeating my assurance that I would give neither time nor thought to any other subject until I had thoroughly investigated his case, and that tomorrow he should hear the result, I took my leave.

Before getting into the carriage I told the servant that his master was far from well, and that he should make a point of frequently looking into his room. My own arrangements I made with a view to being quite secure from interruption.

I merely called at my lodgings, and with a travelling-desk and carpetbag, set off in a hackney carriage for an inn about two miles out of town, called “The Horns,” a very quiet and comfortable house, with good thick walls. And there I resolved, without the possibility of intrusion or distraction, to devote some hours of the night, in my comfortable sitting-room, to Mr. Jennings’ case, and so much of the morning as it might require.

(There occurs here a careful note of Dr. Hesselius’ opinion upon the case, and of the habits, dietary, and medicines which he prescribed. It is curious – some persons would say mystical. But, on the whole, I doubt whether it would sufficiently interest a reader of the kind I am likely to meet with, to warrant its being here reprinted. The whole letter was plainly written at the inn where he had hid himself for the occasion. The next letter is dated from his town lodgings.)

I left town for the inn where I slept last night at half-past nine, and did not arrive at my room in town until one o’clock this afternoon. I found a letter in Mr. Jennings’ hand upon my table. It had not come by post, and, on inquiry, I learned that Mr. Jennings’ servant had brought it, and on learning that I was not to return until today, and that no one could tell him my address, he seemed very uncomfortable, and said his orders from his master were that that he was not to return without an answer.

I opened the letter and read:

Dear Dr. Hesselius. – It is here. You had not been an hour gone when it returned. It is speaking. It knows all that has happened. It knows everything – it knows you, and is frantic and atrocious. It reviles. I send you this. It knows every word I have written – I write. This I promised, and I therefore write, but I fear very confused, very incoherently. I am so interrupted, disturbed.

Ever yours, sincerely yours,

Robert Lynder Jennings.

“When did this come?” I asked.

“About eleven last night: the man was here again, and has been here three times today. The last time is about an hour since.”

Thus answered, and with the notes I had made upon his case in my pocket, I was in a few minutes driving towards Richmond, to see Mr. Jennings.

I by no means, as you perceive, despaired of Mr. Jennings’ case. He had himself remembered and applied, though quite in a mistaken way, the principle which I lay down in my Metaphysical Medicine, and which governs all such cases. I was about to apply it in earnest. I was profoundly interested, and very anxious to see and examine him while the “enemy” was actually present.

I drove up to the sombre house, and ran up the steps, and knocked. The door, in a little time, was opened by a tall woman in black silk. She looked ill, and as if she had been crying. She curtseyed, and heard my question, but she did not answer. She turned her face away, extending her hand towards two men who were coming downstairs; and thus having, as it were, tacitly made me over to them, she passed through a side door hastily and shut it.

The man who was nearest the hall, I at once accosted, but being now close to him, I was shocked to see that both his hands were covered with blood.

I drew back a little, and the man, passing downstairs, merely said in a low tone, “Here’s the servant, sir.”

The servant had stopped on the stairs, confounded and dumb at seeing me. He was rubbing his hands in a handkerchief, and it was steeped in blood.

“Jones, what is it? what has happened?” I asked, while a sickening suspicion overpowered me.

The man asked me to come up to the lobby. I was beside him in a moment, and, frowning and pallid, with contracted eyes, he told me the horror which I already half guessed.

His master had made away with himself.

I went upstairs with him to the room – what I saw there I won’t tell you. He had cut his throat with his razor. It was a frightful gash. The two men had laid him on the bed, and composed his limbs. It had happened, as the immense pool of blood on the floor declared, at some distance between the bed and the window. There was carpet round his bed, and a carpet under his dressing-table, but none on the rest of the floor, for the man said he did not like a carpet on his bedroom. In this sombre and now terrible room, one of the great elms that darkened the house was slowly moving the shadow of one of its great boughs upon this dreadful floor.

I beckoned to the servant, and we went downstairs together. I turned off the hall into an old-fashioned panelled room, and there standing, I heard all the servant had to tell. It was not a great deal.

“I concluded, sir, from your words, and looks, sir, as you left last night, that you thought my master was seriously ill. I thought it might be that you were afraid of a fit, or something. So I attended very close to your directions. He sat up late, till past three o’clock. He was not writing or reading. He was talking a great deal to himself, but that was nothing unusual. At about that hour I assisted him to undress, and left him in his slippers and dressing-gown. I went back softly in about half an hour. He was in his bed, quite undressed, and a pair of candles lighted on the table beside his bed. He was leaning on his elbow, and looking out at the other side of the bed when I came in. I asked him if he wanted anything, and he said No.

“I don’t know whether it was what you said to me, sir, or something a little unusual about him, but I was uneasy, uncommon uneasy about him last night.

“In another half hour, or it might be a little more, I went up again. I did not hear him talking as before. I opened the door a little. The candles were both out, which was not usual. I had a bedroom candle, and I let the light in, a little bit, looking softly round. I saw him sitting in that chair beside the dressing-table with his clothes on again. He turned round and looked at me. I thought it strange he should get up and dress, and put out the candles to sit in the dark, that way. But I only asked him again if I could do anything for him. He said, No, rather sharp, I thought. I asked him if I might light the candles, and he said, ‘Do as you like, Jones.’ So I lighted them, and I lingered about the room, and he said, ‘Tell me truth, Jones; why did you come again – you did not hear anyone cursing?’ ‘No, sir,’ I said, wondering what he could mean.

“‘No,’ said he, after me, ‘of course, no;’ and I said to him, ‘Wouldn’t it be well, sir, you went to bed? It’s just five o’clock;’ and he said nothing, but, ‘Very likely; good-night, Jones.’ So I went, sir, but in less than an hour I came again. The door was fast, and he heard me, and called as I thought from the bed to know what I wanted, and he desired me not to disturb him again. I lay down and slept for a little. It must have been between six and seven when I went up again. The door was still fast, and he made no answer, so I did not like to disturb him, and thinking he was asleep, I left him till nine. It was his custom to ring when he wished me to come, and I had no particular hour for calling him. I tapped very gently, and getting no answer, I stayed away a good while, supposing he was getting some rest then. It was not till eleven o’clock I grew really uncomfortable about him – for at the latest he was never, that I could remember, later than half-past ten. I got no answer. I knocked and called, and still no answer. So not being able to force the door, I called Thomas from the stables, and together we forced it, and found him in the shocking way you saw.”

Jones had no more to tell. Poor Mr. Jennings was very gentle, and very kind. All his people were fond of him. I could see that the servant was very much moved.

So, dejected and agitated, I passed from that terrible house, and its dark canopy of elms, and I hope I shall never see it more. While I write to you I feel like a man who has but half waked from a frightful and monotonous dream. My memory rejects the picture with incredulity and horror. Yet I know it is true. It is the story of the process of a poison, a poison which excites the reciprocal action of spirit and nerve, and paralyses the tissue that separates those cognate functions of the senses, the external and the interior. Thus we find strange bedfellows, and the mortal and immortal prematurely make acquaintance.

Conclusion

A Word for Those who Suffer

My dear Van L———, you have suffered from an affection similar to that which I have just described. You twice complained of a return of it.

Who, under God, cured you? Your humble servant, Martin Hesselius. Let me rather adopt the more emphasised piety of a certain good old French surgeon of three hundred years ago: “I treated, and God cured you.”

Come, my friend, you are not to be hippish. Let me tell you a fact.

I have met with, and treated, as my book shows, fifty-seven cases of this kind of vision, which I term indifferently “sublimated,” “precocious,” and “interior.”

There is another class of affections which are truly termed – though commonly confounded with those which I describe – spectral illusions. These latter I look upon as being no less simply curable than a cold in the head or a trifling dyspepsia.

It is those which rank in the first category that test our promptitude of thought. Fifty-seven such cases have I encountered, neither more nor less. And in how many of these have I failed? In no one single instance.

There is no one affliction of mortality more easily and certainly reducible, with a little patience, and a rational confidence in the physician. With these simple conditions, I look upon the cure as absolutely certain.

You are to remember that I had not even commenced to treat Mr. Jennings’ case. I have not any doubt that I should have cured him perfectly in eighteen months, or possibly it might have extended to two years. Some cases are very rapidly curable, others extremely tedious. Every intelligent physician who will give thought and diligence to the task, will effect a cure.

You know my tract on “The Cardinal Functions of the Brain.” I there, by the evidence of innumerable facts, prove, as I think, the high probability of a circulation arterial and venous in its mechanism, through the nerves. Of this system, thus considered, the brain is the heart. The fluid, which is propagated hence through one class of nerves, returns in an altered state through another, and the nature of that fluid is spiritual, though not immaterial, any more than, as I before remarked, light or electricity are so.

By various abuses, among which the habitual use of such agents as green tea is one, this fluid may be affected as to its quality, but it is more frequently disturbed as to equilibrium. This fluid being that which we have in common with spirits, a congestion found upon the masses of brain or nerve, connected with the interior sense, forms a surface unduly exposed, on which disembodied spirits may operate: communication is thus more or less effectually established. Between this brain circulation and the heart circulation there is an intimate sympathy. The seat, or rather the instrument of exterior vision, is the eye. The seat of interior vision is the nervous tissue and brain, immediately about and above the eyebrow. You remember how effectually I dissipated your pictures by the simple application of iced eau-de-cologne. Few cases, however, can be treated exactly alike with anything like rapid success. Cold acts powerfully as a repellant of the nervous fluid. Long enough continued it will even produce that permanent insensibility which we call numbness, and a little longer, muscular as well as sensational paralysis.

I have not, I repeat, the slightest doubt that I should have first dimmed and ultimately sealed that inner eye which Mr. Jennings had inadvertently opened. The same senses are opened in delirium tremens, and entirely shut up again when the over-action of the cerebral heart, and the prodigious nervous congestions that attend it, are terminated by a decided change in the state of the body. It is by acting steadily upon the body, by a simple process, that this result is produced – and inevitably produced – I have never yet failed.

Poor Mr. Jennings made away with himself. But that catastrophe was the result of a totally different malady, which, as it were, projected itself upon the disease which was established. His case was in the distinctive manner a complication, and the complaint under which he really succumbed, was hereditary suicidal mania. Poor Mr. Jennings I cannot call a patient of mine, for I had not even begun to treat his case, and he had not yet given me, I am convinced, his full and unreserved confidence. If the patient do not array himself on the side of the disease, his cure is certain.

“All The Year Round” magazine, 23 Oct.-13 Nov. 1869

In a Glass Darkly (1872)

THE FAMILIAR

(1847 / 1872)

SEE APPENDIX FOR EARLY VERSION

PROLOGUE

Out of about two hundred and thirty cases more or less nearly akin to that I have entitled “Green Tea,” I select the following which I call “The Familiar.”

To this MS., Doctor Hesselius has, after his wont, attached some sheets of letter-paper, on which are written, in his hand nearly as compact as print, his own remarks upon the case. He says:

“In point of conscience, no more unexceptionable narrator than the venerable Irish Clergyman who has given me this paper, on Mr. Barton’s case, could have been chosen. The statement is, however, medically imperfect. The report of an intelligent physician, who had marked its progress, and attended the patient, from its earlier stages to its close, would have supplied what is wanting to enable me to pronounce with confidence. I should have been acquainted with Mr Barton’s probable hereditary predispositions; I should have known, possibly by very early indicators, something of a remoter origin of the disease than can now be ascertained.

“In a rough way, we may reduce all similar cases to three distinct classes. They are founded on the primary distinction between the subjective and the objective. Of those whose senses are alleged to be subject to supernatural impressions – some are simply visionaries, and propagate the illusions of which they complain from diseased brain or nerves. Others are, unquestionably, infested by, as we term them, spiritual agencies, exterior to themselves. Others, again, owe their sufferings to a mixed condition. The interior sense, it is true, is opened; but it has been and continues open by the action of disease. This form of disease may, in one sense, be compared to the loss of the scarf-skin, and a consequent exposure of surfaces for whose excessive sensitiveness nature has provided a muffling. The loss of this covering is attended by an habitual impassibility, by influences against which we were intended to be guarded. But in the case of the brain, and the nerves immediately connected with its functions and its sensuous impressions, the cerebral circulation undergoes periodically that vibratory disturbance which, I believe, I have satisfactorily examined and demonstrated in my MS. Essay, A. 17. This vibratory disturbance differs, as I there prove, essentially from the congestive disturbance, the phenomena of which are examined in A. 19. It is, when excessive, invariably accompanied by illusions.

“Had I seen Mr. Barton, and examined him upon the points in his case which need elucidation, I should have without difficulty referred those phenomena to their proper disease. My diagnosis is now, necessarily, conjectural.”

Thus writes Doctor Hesselius; and adds a great deal which is of interest only to a scientific physician.

The Narrative of the Rev. Thomas Herbert, which furnishes all that is known of the case will be found in the chapters that follow.

CHAPTER I

Footsteps

I was a young man at the time, and intimately acquainted with some of the actors in this strange tale; the impression which its incidents made on me, therefore, were deep and lasting. I shall now endeavour, with precision, to relate them all, combining, of course, in the narrative, whatever I have learned from various sources, tending, however imperfectly, to illuminate the darkness which involves its progress and termination.

Somewhere about the year 1794, the younger brother of a certain baronet, whom I shall call Sir James Barton, returned to Dublin. He had served in the navy with some distinction, having commanded one of His Majesty’s frigates during the greater part of the American war. Captain Barton was apparently some two or three-and-forty years of age. He was an intelligent and agreeable companion when he pleased it, though generally reserved, and occasionally even moody.

In society, however, he deported himself as a man of the world, and a gentleman. He had not contracted any of the noisy brusqueness sometimes acquired at sea; on the contrary, his manners were remarkably easy, quiet, and even polished. He was in person about the middle size, and somewhat strongly formed – his countenance was marked with the lines of thought, and on the whole wore an expression of gravity and melancholy. Being, however, as I have said, a man of perfect breeding, as well as of good family and in affluent circumstances, he had, of course, ready access to the best society of Dublin without the necessity of any other credentials.

In his personal habits Mr. Barton was unexpensive. He occupied lodgings in one of the then fashionable streets in the south side of the town – kept but one horse and one servant – and though a reputed free-thinker, yet lived an orderly and moral life – indulging neither in gaming, drinking, nor any other vicious pursuit – living very much to himself, without forming intimacies, or choosing any companions, and appearing to mix in gay society rather for the sake of its bustle and distraction, than for any opportunities it offered of interchanging thought or feeling with its votaries.

Barton was, therefore, pronounced a saving, prudent, unsocial sort of fellow, who bid fair to maintain his celibacy alike against stratagem and assault, and was likely to live to a good old age, die rich, and leave his money to an hospital.

It was now apparent, however, that the nature of Mr Barton’s plans had been totally misconceived. A young lady, whom I shall call Miss Montague, was at this time introduced into the gay world by her aunt, the Dowager Lady L———. Miss Montague was decidedly pretty and accomplished, and having some natural cleverness and a great deal of gaiety, became for a while a reigning toast.

Her popularity, however, gained her for a time nothing more than that unsubstantial admiration which, however pleasant as an incense to vanity, is by no means necessarily antecedent to matrimony – for, unhappily for the young lady in question, it was an understood thing that, beyond her personal attractions, she had no kind of earthly provision. Such being the state of affairs, it will readily be believed that no little surprise was consequent upon the appearance of Captain Barton as the avowed lover of the penniless Miss Montague.

His suit prospered, as might have been expected, and in a short time it was communicated by old Lady L——— to each of her hundred-and-fifty particular friends in succession, that Captain Barton had actually tendered proposals of marriage, with her approbation, to her niece, Miss Montague, who had, moreover, accepted the offer of his hand, conditionally upon the consent of her father, who was then upon his homeward voyage from India, and expected in two or three weeks at the furthest.

About this consent there could be no doubt – the delay, therefore, was one merely of form – they were looked upon as absolutely engaged, and Lady L———, with a rigour of old-fashioned decorum with which her niece would, no doubt, gladly have dispensed, withdrew her thenceforward from all further participation in the gaieties of the town.

Captain Barton was a constant visitor, as well as a frequent guest at the house, and was permitted all the privileges of intimacy which a betrothed suitor is usually accorded. Such was the relation of parties, when the mysterious circumstances which darken this narrative first began to unfold themselves.

Lady L——— resided in a handsome mansion at the north side of Dublin, and Captain Barton’s lodgings, as we have already said, were situated at the south. The distance intervening was considerable, and it was Captain Barton’s habit generally to walk home without an attendant, as often as he passed the evening with the old lady and her fair charge.

His shortest way in such nocturnal walks lay, for a considerable space, through a line of street which had as yet merely been laid out, and little more than the foundations of the houses constructed.

One night, shortly after his engagement with Miss Montague had commenced, he happened to remain unusually late, in company with her and Lady L———. The conversation had turned upon the evidences of revelation, which he had disputed with the callous scepticism of a confirmed infidel. What were called “French principles” had in those days found their way a good deal into fashionable society, especially that portion of it which professed allegiance to Whiggism, and neither the old lady nor her charge were so perfectly free from the taint as to look upon Mr. Barton’s views as any serious objection to the proposed union.

The discussion had degenerated into one upon the supernatural and the marvellous, in which he had pursued precisely the same line of argument and ridicule. In all this, it is but truth to state, Captain Barton was guilty of no affectation – the doctrines upon which he insisted, were, in reality, but too truly the basis of his own fixed belief, if so it might be called; and perhaps not the least strange of the many strange circumstances connected with my narrative was the fact that the subject of the fearful influences I am about to describe was himself, from the deliberate conviction of years, an utter disbeliever in what are usually termed preternatural agencies.

It was considerably past midnight when Mr. Barton took his leave and set out upon his solitary walk homeward. He had now reached the lonely road, with its unfinished dwarf walls tracing the foundations of the projected row of houses on either side – the moon was shining mistily, and its imperfect light made the road he trod but additionally dreary – that utter silence which has in it something indefinably exciting reigned there and made the sound of his steps, which alone broke it, unnaturally loud and distinct.

He had proceeded thus some way, when he, on a sudden, heard other footfalls, pattering at a measured pace, and, as it seemed, about two score steps behind him.

The suspicion of being dogged is at all times unpleasant: it is, however, especially so in a spot so lonely: and this suspicion became so strong in the mind of Captain Barton, that he abruptly turned about to confront his pursuer, but, though there was quite sufficient moonlight to disclose any object upon the road he had traversed, no form of any kind was visible there.

The steps he had heard could not have been the reverberation of his own, for he stamped his foot upon the ground, and walked briskly up and down, in the vain attempt to awake an echo; though by no means a fanciful person, therefore, he was at last fain to charge the sounds upon his imagination, and treat them as an illusion. Thus satisfying himself he resumed his walk, and before he had proceeded a dozen paces the mysterious footfall was again audible from behind, and this time, as if with the special design of showing that the sounds were not the responses of an echo, the steps sometimes slackened nearly to a halt, and sometimes hurried for six or eight strides to a run, and again abated to a walk.

Captain Barton, as before, turned suddenly round, and with the same result – no object was visible above the deserted level of the road. He walked back over the same ground, determined that, whatever might have been the cause of the sounds which had so disconcerted him, it should not escape his search – the endeavour, however, was unrewarded.

In spite of all his scepticism he felt something like a superstitious fear stealing fast upon him, and with these unwonted and uncomfortable sensations he once more turned and pursued his way. There was no repetition of these haunting sounds until he had reached the point where he had last stopped to retrace his steps – here they were resumed – and with sudden starts of running which threatened to bring the unseen pursuer up to the alarmed pedestrian.

Captain Barton arrested his course as formerly – the unaccountable nature of the occurrence filled him with vague and disagreeable sensations – and yielding to the excitement that was gaining upon him, he shouted sternly, “Who goes there?” The sound of one’s own voice, thus exerted, in utter solitude, and followed by total silence, has in it something unpleasantly dismaying, and he felt a degree of nervousness which, perhaps, from no cause had he ever known before.

To the very end of this solitary street the steps pursued him – and it required a strong effort of stubborn pride on his part to resist the impulse that prompted him every moment to run for safety at the top of his speed. It was not until he had reached his lodgings, and sat by his own fireside, that he felt sufficiently reassured to rearrange and reconsider in his own mind the occurrences which had so discomposed him. So little a matter, after all, is sufficient to upset the pride of scepticism and vindicate the old simple laws of nature within us.

CHAPTER II

The Watcher

Mr. Barton was next morning sitting at a late breakfast, reflecting upon the incidents of the previous night, with more of inquisitiveness than awe, so speedily do gloomy impressions upon the fancy disappear under the cheerful influence of day, when a letter just delivered by the postman was placed upon the table before him.

There was nothing remarkable in the address of this missive, except that it was written in a hand which he did not know – perhaps it was disguised – for the tall narrow characters were sloped backward; and with the self-inflicted suspense which we often see practised in such cases he puzzled over the inscription for a full minute before he broke the seal. When he did so he read the following words, written in the same hand:

“Mr. Barton, late captain of the ‘Dolphin,’ is warned of DANGER. He will do wisely to avoid ——— Street – (here the locality of his last night’s adventure was named) if he walks there as usual he will meet with something unlucky – let him take warning, once for all, for he has reason to dread

THE WATCHER.”

Captain Barton read and re-read this strange effusion; in every light and in every direction he turned it over and over; he examined the paper on which it was written, and scrutinized the handwriting once more. Defeated here, he turned to the seal; it was nothing but a patch of wax, upon which the accidental impression of a thumb was imperfectly visible.

There was not the slightest mark, or clue of any kind, to lead him to even a guess as to its possible origin. The writer’s object seemed a friendly one, and yet he subscribed himself as one whom he had “reason to dread.” Altogether the letter, its author, and its real purpose were to him an inexplicable puzzle, and one, moreover, unpleasantly suggestive, in his mind, of other associations connected with his last night’s adventure.

In obedience to some feeling – perhaps of pride – Mr. Barton did not communicate, even to his intended bride, the occurrences which I have just detailed. Trifling as they might appear, they had in reality most disagreeably affected his imagination, and he cared not to disclose, even to the young lady in question, what she might possibly look upon as evidences of weakness. The letter might very well be but a hoax, and the mysterious footfall but a delusion or a trick. But although he affected to treat the whole affair as unworthy of a thought, it yet haunted him pertinaciously, tormenting him with perplexing doubts and depressing him with undefined apprehensions. Certain it is, that for a considerable time afterwards he carefully avoided the street indicated in the letter as the scene of danger.

It was not until about a week after the receipt of the letter which I have transcribed, that anything further occurred to remind Captain Barton of its contents, or to counteract the gradual disappearance from his mind of the disagreeable impressions then received.

He was returning one night, after the interval I have stated, from the theatre, which was then situated in Crow Street, and having there seen Miss Montague and Lady L——— into their carriage he loitered for some time with two or three acquaintances.

With these, however, he parted close to the college, and pursued his way alone. It was now fully one o’clock, and the streets were quite deserted. During the whole of his walk with the companions from whom he had just parted he had been at times painfully aware of the sound of steps, as it seemed, dogging them on their way.

Once or twice he had looked back, in the uneasy anticipation that he was again about to experience the same mysterious annoyances which had so disconcerted him a week before, and earnestly hoping that he might see some form to account naturally for the sounds. But the street was deserted – no one was visible.

Proceeding now quite alone upon his homeward way he grew really nervous and uncomfortable, as he became sensible, with increased distinctness, of the well-known and now absolutely dreaded sounds.

By the side of the dead wall which bounded the college park, the sounds followed, recommencing almost simultaneously with his own steps. The same unequal pace – sometimes slow, sometimes for a score yards or so, quickened almost to a run – was audible from behind him. Again and again he turned; quickly and stealthily he glanced over his shoulder – almost at every half-dozen steps; but no one was visible.

The irritation of this intangible and unseen pursuit became gradually all but intolerable; and when at last he reached his home his nerves were strung to such a pitch of excitement that he could not rest, and did not attempt even to lie down until after the daylight had broken.

He was awakened by a knock at his chamber door, and his servant, entering, handed him several letters which had just been received by the penny post. One among them instantly arrested his attention – a single glance at the direction aroused him thoroughly. He at once recognized its character, and read as follows:

“You may as well think, Captain Barton, to escape from your own shadow as from me; do what you may, I will see you as often I please, and you shall see me, for I do not want to hide myself, as you fancy. Do not let it trouble your rest, Captain Barton; for, with a good conscience, what need you fear from the eye of

THE WATCHER.”

It is scarcely necessary to dwell upon the feelings that accompanied a perusal of this strange communication. Captain Barton was observed to be unusually absent and out of spirits for several days afterwards…. But no one divined the cause.

Whatever he might think as to the phantom steps which followed him, there could be no possible illusion about the letters he had received; and, to say the least, their immediate sequence upon the mysterious sounds which had haunted him, was an odd coincidence.

The whole circumstance was, in his own mind, vaguely and instinctively connected with certain passages in his past life, which, of all others, he hated to remember.

It happened, however, that in addition to his own approaching nuptials, Captain Barton had just then – fortunately, perhaps, for himself – some business of an engrossing kind connected with the adjustment of a large and long-litigated claim upon certain properties.

The hurry and excitement of business had its natural effect in gradually dispelling the gloom which had for a time occasionally oppressed him, and in a little while his spirits had entirely recovered their accustomed tone.

During all this time, however, he was, now and then, dismayed by indistinct and half-heard repetitions of the same annoyance, and that in lonely places, in the daytime as well as after nightfall. These renewals of the strange impressions from which he had suffered so much, were, however, desultory and faint, insomuch that often he really could not, to his own satisfaction, distinguish between them and the mere suggestions of an excited imagination.

One evening he walked down to the House of Commons with a Member, an acquaintance of his and mine. This was one of the few occasions upon which I have been in company with Captain Barton. As we walked down together, I observed that he became absent and silent, and to a degree that seemed to argue the pressure of some urgent and absorbing anxiety.

I afterwards learned that during the whole of our walk he had heard the well-known footsteps tracking him as we proceeded.

This, however, was the last time he suffered from this phase of the persecution, of which he was already the anxious victim. A new and a very different one was about to be presented.

CHAPTER III

An Advertisement

Of the new series of impressions which were afterwards gradually to work out his destiny, I that evening witnessed the fact; and but for its relation to the train of events which followed, the incident would scarcely have been now remembered by me.

As we were walking in at the passage from College Green a man, of whom I remember only that he was short in stature, looked like a foreigner, and wore a kind of fur travelling-cap, walked very rapidly, and, as if under fierce excitement, directly towards us, muttering to himself fast and vehemently the while.

This odd-looking person walked straight toward Barton, who was foremost of the three, and halted, regarding him for a moment or two with a look of maniacal menace and fury; and then turning about as abruptly he walked before us at the same agitated pace and disappeared at a side passage. I do distinctly remember being a good deal shocked at the countenance and bearing of this man, which indeed irresistibly impressed me with an undefined sense of danger, such as I have never felt before or since from the presence of anything human; but these sensations were, on my part, far from amounting to anything so disconcerting as to flurry or excite me – I had seen only a singularly evil countenance, agitated, as it seemed, with the excitement of madness.

I was absolutely astonished, however, at the effect of this apparition upon Captain Barton. I knew him to be a man of proud courage and coolness in real danger – a circumstance which made his conduct upon this occasion the more conspicuously odd. He recoiled a step or two as the stranger advanced, and clutched my arm in silence, with what seemed to be a spasm of agony or terror! And then, as the figure disappeared, shoving me roughly back, he followed it for a few paces, stopped in great disorder, and sat down upon a form. I never beheld a countenance more ghastly and haggard.

“For God’s sake, Barton, what is the matter?” said ———, our companion, really alarmed at his appearance. “You’re not hurt, are you? – or unwell? What is it?”

“What did he say? – I did not hear it – what was it?” asked Barton, wholly disregarding the question.

“Nonsense,” said ———, greatly surprised, “who cares what the fellow said? You are unwell Barton, decidedly unwell; let me call a coach.”

“Unwell! No – not unwell,” he said, evidently making an effort to recover his self-possession; “but, to say the truth, I am fatigued – a little overworked – and perhaps over-anxious. You know I have been in Chancery, and the winding-up of a suit is always a nervous affair. I have felt uncomfortable all this evening; but I am better now. Come, come – shall we go on?”

“No, no. Take my advice, Barton, and go home; you really do need rest; you are looking quite ill. I really do insist on your allowing me to see you home,” replied his friend.

I seconded ———’s advice, the more readily as it was obvious that Barton was not himself disinclined to be persuaded. He left us, declining our offered escort. I was not sufficiently intimate with – to discuss the scene we had both just witnessed. I was, however, convinced from his manner in the few commonplace comments and regrets we exchanged, that he was just as little satisfied as I with the extempore plea of illness with which he had accounted for the strange exhibition, and that we were both agreed in suspecting some lurking mystery in the matter.

I called next day at Barton’s lodgings to inquire for him, and learned from the servant that he had not left his room since his return the night before; but that he was not seriously indisposed, and hoped to be out in a few days. That evening he sent for Dr. R———, then in large and fashionable practice in Dublin, and their interview was, it is said, an odd one.

He entered into a detail of his own symptoms in an abstracted and desultory way, which seemed to argue a strange want of interest in his own cure, and, at all events, make it manifest that there was some topic engaging his mind of more engrossing importance than his present ailment. He complained of occasional palpitations and headache.

Doctor R——— asked him, among other questions, whether there was any irritating circumstance or anxiety then occupying his thoughts. This he denied quickly and almost peevishly; and the physician thereupon declared his opinion that there was nothing amiss except some slight derangement of the digestion, for which he accordingly wrote a prescription, and was about to withdraw when Mr. Barton, with the air of a man who recollects a topic which had nearly escaped him, recalled him.

“I beg your pardon, Doctor, but I really almost forgot; will you permit me to ask you two or three medical questions – rather odd ones, perhaps, but a wager depends upon their solution; you will, I hope, excuse my unreasonableness?”

The physician readily undertook to satisfy the inquirer.

Barton seemed to have some difficulty about opening the proposed interrogatories, for he was silent for a minute, then walked to his bookcase, and returned as he had gone; at last he sat down, and said:

“You’ll think them very childish questions, but I can’t recover my wager without a decision; so I must put them. I want to know first about lockjaw. If a man actually has had that complaint, and appears to have died of it – so much so, that a physician of average skill pronounces him actually dead – may he, after all, recover?”

The physician smiled, and shook his head.

“But – but a blunder may be made,” resumed Barton. “Suppose an ignorant pretender to medical skill; may he be so deceived by any stage of the complaint, as to mistake what is only a part of the progress of the disease, for death itself?”

“No one who had ever seen death,” answered he, “could mistake it in a case of lockjaw.”

Barton mused for a few minutes. “I am going to ask you a question, perhaps, still more childish; but first, tell me, are the regulations of foreign hospitals, such as that of, let us say, Naples, very lax and bungling. May not all kinds of blunders and slips occur in their entries of names, and so forth?”

Doctor R——— professed his incompetence to answer that query.

“Well, then, Doctor, here is the last of my questions. You will, probably, laugh at it; but it must out nevertheless. Is there any disease, in all the range of human maladies, which would have the effect of perceptibly contracting the stature and the whole frame – causing the man to shrink in all his proportions, and yet to preserve his exact resemblance to himself in every particular – with the one exception, his height and bulk; any disease, mark – no matter how rare – how little believed in, generally – which could possibly result in producing such an effect?”

The physician replied with a smile, and a very decided negative.

“Tell me, then,” said Barton, abruptly, “if a man be in reasonable fear of assault from a lunatic who is at large, can he not procure a warrant for his arrest and detention?”

“Really, that is more a lawyer’s question than one in my way,” replied Doctor R———; “but I believe, on applying to a magistrate, such a course would be directed.”

The physician then took his leave; but, just as he reached the hall door, remembered that he had left his cane upstairs, and returned. His reappearance was awkward, for a piece of paper, which he recognized as his own prescription, was slowly burning upon the fire, and Barton sitting close by with an expression of settled gloom and dismay.

Doctor R——— had too much tact to observe what presented itself; but he had seen quite enough to assure him that the mind, and not the body, of Captain Barton was in reality the seat of suffering.

A few days afterwards, the following advertisement appeared in the Dublin newspapers:

“If Sylvester Yelland, formerly a foremast man on board His Majesty’s frigate ‘Dolphin,’ or his nearest of kin, will apply to Mr. Hubert Smith, attorney, at his office, Dame Street, he or they may hear of something greatly to his or their advantage. Admission may be had at any hour up to twelve o’clock at night, should parties desire to avoid observation; and the strictest secrecy, as to all communications intended to be confidential, shall be honourably observed.”

The “Dolphin,” as I have mentioned, was the vessel which Captain Barton had commanded; and this circumstance, connected with the extraordinary exertions made by the circulation of handbills, etc., as well as by repeated advertisements, to secure for this strange notice the utmost possible publicity, suggested to Dr. R——— the idea that Captain Barton’s extreme uneasiness was somehow connected with the individual to whom the advertisement was addressed, and he himself the author of it.

This, however, it is needless to add, was no more than a conjecture. No information, whatsoever, as to the real purpose of the advertisement was divulged by the agent, nor yet any hint as to who his employer might be.

CHAPTER IV

He Talks with a Clergyman

Mr. Barton, although he had latterly begun to earn for himself the character of an hypochondriac, was yet very far from deserving it. Though by no means lively, he had yet, naturally, what are termed “even spirits,” and was not subject to undue depressions.

He soon, therefore, began to return to his former habits; and one of the earnest symptoms of this healthier tone of spirits was his appearing at a grand dinner of the Freemasons, of which worthy fraternity he was himself a brother. Barton, who had been at first gloomy and abstracted, drank much more freely than was his wont – possibly with the purpose of dispelling his own secret anxieties – and under the influence of good wine and pleasant company, became gradually (unlike himself) talkative, and even noisy.

It was under this unwonted excitement that he left his company at about half-past ten o’clock; and, as conviviality is a strong incentive to gallantry, it occurred to him to proceed forthwith to Lady L———’s, and pass the remainder of the evening with her and his destined bride.

Accordingly, he was soon at ——— Street and chatting gaily with the ladies. It is not to be supposed that Captain Barton had exceeded the limits which propriety prescribes to good fellowship – he had merely taken enough wine to raise his spirits, without, however, in the least degree unsteadying his mind or affecting his manners.

With this undue elevation of spirits had supervened an entire oblivion or contempt of those undefined apprehensions which had for so long weighed upon his mind, and to a certain extent estranged him from society; but as the night wore away, and his artificial gaiety began to flag, these painful feelings gradually intruded themselves again, and he grew abstracted and anxious as heretofore.

He took his leave at length, with an unpleasant foreboding of some coming mischief, and with a mind haunted with a thousand mysterious apprehensions, such as, even while he acutely felt their pressure, he, nevertheless, inwardly strove or affected to contemn.

It was this proud defiance of what he regarded as his own weakness, which prompted him upon the present occasion to that course which brought about the adventure I am now about to relate.

Mr. Barton might have easily called a coach, but he was conscious that his strong inclination to do so proceeded from no cause other than what he desperately persisted in representing to himself to be his own superstitious tremors.

He might also have returned home by a route different from that against which he had been warned by his mysterious correspondent; but for the same reason he dismissed this idea also, and with a dogged and half desperate resolution to force matters to a crisis of some kind, if there were any reality in the causes of his former suffering, and if not, satisfactorily to bring their delusiveness to the proof, he determined to follow precisely the course which he had trodden upon the night so painfully memorable in his own mind as that on which his strange persecution commenced. Though, sooth to say, the pilot who for the first time steers his vessel under the muzzles of a hostile battery, never felt his resolution more severely tasked than did Captain Barton, as he breathlessly pursued this solitary path – a path which, spite of every effort of scepticism and reason, he felt to be infested by some (as respected him) malignant being.

He pursued his way steadily and rapidly, scarcely breathing from intensity of suspense; he, however, was troubled by no renewal of the dreaded footsteps, and was beginning to feel a return of confidence as, more than three-fourths of the way being accomplished with impunity, he approached the long line of twinkling oil lamps which indicated the frequented streets.

This feeling of self-congratulation was, however, but momentary. The report of a musket at some hundred yards behind him, and the whistle of a bullet close to his head, disagreeably and startlingly dispelled it. His first impulse was to retrace his steps in pursuit of the assassin; but the road on either side was, as we have said, embarrassed by the foundations of a street, beyond which extended waste fields, full of rubbish and neglected lime and brick-kilns, and all now as utterly silent as though no sound had ever disturbed their dark and unsightly solitude. The futility of, single-handed, attempting, under such circumstances, a search for the murderer, was apparent; especially as no sound, either of retreating steps or any other kind, was audible to direct his pursuit.

With the tumultuous sensations of one whose life has just been exposed to a murderous attempt, and whose escape has been the narrowest possible, Captain Barton turned again; and without, however, quickening his pace actually to a run, hurriedly pursued his way.

He had turned, as I have said, after a pause of a few seconds, and had just commenced his rapid retreat, when on a sudden he met the well-remembered little man in the fur cap. The encounter was but momentary. The figure was walking at the same exaggerated pace, and with the same strange air of menace as before; and as it passed him he thought he heard it say, in a furious whisper, “Still alive, still alive!”

The state of Mr. Barton’s spirits began now to work a corresponding alteration in his health and looks, and to such a degree that it was impossible that the change should escape general remark.

For some reasons, known but to himself, he took no steps whatsoever to bring the attempt upon his life, which he had so narrowly escaped, under the notice of the authorities; on the contrary, he kept it jealously to himself; and it was not for many weeks after the occurrence that he mentioned it, and then in strict confidence, to a gentleman, whom the torments of his mind at last compelled him to consult.

Spite of his blue devils, however, poor Barton, having no satisfactory reason to render to the public for any undue remissness in the attentions exacted by the relation existing between him and Miss Montague, was obliged to exert himself, and present to the world a confident and cheerful bearing.

The true source of his sufferings, and every circumstance connected with him, he guarded with a reserve so jealous, that it seemed dictated by at least a suspicion that the origin of his strange persecution was known to himself, and that it was of a nature which, upon his own account, he could not or dared not disclose.

The mind thus turned in upon itself, and constantly occupied with a haunting anxiety which it dared not reveal or confide to any human breast, became daily more excited, and, of course, more vividly impressible, by a system of attack which operated through the nervous system; and in this state he was destined to sustain, with increasing frequency, the stealthy visitations of that apparition which, from the first, had seemed to possess so terrible a hold upon his imagination.

It was about this time that Captain Barton called upon the then celebrated preacher, Dr. ———, with whom he had a slight acquaintance, and an extraordinary conversation ensued.

The divine was seated in his chambers in college, surrounded with works upon his favourite pursuit, and deep in theology, when Barton was announced.

There was something at once embarrassed and excited in his manner, which, along with his wan and haggard countenance, impressed the student with the unpleasant consciousness that his visitor must have recently suffered terribly indeed, to account for an alteration so striking – almost shocking.

After the usual interchange of polite greeting, and a few commonplace remarks, Captain Barton, who obviously perceived the surprise which his visit had excited, and which Doctor was unable wholly to conceal, interrupted a brief pause by remarking:

“This is a strange call, Doctor ———, perhaps scarcely warranted by an acquaintance so slight as mine with you. I should not under ordinary circumstances have ventured to disturb you; but my visit is neither an idle nor impertinent intrusion. I am sure you will not so account it, when I tell you how afflicted I am.”

Doctor ——— interrupted him with assurances such as good breeding suggested, and Barton resumed.

“I am come to task your patience by asking your advice. When I say your patience, I might, indeed, say more; I might have said your humanity – your compassion; for I have been and am a great sufferer.”

“My dear sir,” replied the churchman, “it will, indeed, afford me infinite gratification if I can give you comfort in any distress of mind! but – you know—”

“I know what you would say,” resumed Barton, quickly; “I am an unbeliever, and, therefore, incapable of deriving help from religion; but don’t take that for granted. At least you must not assume that, however unsettled my convictions may be, I do not feel a deep – a very deep – interest in the subject. Circumstances have lately forced it upon my attention in such a way as to compel me to review the whole question in a more candid and teachable spirit, I believe, than I ever studied it in before.”

“Your difficulties, I take it for granted, refer to the evidences of revelation,” suggested the clergyman.

“Why – no – not altogether; in fact, I am ashamed to say I have not considered even my objections sufficiently to state them connectedly; but – but there is one subject on which I feel a peculiar interest.”

He paused again, and Doctor pressed him to proceed.

“The fact is,” said Barton, “whatever may be my uncertainty as to the authenticity of what we are taught to call revelation, of one fact I am deeply and horribly convinced, that there does exist beyond this a spiritual world – a system whose workings are generally in mercy hidden from us – a system which may be, and which is sometimes, partially and terribly revealed. I am sure – I know,” continued Barton, with increasing excitement, “that there is a God – a dreadful God – and that retribution follows guilt, in ways the most mysterious and stupendous – by agencies the most inexplicable and terrific; – there is a spiritual system – great God, how I have been convinced! – a system malignant, and implacable, and omnipotent, under whose persecutions I am, and have been, suffering the torments of the damned! – yes, sir – yes – the fires and frenzy of hell!”

As Barton spoke, his agitation became so vehement that the Divine was shocked, and even alarmed. The wild and excited rapidity with which he spoke, and, above all, the indefinable horror that stamped his features, afforded a contrast to his ordinary cool and unimpassioned self-possession striking and painful in the last degree.

CHAPTER V

Mr. Barton States His Case

“My dear sir,” said Doctor ———, after a brief pause, “I fear you have been very unhappy, indeed; but I venture to predict that the depression under which you labour will be found to originate in purely physical causes, and that with a change of air, and the aid of a few tonics, your spirits will return, and the tone of your mind be once more cheerful and tranquil as heretofore. There was, after all, more truth than we are quite willing to admit in the classic theories which assigned the undue predominance of any one affection of the mind to the undue action or torpidity of one or other of our bodily organs. Believe me, that a little attention to diet, exercise, and the other essentials of health, under competent direction, will make you as much yourself as you can wish.”

“Doctor ———,” said Barton, with something like a shudder, “I cannot delude myself with such a hope. I have no hope to cling to but one, and that is, that by some other spiritual agency more potent than that which tortures me, it may be combated, and I delivered. If this may not be, I am lost – now and for ever lost.”

“But, Mr. Barton, you must remember,” urged his companion, “that others have suffered as you have done, and—”

“No, no, no,” interrupted he, with irritability – “no, sir, I am not a credulous – far from a superstitious man. I have been, perhaps, too much the reverse – too sceptical, too slow of belief; but unless I were one whom no amount of evidence could convince, unless I were to contemn the repeated, the perpetual evidence of my own senses, I am now – now at last constrained to believe – I have no escape from the conviction – the overwhelming certainty – that I am haunted and dogged, go where I may, by – by a DEMON!”

There was a preternatural energy of horror in Barton’s face, as, with its damp and deathlike lineaments turned towards his companion, he thus delivered himself.

“God help you, my poor friend,” said Dr. ———, much shocked, “God help you; for, indeed, you are a sufferer, however your sufferings may have been caused.”

“Aye, aye, God help me,” echoed Barton, sternly; “but will He help me – will He help me?”

“Pray to Him – pray in an humble and trusting spirit,” said he.

“Pray, pray,” echoed he again; “I can’t pray – I could as easily move a mountain by an effort of my will. I have not belief enough to pray; there is something within me that will not pray. You prescribe impossibilities – literal impossibilities.”

“You will not find it so, if you will but try,” said Doctor ———.

“Try! I have tried, and the attempt only fills me with confusion: and, sometimes, terror: I have tried in vain, and more than in vain. The awful, unutterable idea of eternity and infinity oppresses and maddens my brain whenever my mind approaches the contemplation of the Creator: I recoil from the effort scared. I tell you, Doctor ———, if I am to be saved, it must be by other means. The idea of an eternal Creator is to me intolerable – my mind cannot support it.”

“Say, then, my dear sir,” urged he, “say how you would have me serve you – what you would learn of me – what I can do or say to relieve you?”

“Listen to me first,” replied Captain Barton; with a subdued air, and an effort to suppress his excitement, “listen to me while I detail the circumstances of the persecution under which my life has become all but intolerable – a persecution which has made me fear death and the world beyond the grave as much as I have grown to hate existence.”

Barton then proceeded to relate the circumstances which I have already detailed, and then continued:

“This has now become habitual – an accustomed thing. I do not mean the actual seeing him in the flesh – thank God, that at least is not permitted daily. Thank God, from the ineffable horrors of that visitation I have been mercifully allowed intervals of repose, though none of security; but from the consciousness that a malignant spirit is following and watching me wherever I go, I have never, for a single instant, a temporary respite. I am pursued with blasphemies, cries of despair, and appalling hatred. I hear those dreadful sounds called after me as I turn the corners of the streets; they come in the night-time, while I sit in my chamber alone; they haunt me everywhere, charging me with hideous crimes, and – great God! – threatening me with coming vengeance and eternal misery. Hush! do you hear that?” he cried, with a horrible smile of triumph; “there – there, will that convince you?”

The clergyman felt a chill of horror steal over him, while, during the wail of a sudden gust of wind, he heard, or fancied he heard, the half-articulate sounds of rage and derision mingling in the sough.

“Well, what do you think of that?” at length Barton cried, drawing a long breath through his teeth.

“I heard the wind,” said Doctor ———. “What should I think of it – what is there remarkable about it?”

“The prince of the powers of the air,” muttered Barton, with a shudder.

“Tut, tut! my dear sir,” said the student, with an effort to reassure himself; for though it was broad daylight there was nevertheless something disagreeably contagious in the nervous excitement under which his visitor so miserably suffered. “You must not give way to these wild fancies; you must resist these impulses of the imagination.”

“Aye, aye; ‘resist the devil and he will flee from thee,’” said Barton, in the same tone; “but how resist him? aye, there it is – there is the rub. What – what am I to do? what can I do?”

“My dear sir, this is fancy,” said the man of folios; “you are your own tormentor.”

“No, no, sir – fancy has no part in it,” answered Barton, somewhat sternly. “Fancy! was it that made you, as well as me, hear, but this moment, those accents of hell? Fancy, indeed! No, no.”

“But you have seen this person frequently,” said the ecclesiastic; “why have you not accosted or secured him? Is it not a little precipitate, to say no more, to assume, as you have done, the existence of preternatural agency; when, after all, everything may be easily accountable, if only proper means were taken to sift the matter.”

“There are circumstances connected with this – this appearance,” said Barton, “which it is needless to disclose, but which to me are proofs of its horrible nature. I know that the being that follows me is not human – I say I know this; I could prove it to your own conviction.” He paused for a minute, and then added, “And as to accosting it, I dare not, I could not; when I see it I am powerless; I stand in the gaze of death, in the triumphant presence of infernal power and malignity. My strength, and faculties, and memory, all forsake me. O God, I fear, sir, you know not what you speak of. Mercy, mercy; heaven have pity on me!”

He leaned his elbow on the table, and passed his hand across his eyes, as if to exclude some image of horror, muttering the last words of the sentence he had just concluded again and again.

“Doctor ———,” he said, abruptly raising himself, and looking full upon the clergyman with an imploring eye, “I know you will do for me whatever may be done. You know now fully the circumstances and the nature of my affliction. I tell you I cannot help myself; I cannot hope to escape; I am utterly passive. I conjure you, then, to weigh my case well, and if anything may be done for me by vicarious supplication – by the intercession of the good – or by any aid or influence whatsoever, I implore of you, I adjure you in the name of the Most High, give me the benefit of that influence – deliver me from the body of this death. Strive for me, pity me; I know you will; you cannot refuse this; it is the purpose and object of my visit. Send me away with some hope – however little – some faint hope of ultimate deliverance, and I will nerve myself to endure, from hour to hour, the hideous dream into which my existence has been transformed.”

Doctor assured him that all he could do was to pray earnestly for him, and that so much he would not fail to do. They parted with a hurried and melancholy valediction. Barton hastened to the carriage that awaited him at the door, drew down the blinds, and drove away, while Doctor returned to his chamber, to ruminate at leisure upon the strange interview which had just interrupted his studies.

CHAPTER VI

Seen Again

It was not to be expected that Captain Barton’s changed and eccentric habits should long escape remark and discussion. Various were the theories suggested to account for it. Some attributed the alteration to the pressure of secret pecuniary embarrassments; others to a repugnance to fulfil an engagement into which he was presumed to have too precipitately entered; and others, again, to the supposed incipiency of mental disease, which latter, indeed, was the most plausible, as well as the most generally received, of the hypotheses circulated in the gossip of the day.

From the very commencement of this change, at first so gradual in its advances, Miss Montague had of course been aware of it. The intimacy involved in their peculiar relation, as well as the near interest which it inspired, afforded, in her case, a like opportunity and motive for the successful exercise of that keen and penetrating observation peculiar to her sex.

His visits became, at length, so interrupted, and his manner, while they lasted, so abstracted, strange, and agitated, that Lady L———, after hinting her anxiety and her suspicions more than once, at length distinctly stated her anxiety, and pressed for an explanation.

The explanation was given, and although its nature at first relieved the worst solicitudes of the old lady and her niece, yet the circumstances which attended it, and the really dreadful consequences which it obviously indicated, as regarded the spirits, and indeed the reason of the now wretched man who made the strange declaration, were enough, upon little reflection, to fill their minds with perturbation and alarm.

General Montague, the young lady’s father, at length arrived. He had himself slightly known Barton some ten or twelve years previously and, being aware of his fortune and connections, was disposed to regard him as an unexceptionable and indeed a most desirable match for his daughter. He laughed at the story of Barton’s supernatural visitations, and lost no time in calling upon his intended son-in-law.

“My dear Barton,” he continued, gaily, after a little conversation, “my sister tells me that you are a victim to blue devils, in quite a new and original shape.”

Barton changed countenance, and sighed profoundly.

“Come, come; I protest this will never do,” continued the General; “you are more like a man on his way to the gallows than to the altar. These devils have made quite a saint of you.”

Barton made an effort to change the conversation.

“No, no, it won’t do,” said his visitor laughing; “I am resolved to say what I have to say upon this magnificent mock mystery of yours. You must not be angry, but really it is too bad to see you at your time of life absolutely frightened into good behaviour, like a naughty child, by a bugaboo, and as far as I can learn a very contemptible one. Seriously, I have been a good deal annoyed at what they tell me; but at the same time thoroughly convinced that there is nothing in the matter that may not be cleared up, with a little attention and management, within a week at furthest.”

“Ah, General, you do not know—” he began.

“Yes, but I do know quite enough to warrant my confidence,” interrupted the soldier; “don’t I know that all your annoyance proceeds from the occasional appearance of a certain little man in a cap and greatcoat, with a red vest and a bad face, who follows you about, and pops upon you at corners of lanes, and throws you into ague fits. Now, my dear fellow, I’ll make it my business to catch this mischievous little mountebank, and either beat him to a jelly with my own hands, or have him whipped through the town, at the cart’s tail, before a month passes.”

“If you knew what I knew,” said Barton, with gloomy agitation, “you would speak very differently. Don’t imagine that I am so weak as to assume, without proof the most overwhelming, the conclusion to which I have been forced – the proofs are here, locked up here.” As he spoke he tapped upon his breast, and with an anxious sigh continued to walk up and down the room.

“Well, well, Barton,” said his visitor, “I’ll wager a rump and a dozen I collar the ghost, and convince even you before many days are over.”

He was running on in the same strain when he was suddenly arrested, and not a little shocked, by observing Barton, who had approached the window, stagger slowly back, like one who had received a stunning blow; his arm extended toward the street – his face and his very lips white as ashes – while he muttered, “There – by heaven! – there – there!”

General Montague started mechanically to his feet, and from the window of the drawing-room saw a figure corresponding, as well as his hurry would permit him to discern, with the description of the person whose appearance so persistently disturbed the repose of his friend.

The figure was just turning from the rails of the area upon which it had been leaning, and, without waiting to see more, the old gentleman snatched his cane and hat, and rushed down the stairs and into the street, in the furious hope of securing the person, and punishing the audacity of the mysterious stranger.

He looked round him, but in vain, for any trace of the person he had himself distinctly seen. He ran breathlessly to the nearest corner, expecting to see from thence the retiring figure, but no such form was visible. Back and forward, from crossing to crossing, he ran, at fault, and it was not until the curious gaze and laughing countenances of the passers-by reminded him of the absurdity of his pursuit, that he checked his hurried pace, lowered his walking cane from the menacing altitude which he had mechanically given it, adjusted his hat, and walked composedly back again, inwardly vexed and flurried. He found Barton pale and trembling in every joint; they both remained silent, though under emotions very different. At last Barton whispered, “You saw it?”

“It – him – someone – you mean – to be sure I did,” replied Montague, testily. “But where is the good or the harm of seeing him? The fellow runs like a lamplighter. I wanted to catch him, but he had stolen away before I could reach the hall door. However, it is no great matter; next time, I dare say, I’ll do better; and, egad, if I once come within reach of him, I’ll introduce his shoulders to the weight of my cane.”

Notwithstanding General Montague’s undertakings and exhortations, however, Barton continued to suffer from the selfsame unexplained cause; go how, when, or where he would, he was still constantly dogged or confronted by the being who had established over him so horrible an influence.

Nowhere and at no time was he secure against the odious appearance which haunted him with such diabolic perseverance.

His depression, misery, and excitement became more settled and alarming every day, and the mental agonies that ceaselessly preyed upon him began at last so sensibly to affect his health that Lady L——— and General Montague succeeded, without, indeed, much difficulty, in persuading him to try a short tour on the Continent, in the hope that an entire change of scene would, at all events, have the effect of breaking through the influences of local association, which the more sceptical of his friends assumed to be by no means inoperative in suggesting and perpetuating what they conceived to be a mere form of nervous illusion.

General Montague indeed was persuaded that the figure which haunted his intended son-in-law was by no means the creation of his imagination, but, on the contrary, a substantial form of flesh and blood, animated by a resolution, perhaps with some murderous object in perspective, to watch and follow the unfortunate gentleman.

Even this hypothesis was not a very pleasant one; yet it was plain that if Barton could ever be convinced that there was nothing preternatural in the phenomenon which he had hitherto regarded in that light, the affair would lose all its terrors in his eyes, and wholly cease to exercise upon his health and spirits the baleful influence which it had hitherto done. He therefore reasoned, that if the annoyance were actually escaped by mere locomotion and change of scene, it obviously could not have originated in any supernatural agency.

CHAPTER VII

Flight

Yielding to their persuasions, Barton left Dublin for England accompanied by General Montague. They posted rapidly to London, and thence to Dover, whence they took the packet with a fair wind for Calais. The General’s confidence in the result of the expedition on Barton’s spirits had risen day by day since their departure from the shores of Ireland; for to the inexpressible relief and delight of the latter, he had not since then so much as even once fancied a repetition of those impressions which had, when at home, drawn him gradually down to the very depths of despair.

This exemption from what he had begun to regard as the inevitable condition of his existence, and the sense of security which began to pervade his mind, were inexpressibly delightful; and in the exultation of what he considered his deliverance, he indulged in a thousand happy anticipations for a future into which so lately he had hardly dared to look; and, in short, both he and his companion secretly congratulated themselves upon the termination of that persecution which had been to its immediate victim a source of such unspeakable agony.

It was a beautiful day, and a crowd of idlers stood upon the jetty to receive the packet and enjoy the bustle of the new arrivals. Montague walked a few paces in advance of his friend, and as he made his way through the crowd a little man touched his arm and said to him, in a broad provincial patois:

“Monsieur is walking too fast; he will lose his sick comrade in the throng, for, by my faith, the poor gentleman seems to be fainting.”

Montague turned quickly, and observed that Barton did indeed look deadly pale. He hastened to his side.

“My dear fellow, are you ill?” he asked anxiously.

The question was unheeded, and twice repeated, ere Barton stammered—

“I saw him – by ———, I saw him!”

“Him! – the wretch – who – where now? – where is he?” cried Montague, looking around him.

“I saw him – but he is gone,” repeated Barton, faintly.

“But where – where? For God’s sake speak,” urged Montague, vehemently.

“It is but this moment – here,” said he.

“But what did he look like – what had he on – what did he wear – quick, quick,” urged his excited companion, ready to dart among the crowd and collar the delinquent on the spot.

“He touched your arm – he spoke to you – he pointed to me. God be merciful to me, there is no escape,” said Barton, in the low, subdued tones of despair.

Montague had already bustled away in all the flurry of mingled hope and rage; but though the singular personnel of the stranger who had accosted him was vividly impressed upon his recollection, he failed to discover among the crowd even the slightest resemblance to him.

After a fruitless search, in which he enlisted the services of several of the bystanders, who aided all the more zealously as they believed he had been robbed, he at length, out of breath and baffled, gave over the attempt.

“Ah, my friend, it won’t do,” said Barton, with the faint voice and bewildered, ghastly look of one who had been stunned by some mortal shock; “there is no use in contending; whatever it is, the dreadful association between me and it is now established – I shall never escape – never!”

“Nonsense, nonsense, my dear Barton; don’t talk so,” said Montague, with something at once of irritation and dismay; “you must not, I say; we’ll jockey the scoundrel yet; never mind, I say – never mind.”

It was, however, but labour lost to endeavour henceforward to inspire Barton with one ray of hope; he became desponding.

This intangible and, as it seemed, utterly inadequate influence was fast destroying his energies of intellect, character, and health. His first object was now to return to Ireland, there, as he believed, and now almost hoped, speedily to die.

To Ireland accordingly he came, and one of the first faces he saw upon the shore was again that of his implacable and dreaded attendant. Barton seemed at last to have lost not only all enjoyment and every hope in existence, but all independence of will besides. He now submitted himself passively to the management of the friends most nearly interested in his welfare.

With the apathy of entire despair he implicitly assented to whatever measures they suggested and advised; and as a last resource it was determined to remove him to a house of Lady L———’s, in the neighbourhood of Clontarf, where, with the advice of his medical attendant, who persisted in his opinion that the whole train of consequences resulted merely from some nervous derangement, it was resolved that he was to confine himself strictly to the house, and make use only of those apartments which commanded a view of an enclosed yard, the gates of which were to be kept jealously locked.

Those precautions would certainly secure him against the casual appearance of any living form that his excited imagination might possibly confound with the spectre which, as it was contended, his fancy recognized in every figure that bore even a distant or general resemblance to the peculiarities with which his fancy had at first invested it.

A month or six weeks’ absolute seclusion under these conditions, it was hoped might, by interrupting the series of these terrible impressions, gradually dispel the predisposing apprehensions, and the associations which had confirmed the supposed disease, and rendered recovery hopeless.

Cheerful society and that of his friends was to be constantly supplied, and on the whole, very sanguine expectations were indulged in, that under the treatment thus detailed the obstinate hypochondria of the patient might at length give way.

Accompanied, therefore, by Lady L———, General Montague and his daughter – his own affianced bride – poor Barton – himself never daring to cherish a hope of his ultimate emancipation from the horrors under which his life was literally wasting away – took possession of the apartments, whose situation protected him against the intrusions from which he shrank with such unutterable terror.

After a little time, a steady persistence in this system began to manifest its results in a very marked though gradual improvement, alike in the health and spirits of the invalid. Not, indeed, that anything at all approaching complete recovery was yet discernible. On the contrary, to those who had not seen him since the commencement of his strange sufferings, such an alteration would have been apparent as might well have shocked them.

The improvement, however, such as it was, was welcomed with gratitude and delight, especially by the young lady, whom her attachment to him, as well as her now singularly painful position, consequent on his protracted illness, rendered an object scarcely one degree less to be commiserated than himself.

A week passed – a fortnight – a month – and yet there had been no recurrence of the hated visitation. The treatment had, so far forth, been followed by complete success. The chain of associations was broken. The constant pressure upon the over-tasked spirits had been removed, and, under these comparatively favourable circumstances, the sense of social community with the world about him, and something of human interest, if not of enjoyment, began to reanimate him.

It was about this time that Lady L——— who, like most old ladies of the day, was deep in family receipts, and a great pretender to medical science, dispatched her own maid to the kitchen garden with a list of herbs, which were there to be care fully culled and brought back to her housekeeper for the purpose stated. The handmaiden, however, returned with her task scarce half completed, and a good deal flurried and alarmed. Her mode of accounting for her precipitate retreat and evident agitation was odd and, to the old lady, startling.

CHAPTER VIII

Softened

It appeared that she had repaired to the kitchen garden, pursuant to her mistress’s directions, and had there begun to make the specified election among the rank and neglected herbs which crowded one corner of the enclosure; and while engaged in this pleasant labour she carelessly sang a fragment of an old song, as she said, “to keep herself company.” She was, however, interrupted by an ill-natured laugh; and, looking up, she saw through the old thorn hedge, which surrounded the garden, a singularly ill-looking little man, whose countenance wore the stamp of menace and malignity, standing close to her at the other side of the hawthorn screen.

She described herself as utterly unable to move or speak, while he charged her with a message for Captain Barton, the substance of which she distinctly remembered to have been to the effect that he, Captain Barton, must come abroad as usual, and show himself to his friends out of doors, or else prepare for a visit in his own chamber.

On concluding this brief message, the stranger had, with a threatening air, got down into the outer ditch, and, seizing the hawthorn stems in his hands, seemed on the point of climbing through the fence – a feat which might have been accomplished without much difficulty.

Without, of course, awaiting this result, the girl – throwing down her treasures of thyme and rosemary – had turned and run, with the swiftness of terror, to the house. Lady L——— commanded her, on pain of instant dismissal, to observe an absolute silence respecting all that passed of the incident which related to Captain Barton; and, at the same time, directed instant search to be made by her men in the garden and the fields adjacent. This measure, however, was as usual unsuccessful, and, filled with indefinable misgivings, Lady L——— communicated the incident to her brother. The story, however, until long afterwards, went no further, and, of course, it was jealously guarded from Barton, who continued to amend though slowly.

Barton now began to walk occasionally in the courtyard which I have mentioned, and which, being enclosed by a high wall, commanded no view beyond its own extent. Here he, therefore, considered himself perfectly secure: and, but for a careless violation of orders by one of the grooms, he might have enjoyed, at least for some time longer, his much-prized immunity. Opening upon the public road, this yard was entered by a wooden gate, with a wicket in it, and was further defended by an iron gate upon the outside. Strict orders had been given to keep both carefully locked; but, spite of these, it had happened that one day, as Barton was slowly pacing this narrow enclosure in his accustomed walk, and reaching the farther extremity was turning to retrace his steps, he saw the boarded wicket ajar, and the face of his tormentor immovably looking at him through the iron bars. For a few seconds he stood riveted to the earth – breathless and bloodless – in the fascination of that dreaded gaze, and then fell helplessly insensible upon the pavement.

There he was found a few minutes afterwards, and conveyed to his room – the apartment which he was never afterwards to leave alive. Henceforward a marked and unaccountable change was observable in the tone of his mind. Captain Barton was now no longer the excited and despairing man he had been before; a strange alteration had passed upon him – an unearthly tranquillity reigned in his mind – it was the anticipated stillness of the grave.

“Montague, my friend, this struggle is nearly ended now,” he said, tranquilly, but with a look of fixed and fearful awe. “I have, at last, some comfort from that world of spirits from which my punishment has come. I now know that my sufferings will soon be over.”

Montague pressed him to speak on.

“Yes,” said he, in a softened voice, “my punishment is nearly ended. From sorrow, perhaps, I shall never, in time or eternity, escape; but my agony is almost over. Comfort has been revealed to me, and what remains of my allotted struggle I will bear with submission – even with hope.”

“I am glad to hear you speak so tranquilly, my dear Barton,” said Montague; “peace and cheer of mind are all you need to make you what you were.”

“No, no – I never can be that,” said he mournfully. “I am no longer fit for life. I am soon to die. I am to see him but once again, and then all is ended.”

“He said so, then?” suggested Montague.

“He? – No, no: good tidings could scarcely come through him; and these were good and welcome; and they came so solemnly and sweetly – with unutterable love and melancholy, such as I could not – without saying more than is needful, or fitting, of other long past scenes and persons – fully explain to you.” As Barton said this he shed tears.

“Come, come,” said Montague, mistaking the source of his emotions, “you must not give way. What is it, after all, but a pack of dreams and nonsense; or, at worst, the practices of a scheming rascal that enjoys his power of playing upon your nerves, and loves to exert it – a sneaking vagabond that owes you a grudge, and pays it off this way, not daring to try a more manly one.”

“A grudge, indeed, he owes me – you say rightly,” said Barton, with a sudden shudder; “a grudge as you call it. Oh, my God! when the justice of Heaven permits the Evil one to carry out a scheme of vengeance – when its execution is committed to the lost and terrible victim of sin, who owes his own ruin to the man, the very man, whom he is commissioned to pursue – then, indeed, the torments and terrors of hell are anticipated on earth. But heaven has dealt mercifully with me – hope has opened to me at last; and if death could come without the dreadful sight I am doomed to see, I would gladly close my eyes this moment upon the world. But though death is welcome, I shrink with an agony you cannot understand – an actual frenzy of terror – from the last encounter with that – that DEMON, who has drawn me thus to the verge of the chasm, and who is himself to plunge me down. I am to see him again – once more – but under circumstances unutterably more terrific than ever.”

As Barton thus spoke, he trembled so violently that Montague was really alarmed at the extremity of his sudden agitation, and hastened to lead him back to the topic which had before seemed to exert so tranquillizing an effect upon his mind.

“It was not a dream,” he said, after a time; “I was in a different state – I felt differently and strangely; and yet it was all as real, as clear and vivid, as what I now see and hear – it was a reality.”

“And what did you see and hear?” urged his companion.

“When I wakened from the swoon I fell into on seeing him,” said Barton, continuing as if he had not heard the question, “it was slowly, very slowly – I was lying by the margin of a broad lake, with misty hills all round, and a soft, melancholy, rose-coloured light illuminated it all. It was unusually sad and lonely, and yet more beautiful than any earthly scene. My head was leaning on the lap of a girl, and she was singing a song, that told, I know not how – whether by words or harmonies – of all my life – all that is past, and all that is still to come; and with the song the old feelings that I thought had perished within me came back, and tears flowed from my eyes – partly for the song and its mysterious beauty, and partly for the unearthly sweetness of her voice; and yet I knew the voice – oh! how well; and I was spellbound as I listened and looked at the solitary scene, without stirring, almost without breathing – and, alas! alas! without turning my eyes towards the face that I knew was near me, so sweetly powerful was the enchantment that held me. And so, slowly, the song and scene grew fainter, and fainter, to my senses, till all was dark and still again. And then I awoke to this world, as you saw, comforted, for I knew that I was forgiven much.” Barton wept again long and bitterly.

From this time, as we have said, the prevailing tone of his mind was one of profound and tranquil melancholy. This, however, was not without its interruptions. He was thoroughly impressed with the conviction that he was to experience another and a final visitation, transcending in horror all he had before experienced. From this anticipated and unknown agony he often shrank in such paroxysms of abject terror and distraction, as filled the whole household with dismay and superstitious panic. Even those among them who affected to discredit the theory of preternatural agency, were often in their secret souls visited during the silence of night with qualms and apprehensions, which they would not have readily confessed; and none of them attempted to dissuade Barton from the resolution on which he now systematically acted, of shutting himself up in his own apartment. The window-blinds of this room were kept jealously down, and his own man was seldom out of his presence, day or night, his bed being placed in the same chamber.

This man was an attached and respectable servant; and his duties, in addition to those ordinarily imposed upon valets, but which Barton’s independent habits generally dispensed with, were to attend carefully to the simple precautions by means of which his master hoped to exclude the dreaded intrusion of the “Watcher.” And, in addition to attending to whose arrangements, which amounted merely to guarding against the possibility of his master’s being, through any unscreened window or open door, exposed to the dreaded influence, the valet was never to suffer him to be alone – total solitude, even for a minute, had become to him now almost as intolerable as the idea of going abroad into the public ways – it was an instinctive anticipation of what was coming.

CHAPTER IX

Requiescat

It is needless to say, that under these circumstances no steps were taken toward the fulfilment of that engagement into which he had entered. There was quite disparity enough in point of years, and indeed of habits, between the young lady and Captain Barton to have precluded anything like very vehement or romantic attachment on her part. Though grieved and anxious, therefore, she was very far from being heartbroken.

Miss Montague, however, devoted much of her time to the patient but fruitless attempt to cheer the unhappy invalid. She read to him and conversed with him; but it was apparent that whatever exertions he made, the endeavour to escape from the one ever waking fear that preyed upon him was utterly and miserably unavailing.

Young ladies are much given to the cultivation of pets; and among those who shared the favour of Miss Montague was a fine old owl, which the gardener, who caught him napping among the ivy of a ruined stable, had dutifully presented to that young lady.

The caprice which regulates such preferences was manifested in the extravagant favour with which this grim and ill-favoured bird was at once distinguished by his mistress; and, trifling as this whimsical circumstance may seem, I am forced to mention it, inasmuch as it is connected, oddly enough, with the concluding scene of the story.

Barton, so far from sharing in this liking for the new favourite, regarded it from the first with an antipathy as violent as it was utterly unaccountable. Its very vicinity was unsupportable to him. He seemed to hate and dread it with a vehemence absolutely laughable, and which, to those who have never witnessed the exhibition of antipathies of this kind, would seem all but incredible.

With these few words of preliminary explanation, I shall proceed to state the particulars of the last scene in this strange series of incidents. It was almost two o’clock one winter’s night, and Barton was, as usual at that hour, in his bed; the servant we have mentioned occupied a smaller bed in the same room, and a light was burning. The man was on a sudden aroused by his master, who said:

“I can’t get it out of my head that that accursed bird has got out somehow, and is lurking in some corner of the room. I have been dreaming about him. Get up, Smith, and look about; search for him. Such hateful dreams!”

The servant rose and examined the chamber, and while engaged in so doing he heard the well-known sound, more like a long-drawn gasp than a hiss, with which these birds from their secret haunts affright the quiet of the night.

This ghostly indication of its proximity – for the sound proceeded from the passage upon which Barton’s chamber door opened – determined the search of the servant, who, opening the door, proceeded a step or two forward for the purpose of driving the bird away. He had, however, hardly entered the lobby, when the door behind him slowly swung to under the impulse, as it seemed, of some gentle current of air; but as immediately over the door there was a kind of window, intended in the daytime to aid in lighting the passage, and through which at present the rays of the candle were issuing, the valet could see quite enough for his purpose.

As he advanced he heard his master – who, lying in a well-curtained bed, had not, as it seemed, perceived his exit from the room – call him by name, and direct him to place the candle on the table by his bed. The servant, who was now some way in the long passage, and not liking to raise his voice for the purpose of replying, lest he should startle the sleeping inmates of the house, began to walk hurriedly and softly back again, when, to his amazement, he heard a voice in the interior of the chamber answering calmly, and actually saw, through the window which overtopped the door, that the light was slowly shifting, as if carried across the room in answer to his master’s call. Palsied by a feeling akin to terror, yet not unmingled with curiosity, he stood breathless and listening at the threshold, unable to summon resolution to push open the door and enter. Then came a rustling of the curtains, and a sound like that of one who in a low voice hushes a child to rest, in the midst of which he heard Barton say, in a tone of stifled horror – “Oh, God – oh, my God!” and repeat the same exclamation several times. Then ensued silence, which again was broken by the same strange soothing sound; and at last there burst forth, in one swelling peal, a yell of agony so appalling and hideous that, under some impulse of ungovernable horror, the man rushed to the door, and with his whole strength strove to force it open. Whether it was that, in his agitation, he had himself but imperfectly turned the handle, or that the door was really secured upon the inside, he failed to effect an entrance; and as he tugged and pushed, yell after yell rang louder and wilder through the chamber, accompanied all the while by the same hushed sounds. Actually freezing with terror, and scarce knowing what he did, the man turned and ran down the passage, wringing his hands in the extremity of horror and irresolution. At the stair-head he was encountered by General Montague, scared and eager, and just as they met the fearful sounds had ceased.

“What is it? Who – where is your master?” said Montague, with the incoherence of extreme agitation. “Has anything – for God’s sake is anything wrong?”

“Lord have mercy on us, it’s all over,” said the man, staring wildly towards his master’s chamber. “He’s dead, sir, I’m sure he’s dead.”

Without waiting for inquiry or explanation, Montague, closely followed by the servant, hurried to the chamber door, turned the handle, and pushed it open. As the door yielded to his pressure, the ill-omened bird of which the servant had been in search, uttering its spectral warning, started suddenly from the far side of the bed, and flying through the doorway close over their heads, and extinguishing, in its passage, the candle which Montague carried, crashed through the skylight that overlooked the lobby and sailed away into the darkness of the outer space.

“There it is, God bless us,” whispered the man after a breathless pause.

“Curse that bird,” muttered the General, startled by the suddenness of the apparition, and unable to conceal his discomposure.

“The candle is moved,” said the man, after another breathless pause, pointing to the candle that still burned in the room; “see, they put it by the bed.”

“Draw the curtains, fellow, and don’t stand gaping there,” whispered Montague, sternly.

The man hesitated.

“Hold this, then,” said Montague, impatiently thrusting the candlestick into the servant’s hand, and himself advancing to the bedside, he drew the curtains apart. The light of the candle, which was still burning at the bedside, fell upon a figure huddled together, and half upright, at the head of the bed. It seemed as though it had slunk back as far as the solid panelling would allow, and the hands were still clutched in the bed-clothes.

“Barton, Barton, Barton!” cried the General, with a strange mixture of awe and vehemence. He took the candle, and held it so that it shone full upon the face. The features were fixed, stern, and white; the jaw was fallen; and the sightless eyes, still open, gazed vacantly forward toward the front of the bed. “God Almighty! he’s dead,” muttered the General, as he looked upon this fearful spectacle. They both continued to gaze upon it in silence for a minute or more. “And cold, too,” whispered Montague, withdrawing his hand from that of the dead man.

“And see, see – may I never have life, sir,” added the man, after another pause, with a shudder, “but there was something else on the bed with him. Look there – look there – see that, sir.”

As the man thus spoke he pointed to a deep indenture, as if caused by a heavy pressure, near the foot of the bed.

Montague was silent.

“Come, sir, come away, for God’s sake,” whispered the man, drawing close up to him, and holding fast by his arm, while he glanced fearfully round; “what good can be done here now – come away, for God’s sake!”

At this moment they heard the steps of more than one approaching, and Montague, hastily desiring the servant to arrest their progress, endeavoured to loose the rigid grip with which the fingers of the dead man were clutched in the bed-clothes, and drew, as well as he was able, the awful figure into a reclining posture; then closing the curtains carefully upon it, he hastened himself to meet those persons that were approaching.

~   ~   ~   ~

It is needless to follow the personages so slightly connected with this narrative into the events of their after-life; it is enough to say, that no clue to the solution of these mysterious occurrences was ever after discovered; and so long an interval having now passed since the event which I have just described concluded this strange history, it is scarcely to be expected that time can throw any new lights upon its dark and inexplicable outline. Until the secrets of the earth shall be no longer hidden, therefore, these transactions must remain shrouded in their original obscurity.

The only occurrence in Captain Barton’s former life to which reference was ever made, as having any possible connection with the sufferings with which his existence closed, and which he himself seemed to regard as working out a retribution for some grievous sin of his past life, was a circumstance which not for several years after his death was brought to light. The nature of this disclosure was painful to his relatives, and discreditable to his memory.

It appeared that some six years before Captain Barton’s final return to Dublin, he had formed, in the town of Plymouth, a guilty attachment, the object of which was the daughter of one of the ship’s crew under his command. The father had visited the frailty of his unhappy child with extreme harshness, and even brutality, and it was said that she had died heartbroken. Presuming upon Barton’s implication in her guilt, this man had conducted himself toward him with marked insolence; and Barton retaliated this, and what he resented with still more exasperated bitterness – his treatment of the unfortunate girl – by a systematic exercise of those terrible and arbitrary severities which the regulations of the navy placed at the command of those who are responsible for its discipline. The man had at length made his escape, while the vessel was in port at Naples, but died, as it was said, in an hospital in that town, of the wounds inflicted in one of his recent and sanguinary punishments.

Whether these circumstances in reality bear, or not, upon the occurrences of Barton’s after-life, it is, of course, impossible to say. It seems, however, more than probable that they were at least, in his own mind, closely associated with them. But however the truth may be as to the origin and motives of this mysterious persecution, there can be no doubt that, with respect to the agencies by which it was accomplished, absolute and impenetrable mystery is like to prevail until the day of doom.

~   ~   ~   ~

Postscript by the Editor

The preceding narrative is given in the ipsissima verba of the good old clergyman, under whose hand it was delivered to Doctor Hesselius. Notwithstanding the occasional stiffness and redundancy of his sentences, I thought it better to reserve to myself the power of assuring the reader, that in handing to the printer the MS. of a statement so marvellous, the Editor has not altered one letter of the original text—
(Ed. Papers of Dr. Hesselius).

originally “The Watcher”

“Dublin University Magazine”, Nov. 1847
early version (see appendix) —
Ghost Stories And Tales Of Mystery (1851)

revised to “The Familiar”

revised version (the above story) —
In a Glass Darkly (1872)

MR. JUSTICE HARBOTTLE

(1872)

PROLOGUE

On this case Doctor Hesselius has inscribed nothing more than the words, “Harman’s Report,” and a simple reference to his own extraordinary Essay on “The Interior Sense, and the Conditions of the Opening thereof.”

The reference is to Vol. I., Section 317, Note Z-a. The note to which reference is thus made, simply says: “There are two accounts of the remarkable case of the Honourable Mr. Justice Harbottle, one furnished to me by Mrs. Trimmer, of Tunbridge Wells (June, 1805); the other at a much later date, by Anthony Harman, Esq. I much prefer the former; in the first place, because it is minute and detailed, and written, it seems to me, with more caution and knowledge; and in the next, because the letters from Dr. Hedstone, which are embodied in it, furnish matter of the highest value to a right apprehension of the nature of the case. It was one of the best declared cases of an opening of the interior sense, which I have met with. It was affected too, by the phenomenon, which occurs so frequently as to indicate a law of these eccentric conditions; that is to say, it exhibited what I may term, the contagious character of this sort of intrusion of the spirit-world upon the proper domain of matter. So soon as the spirit-action has established itself in the case of one patient, its developed energy begins to radiate, more or less effectually, upon others. The interior vision of the child was opened; as was, also, that of its mother, Mrs. Pyneweck; and both the interior vision and hearing of the scullery-maid, were opened on the same occasion. After-appearances are the result of the law explained in Vol. II., Section 17 to 49. The common centre of association, simultaneously recalled, unites, or reunites, as the case may be, for a period measured, as we see, in Section 37. The maximum will extend to days, the minimum is little more than a second. We see the operation of this principle perfectly displayed, in certain cases of lunacy, of epilepsy, of catalepsy, and of mania, of a peculiar and painful character, though unattended by incapacity of business.”

The memorandum of the case of Judge Harbottle, which was written by Mrs. Trimmer, of Tunbridge Wells, which Doctor Hesselius thought the better of the two, I have been unable to discover among his papers. I found in his escritoire a note to the effect that he had lent the Report of Judge Harbottle’s case, written by Mrs. Trimmer, to Dr. F. Heyne. To that learned and able gentleman accordingly I wrote, and received from him, in his reply, which was full of alarms and regrets, on account of the uncertain safety of that “valuable MS.,” a line written long since by Dr. Hesselius, which completely exonerated him, inasmuch as it acknowledged the safe return of the papers. The narrative of Mr. Harman, is therefore, the only one available for this collection. The late Dr. Hesselius, in another passage of the note that I have cited, says, “As to the facts (non-medical) of the case, the narrative of Mr. Harman exactly tallies with that furnished by Mrs. Trimmer.” The strictly scientific view of the case would scarcely interest the popular reader; and, possibly, for the purposes of this selection, I should, even had I both papers to choose between, have preferred that of Mr. Harman, which is given, in full, in the following pages.

CHAPTER I

The Judge’s House

Thirty years ago, an elderly man, to whom I paid quarterly a small annuity charged on some property of mine, came on the quarter-day to receive it. He was a dry, sad, quiet man, who had known better days, and had always maintained an unexceptionable character. No better authority could be imagined for a ghost story.

He told me one, though with a manifest reluctance; he was drawn into the narration by his choosing to explain what I should not have remarked, that he had called two days earlier than that week after the strict day of payment, which he had usually allowed to elapse. His reason was a sudden determination to change his lodgings, and the consequent necessity of paying his rent a little before it was due.

He lodged in a dark street in Westminster, in a spacious old house, very warm, being wainscoted from top to bottom, and furnished with no undue abundance of windows, and those fitted with thick sashes and small panes.

This house was, as the bills upon the windows testified, offered to be sold or let. But no one seemed to care to look at it.

A thin matron, in rusty black silk, very taciturn, with large, steady, alarmed eyes, that seemed to look in your face, to read what you might have seen in the dark rooms and passages through which you had passed, was in charge of it, with a solitary “maid-of-all-work” under her command. My poor friend had taken lodgings in this house, on account of their extraordinary cheapness. He had occupied them for nearly a year without the slightest disturbance, and was the only tenant, under rent, in the house. He had two rooms; a sitting-room and a bedroom with a closet opening from it, in which he kept his books and papers locked up. He had gone to his bed, having also locked the outer door. Unable to sleep, he had lighted a candle, and after having read for a time, had laid the book beside him. He heard the old clock at the stairhead strike one; and very shortly after, to his alarm, he saw the closet door, which he thought he had locked, open stealthily, and a slight dark man, particularly sinister, and somewhere about fifty, dressed in mourning of a very antique fashion, such a suit as we see in Hogarth, entered the room on tip-toe. He was followed by an elder man, stout, and blotched with scurvy, and whose features, fixed as a corpse’s, were stamped with dreadful force with a character of sensuality and villainy.

This old man wore a flowered silk dressing-gown and ruffles, and he remarked a gold ring on his finger, and on his head a cap of velvet, such as, in the days of perukes, gentlemen wore in undress.

This direful old man carried in his ringed and ruffled hand a coil of rope; and these two figures crossed the floor diagonally, passing the foot of his bed, from the closet door at the farther end of the room, at the left, near the window, to the door opening upon the lobby, close to the bed’s head, at his right.

He did not attempt to describe his sensations as these figures passed so near him. He merely said, that so far from sleeping in that room again, no consideration the world could offer would induce him so much as to enter it again alone, even in the daylight. He found both doors, that of the closet, and that of the room opening upon the lobby, in the morning fast locked as he had left them before going to bed.

In answer to a question of mine, he said that neither appeared the least conscious of his presence. They did not seem to glide, but walked as living men do, but without any sound, and he felt a vibration on the floor as they crossed it. He so obviously suffered from speaking about the apparitions, that I asked him no more questions.

There were in his description, however, certain coincidences so very singular, as to induce me, by that very post, to write to a friend much my senior, then living in a remote part of England, for the information which I knew he could give me. He had himself more than once pointed out that old house to my attention, and told me, though very briefly, the strange story which I now asked him to give me in greater detail.

His answer satisfied me; and the following pages convey its substance.

Your letter (he wrote) tells me you desire some particulars about the closing years of the life of Mr. Justice Harbottle, one of the judges of the Court of Common Pleas. You refer, of course, to the extraordinary occurrences that made that period of his life long after a theme for “winter tales” and metaphysical speculation. I happen to know perhaps more than any other man living of those mysterious particulars.

The old family mansion, when I revisited London, more than thirty years ago, I examined for the last time. During the years that have passed since then, I hear that improvement, with its preliminary demolitions, has been doing wonders for the quarter of Westminster in which it stood. If I were quite certain that the house had been taken down, I should have no difficulty about naming the street in which it stood. As what I have to tell, however, is not likely to improve its letting value, and as I should not care to get into trouble, I prefer being silent on that particular point.

How old the house was, I can’t tell. People said it was built by Roger Harbottle, a Turkey merchant, in the reign of King James I. I am not a good opinion upon such questions; but having been in it, though in its forlorn and deserted state, I can tell you in a general way what it was like. It was built of dark-red brick, and the door and windows were faced with stone that had turned yellow by time. It receded some feet from the line of the other houses in the street; and it had a florid and fanciful rail of iron about the broad steps that invited your ascent to the hall door, in which were fixed, under a file of lamps among scrolls and twisted leaves, two immense “extinguishers,” like the conical caps of fairies, into which, in old times, the footmen used to thrust their flambeaux when their chairs or coaches had set down their great people, in the hall or at the steps, as the case might be. That hall is panelled up to the ceiling, and has a large fireplace. Two or three stately old rooms open from it at each side. The windows of these are tall, with many small panes. Passing through the arch at the back of the hall, you come upon the wide and heavy well-staircase. There is a back staircase also. The mansion is large, and has not as much light, by any means, in proportion to its extent, as modern houses enjoy. When I saw it, it had long been untenanted, and had the gloomy reputation beside of a haunted house. Cobwebs floated from the ceilings or spanned the corners of the cornices, and dust lay thick over everything. The windows were stained with the dust and rain of fifty years, and darkness had thus grown darker.

When I made it my first visit, it was in company with my father, when I was still a boy, in the year 1808. I was about twelve years old, and my imagination impressible, as it always is at that age. I looked about me with great awe. I was here in the very centre and scene of those occurrences which I had heard recounted at the fireside at home, with so delightful a horror.

My father was an old bachelor of nearly sixty when he married. He had, when a child, seen Judge Harbottle on the bench in his robes and wig a dozen times at least before his death, which took place in 1748, and his appearance made a powerful and unpleasant impression, not only on his imagination, but upon his nerves.

The Judge was at that time a man of some sixty-seven years. He had a great mulberry-coloured face, a big, carbuncled nose, fierce eyes, and a grim and brutal mouth. My father, who was young at the time, thought it the most formidable face he had ever seen; for there were evidences of intellectual power in the formation and lines of the forehead. His voice was loud and harsh, and gave effect to the sarcasm which was his habitual weapon on the bench.

This old gentleman had the reputation of being about the wickedest man in England. Even on the bench he now and then showed his scorn of opinion. He had carried cases his own way, it was said, in spite of counsel, authorities, and even of juries, by a sort of cajolery, violence, and bamboozling, that somehow confused and overpowered resistance. He had never actually committed himself; he was too cunning to do that. He had the character of being, however, a dangerous and unscrupulous judge; but his character did not trouble him. The associates he chose for his hours of relaxation cared as little as he did about it.

CHAPTER II

Mr. Peters

One night during the session of 1746 this old Judge went down in his chair to wait in one of the rooms of the House of Lords for the result of a division in which he and his order were interested.

This over, he was about to return to his house close by, in his chair; but the night had become so soft and fine that he changed his mind, sent it home empty, and with two footmen, each with a flambeau, set out on foot in preference. Gout had made him rather a slow pedestrian. It took him some time to get through the two or three streets he had to pass before reaching his house.

In one of those narrow streets of tall houses, perfectly silent at that hour, he overtook, slowly as he was walking, a very singular-looking old gentleman.

He had a bottle-green coat on, with a cape to it, and large stone buttons, a broad-leafed low-crowned hat, from under which a big powdered wig escaped; he stooped very much, and supported his bending knees with the aid of a crutch-handled cane, and so shuffled and tottered along painfully.

“I ask your pardon, sir,” said this old man, in a very quavering voice, as the burly Judge came up with him, and he extended his hand feebly towards his arm.

Mr. Justice Harbottle saw that the man was by no means poorly dressed, and his manner that of a gentleman.

The Judge stopped short, and said, in his harsh peremptory tones, “Well, sir, how can I serve you?”

“Can you direct me to Judge Harbottle’s house? I have some intelligence of the very last importance to communicate to him.”

“Can you tell it before witnesses?” asked the Judge.

“By no means; it must reach his ear only,” quavered the old man earnestly.

“If that be so, sir, you have only to accompany me a few steps farther to reach my house, and obtain a private audience; for I am Judge Harbottle.”

With this invitation the infirm gentleman in the white wig complied very readily; and in another minute the stranger stood in what was then termed the front parlour of the Judge’s house, tête-à-tête with that shrewd and dangerous functionary.

He had to sit down, being very much exhausted, and unable for a little time to speak; and then he had a fit of coughing, and after that a fit of gasping; and thus two or three minutes passed, during which the Judge dropped his roquelaure on an armchair, and threw his cocked-hat over that.

The venerable pedestrian in the white wig quickly recovered his voice. With closed doors they remained together for some time.

There were guests waiting in the drawing-rooms, and the sound of men’s voices laughing, and then of a female voice singing to a harpsichord, were heard distinctly in the hall over the stairs; for old Judge Harbottle had arranged one of his dubious jollifications, such as might well make the hair of godly men’s heads stand upright for that night.

This old gentleman in the powdered white wig, that rested on his stooped shoulders, must have had something to say that interested the Judge very much; for he would not have parted on easy terms with the ten minutes and upwards which that conference filched from the sort of revelry in which he most delighted, and in which he was the roaring king, and in some sort the tyrant also, of his company.

The footman who showed the aged gentleman out observed that the Judge’s mulberry-coloured face, pimples and all, were bleached to a dingy yellow, and there was the abstraction of agitated thought in his manner, as he bid the stranger good-night. The servant saw that the conversation had been of serious import, and that the Judge was frightened.

Instead of stumping upstairs forthwith to his scandalous hilarities, his profane company, and his great china bowl of punch – the identical bowl from which a bygone Bishop of London, good easy man, had baptised this Judge’s grandfather, now clinking round the rim with silver ladles, and hung with scrolls of lemon-peel – instead, I say, of stumping and clambering up the great staircase to the cavern of his Circean enchantment, he stood with his big nose flattened against the windowpane, watching the progress of the feeble old man, who clung stiffly to the iron rail as he got down, step by step, to the pavement.

The hall door had hardly closed, when the old Judge was in the hall bawling hasty orders, with such stimulating expletives as old colonels under excitement sometimes indulge in now-a-days, with a stamp or two of his big foot, and a waving of his clenched fist in the air. He commanded the footman to overtake the old gentleman in the white wig, to offer him his protection on his way home, and in no case to show his face again without having ascertained where he lodged, and who he was, and all about him.

“By God, sirrah! if you fail me in this, you doff my livery tonight!”

Forth bounced the stalwart footman, with his heavy cane under his arm, and skipped down the steps, and looked up and down the street after the singular figure, so easy to recognize.

What were his adventures I shall not tell you just now.

The old man, in the conference to which he had been admitted in that stately panelled room, had just told the Judge a very strange story. He might be himself a conspirator; he might possibly be crazed; or possibly his whole story was straight and true.

The aged gentleman in the bottle-green coat, in finding himself alone with Mr. Justice Harbottle, had become agitated. He said,

“There is, perhaps you are not aware, my lord, a prisoner in Shrewsbury jail, charged with having forged a bill of exchange for a hundred and twenty pounds, and his name is Lewis Pyneweck, a grocer of that town.”

“Is there?” says the Judge, who knew well that there was.

“Yes, my lord,” says the old man.

“Then you had better say nothing to affect this case. If you do, by – , I’ll commit you! for I’m to try it,” says the judge, with his terrible look and tone.

“I am not going to do anything of the kind, my lord; of him or his case I know nothing, and care nothing. But a fact has come to my knowledge which it behoves you to well consider.”

“And what may that fact be?” inquired the Judge; “I’m in haste, sir, and beg you will use dispatch.”

“It has come to my knowledge, my lord, that a secret tribunal is in process of formation, the object of which is to take cognisance of the conduct of the judges; and first, of your conduct, my lord; it is a wicked conspiracy.”

“Who are of it?” demands the Judge.

“I know not a single name as yet. I know but the fact, my lord; it is most certainly true.”

“I’ll have you before the Privy Council, sir,” says the Judge.

“That is what I most desire; but not for a day or two, my lord.”

“And why so?”

“I have not as yet a single name, as I told your lordship; but I expect to have a list of the most forward men in it, and some other papers connected with the plot, in two or three days.”

“You said one or two just now.”

“About that time, my lord.”

“Is this a Jacobite plot?”

“In the main I think it is, my lord.”

“Why, then, it is political. I have tried no State prisoners, nor am like to try any such. How, then, doth it concern me?”

“From what I can gather, my lord, there are those in it who desire private revenges upon certain judges.”

“What do they call their cabal?”

“The High Court of Appeal, my lord.”

“Who are you, sir? What is your name?”

“Hugh Peters, my lord.”

“That should be a Whig name?”

“It is, my lord.” “Where do you lodge, Mr. Peters?”

“In Thames Street, my lord, over against the sign of the ‘Three Kings.’”

“‘Three Kings?’ Take care one be not too many for you, Mr. Peters! How come you, an honest Whig, as you say, to be privy to a Jacobite plot? Answer me that.”

“My lord, a person in whom I take an interest has been seduced to take a part in it; and being frightened at the unexpected wickedness of their plans, he is resolved to become an informer for the Crown.”

“He resolves like a wise man, sir. What does he say of the persons? Who are in the plot? Doth he know them?”

“Only two, my lord; but he will be introduced to the club in a few days, and he will then have a list, and more exact information of their plans, and above all of their oaths, and their hours and places of meeting, with which he wishes to be acquainted before they can have any suspicions of his intentions. And being so informed, to whom, think you, my lord, had he best go then?”

“To the king’s attorney-general straight. But you say this concerns me, sir, in particular? How about this prisoner, Lewis Pyneweck? Is he one of them?”

“I can’t tell, my lord; but for some reason, it is thought your lordship will be well advised if you try him not. For if you do, it is feared ’twill shorten your days.”

“So far as I can learn, Mr. Peters, this business smells pretty strong of blood and treason. The king’s attorney-general will know how to deal with it. When shall I see you again, sir?”

“If you give me leave, my lord, either before your lordship’s court sits, or after it rises, tomorrow. I should like to come and tell your lordship what has passed.”

“Do so, Mr. Peters, at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. And see you play me no trick, sir, in this matter; if you do, by – , sir, I’ll lay you by the heels!”

“You need fear no trick from me, my lord; had I not wished to serve you, and acquit my own conscience, I never would have come all this way to talk with your lordship.”

“I’m willing to believe you, Mr. Peters; I’m willing to believe you, sir.”

And upon this they parted.

“He has either painted his face, or he is consumedly sick,” thought the old Judge.

The light had shown more effectually upon his features as he turned to leave the room with a low bow, and they looked, he fancied, unnaturally chalky.

“Damn him!” said the Judge ungraciously, as he began to scale the stairs: “he has half-spoiled my supper.”

But if he had, no one but the Judge himself perceived it, and the evidence was all, as anyone might perceive, the other way.

CHAPTER III

Lewis Pyneweck

In the meantime the footman dispatched in pursuit of Mr. Peters speedily overtook that feeble gentleman. The old man stopped when he heard the sound of pursuing steps, but any alarms that may have crossed his mind seemed to disappear on his recognizing the livery. He very gratefully accepted the proffered assistance, and placed his tremulous arm within the servant’s for support. They had not gone far, however, when the old man stopped suddenly, saying,

“Dear me! as I live, I have dropped it. You heard it fall. My eyes, I fear, won’t serve me, and I’m unable to stoop low enough; but if you will look, you shall have half the find. It is a guinea; I carried it in my glove.”

The street was silent and deserted. The footman had hardly descended to what he termed his “hunkers,” and begun to search the pavement about the spot which the old man indicated, when Mr. Peters, who seemed very much exhausted, and breathed with difficulty, struck him a violent blow, from above, over the back of the head with a heavy instrument, and then another; and leaving him bleeding and senseless in the gutter, ran like a lamplighter down a lane to the right, and was gone.

When an hour later, the watchman brought the man in livery home, still stupid and covered with blood, Judge Harbottle cursed his servant roundly, swore he was drunk, threatened him with an indictment for taking bribes to betray his master, and cheered him with a perspective of the broad street leading from the Old Bailey to Tyburn, the cart’s tail, and the hangman’s lash.

Notwithstanding this demonstration, the Judge was pleased. It was a disguised “affidavit man,” or footpad, no doubt, who had been employed to frighten him. The trick had fallen through.

A “court of appeal,” such as the false Hugh Peters had indicated, with assassination for its sanction, would be an uncomfortable institution for a “hanging judge” like the Honourable Justice Harbottle. That sarcastic and ferocious administrator of the criminal code of England, at that time a rather pharisaical, bloody and heinous system of justice, had reasons of his own for choosing to try that very Lewis Pyneweck, on whose behalf this audacious trick was devised. Try him he would. No man living should take that morsel out of his mouth.

Of Lewis Pyneweck, of course, so far as the outer world could see, he knew nothing. He would try him after his fashion, without fear, favour, or affection.

But did he not remember a certain thin man, dressed in mourning, in whose house, in Shrewsbury, the Judge’s lodgings used to be, until a scandal of ill-treating his wife came suddenly to light? A grocer with a demure look, a soft step, and a lean face as dark as mahogany, with a nose sharp and long, standing ever so little awry, and a pair of dark steady brown eyes under thinly-traced black brows – a man whose thin lips wore always a faint unpleasant smile.

Had not that scoundrel an account to settle with the Judge? had he not been troublesome lately? and was not his name Lewis Pyneweck, some time grocer in Shrewsbury, and now prisoner in the jail of that town?

The reader may take it, if he pleases, as a sign that Judge Harbottle was a good Christian, that he suffered nothing ever from remorse. That was undoubtedly true. He had, nevertheless, done this grocer, forger, what you will, some five or six years before, a grievous wrong; but it was not that, but a possible scandal, and possible complications, that troubled the learned Judge now.

Did he not, as a lawyer, know, that to bring a man from his shop to the dock, the chances must be at least ninety-nine out of a hundred that he is guilty?

A weak man like his learned brother Withershins was not a judge to keep the high-roads safe, and make crime tremble. Old Judge Harbottle was the man to make the evil-disposed quiver, and to refresh the world with showers of wicked blood, and thus save the innocent, to the refrain of the ancient saw he loved to quote:

Foolish pity

Ruins a city

In hanging that fellow he could not be wrong. The eye of a man accustomed to look upon the dock could not fail to read “villain” written sharp and clear in his plotting face. Of course he would try him, and no one else should.

A saucy-looking woman, still handsome, in a mobcap gay with blue ribbons, in a saque of flowered silk, with lace and rings on, much too fine for the Judge’s housekeeper, which nevertheless she was, peeped into his study next morning, and, seeing the Judge alone, stepped in.

“Here’s another letter from him, come by the post this morning. Can’t you do nothing for him?” she said wheedlingly, with her arm over his neck, and her delicate finger and thumb fiddling with the lobe of his purple ear.

“I’ll try,” said Judge Harbottle, not raising his eyes from the paper he was reading.

“I knew you’d do what I asked you,” she said.

The Judge clapt his gouty claw over his heart, and made her an ironical bow.

“What,” she asked, “will you do?”

“Hang him,” said the Judge with a chuckle.

“You don’t mean to; no, you don’t, my little man,” said she, surveying herself in a mirror on the wall.

“I’m damned but I think you’re falling in love with your husband at last!” said Judge Harbottle.

“I’m blest but I think you’re growing jealous of him,” replied the lady with a laugh. “But no; he was always a bad one to me; I’ve done with him long ago.”

“And he with you, by George! When he took your fortune, and your spoons, and your earrings, he had all he wanted of you. He drove you from his house; and when he discovered you had made yourself comfortable, and found a good situation, he’d have taken your guineas, and your silver, and your earrings over again, and then allowed you half-a-dozen years more to make a new harvest for his mill. You don’t wish him good; if you say you do, you lie.”

She laughed a wicked, saucy laugh, and gave the terrible Rhadamanthus a playful tap on the chops.

“He wants me to send him money to fee a counsellor,” she said, while her eyes wandered over the pictures on the wall, and back again to the looking-glass; and certainly she did not look as if his jeopardy troubled her very much.

“Confound his impudence, the scoundrel!” thundered the old Judge, throwing himself back in his chair, as he used to do in furore on the bench, and the lines of his mouth looked brutal, and his eyes ready to leap from their sockets. “If you answer his letter from my house to please yourself, you’ll write your next from somebody else’s to please me. You understand, my pretty witch, I’ll not be pestered. Come, no pouting; whimpering won’t do. You don’t care a brass farthing for the villain, body or soul. You came here but to make a row. You are one of Mother Carey’s chickens; and where you come, the storm is up. Get you gone, baggage! get you gone!” he repeated, with a stamp; for a knock at the hall door made her instantaneous disappearance indispensable.

I need hardly say that the venerable Hugh Peters did not appear again. The Judge never mentioned him. But oddly enough, considering how he laughed to scorn the weak invention which he had blown into dust at the very first puff, his white-wigged visitor and the conference in the dark front parlour were often in his memory.

His shrewd eye told him that allowing for change of tints and such disguises as the playhouse affords every night, the features of this false old man, who had turned out too hard for his tall footman, were identical with those of Lewis Pyneweck.

Judge Harbottle made his registrar call upon the crown solicitor, and tell him that there was a man in town who bore a wonderful resemblance to a prisoner in Shrewsbury jail named Lewis Pyneweck, and to make inquiry through the post forthwith whether anyone was personating Pyneweck in prison and whether he had thus or otherwise made his escape.

The prisoner was safe, however, and no question as to his identity.

CHAPTER IV

Interruption in Court

In due time Judge Harbottle went circuit; and in due time the judges were in Shrewsbury. News travelled slowly in those days, and newspapers, like the wagons and stage coaches, took matters easily. Mrs. Pyneweck, in the Judge’s house, with a diminished household – the greater part of the Judge’s servants having gone with him, for he had given up riding circuit, and travelled in his coach in state – kept house rather solitarily at home.

In spite of quarrels, in spite of mutual injuries – some of them, inflicted by herself, enormous – in spite of a married life of spited bickerings – a life in which there seemed no love or liking or forbearance, for years – now that Pyneweck stood in near danger of death, something like remorse came suddenly upon her. She knew that in Shrewsbury were transacting the scenes which were to determine his fate. She knew she did not love him; but she could not have supposed, even a fortnight before, that the hour of suspense could have affected her so powerfully.

She knew the day on which the trial was expected to take place. She could not get it out of her head for a minute; she felt faint as it drew towards evening.

Two or three days passed; and then she knew that the trial must be over by this time. There were floods between London and Shrewsbury, and news was long delayed. She wished the floods would last forever. It was dreadful waiting to hear; dreadful to know that the event was over, and that she could not hear till self-willed rivers subsided; dreadful to know that they must subside and the news come at last.

She had some vague trust in the Judge’s good nature, and much in the resources of chance and accident. She had contrived to send the money he wanted. He would not be without legal advice and energetic and skilled support.

At last the news did come – a long arrear all in a gush: a letter from a female friend in Shrewsbury; a return of the sentences, sent up for the Judge; and most important, because most easily got at, being told with great aplomb and brevity, the long-deferred intelligence of the Shrewsbury Assizes in the Morning Advertiser. Like an impatient reader of a novel, who reads the last page first, she read with dizzy eyes the list of the executions.

Two were respited, seven were hanged; and in that capital catalogue was this line:

Lewis Pyneweck – forgery.

She had to read it a half-a-dozen times over before she was sure she understood it. Here was the paragraph:

Sentence, Death – 7.

Executed accordingly,
on Friday the 13th instant, to wit:

Thomas Primer, alias Duck – highway robbery.
Flora Guy – stealing to the value of 11s. 6d.
Arthur Pounden – burglary.
Matilda Mummery – riot.
Lewis Pyneweck – forgery, bill of exchange.

And when she reached this, she read it over and over, feeling very cold and sick.

This buxom housekeeper was known in the house as Mrs. Carwell – Carwell being her maiden name, which she had resumed.

No one in the house except its master knew her history. Her introduction had been managed craftily. No one suspected that it had been concerted between her and the old reprobate in scarlet and ermine.

Flora Carwell ran up the stairs now, and snatched her little girl, hardly seven years of age, whom she met on the lobby, hurriedly up in her arms, and carried her into her bedroom, without well knowing what she was doing, and sat down, placing the child before her. She was not able to speak. She held the child before her, and looked in the little girl’s wondering face, and burst into tears of horror.

She thought the Judge could have saved him. I daresay he could. For a time she was furious with him, and hugged and kissed her bewildered little girl, who returned her gaze with large round eyes.

That little girl had lost her father, and knew nothing of the matter. She had always been told that her father was dead long ago.

A woman, coarse, uneducated, vain, and violent, does not reason, or even feel, very distinctly; but in these tears of consternation were mingling a self-upbraiding. She felt afraid of that little child.

But Mrs. Carwell was a person who lived not upon sentiment, but upon beef and pudding; she consoled herself with punch; she did not trouble herself long even with resentments; she was a gross and material person, and could not mourn over the irrevocable for more than a limited number of hours, even if she would.

Judge Harbottle was soon in London again. Except the gout, this savage old epicurean never knew a day’s sickness. He laughed, and coaxed, and bullied away the young woman’s faint upbraidings, and in a little time Lewis Pyneweck troubled her no more; and the Judge secretly chuckled over the perfectly fair removal of a bore, who might have grown little by little into something very like a tyrant.

It was the lot of the Judge whose adventures I am now recounting to try criminal cases at the Old Bailey shortly after his return. He had commenced his charge to the jury in a case of forgery, and was, after his wont, thundering dead against the prisoner, with many a hard aggravation and cynical gibe, when suddenly all died away in silence, and, instead of looking at the jury, the eloquent Judge was gaping at some person in the body of the court.

Among the persons of small importance who stand and listen at the sides was one tall enough to show with a little prominence; a slight mean figure, dressed in seedy black, lean and dark of visage. He had just handed a letter to the crier, before he caught the Judge’s eye.

That Judge descried, to his amazement, the features of Lewis Pyneweck. He had the usual faint thin-lipped smile; and with his blue chin raised in air, and as it seemed quite unconscious of the distinguished notice he has attracted, he was stretching his low cravat with his crooked fingers, while he slowly turned his head from side to side – a process which enabled the Judge to see distinctly a stripe of swollen blue round his neck, which indicated, he thought, the grip of the rope.

This man, with a few others, had got a footing on a step, from which he could better see the court. He now stepped down, and the Judge lost sight of him.

His lordship signed energetically with his hand in the direction in which this man had vanished. He turned to the tipstaff. His first effort to speak ended in a gasp. He cleared his throat, and told the astounded official to arrest that man who had interrupted the court.

“He’s but this moment gone down there. Bring him in custody before me, within ten minutes’ time, or I’ll strip your gown from your shoulders and fine the sheriff!” he thundered, while his eyes flashed round the court in search of the functionary.

Attorneys, counsellors, idle spectators, gazed in the direction in which Mr. Justice Harbottle had shaken his gnarled old hand. They compared notes. Not one had seen anyone making a disturbance. They asked one another if the Judge was losing his head.

Nothing came of the search. His lordship concluded his charge a great deal more tamely; and when the jury retired, he stared round the court with a wandering mind, and looked as if he would not have given sixpence to see the prisoner hanged.

CHAPTER V

Caleb Searcher

The Judge had received the letter; had he known from whom it came, he would no doubt have read it instantaneously. As it was he simply read the direction:

To the Honourable The Lord Justice Elijah Harbottle, One of his Majesty’s Justices of the Honourable Court of Common Pleas.

It remained forgotten in his pocket till he reached home.

When he pulled out that and others from the capacious pocket of his coat, it had its turn, as he sat in his library in his thick silk dressing-gown; and then he found its contents to be a closely-written letter, in a clerk’s hand, and an enclosure in “secretary hand,” as I believe the angular scrivinary of law-writings in those days was termed, engrossed on a bit of parchment about the size of this page. The letter said:

MR. JUSTICE HARBOTTLE, – MY LORD,

I am ordered by the High Court of Appeal to acquaint your lordship, in order to your better preparing yourself for your trial, that a true bill hath been sent down, and the indictment lieth against your lordship for the murder of one Lewis Pyneweck of Shrewsbury, citizen, wrongfully executed for the forgery of a bill of exchange, on the – th day of – last, by reason of the wilful perversion of the evidence, and the undue pressure put upon the jury, together with the illegal admission of evidence by your lordship, well knowing the same to be illegal, by all which the promoter of the prosecution of the said indictment, before the High Court of Appeal, hath lost his life.

And the trial of the said indictment, I am farther ordered to acquaint your lordship, is fixed for the both day of ——— next ensuing, by the right honourable the Lord Chief Justice Twofold, of the court aforesaid, to wit, the High Court of Appeal, on which day it will most certainly take place. And I am farther to acquaint your lordship, to prevent any surprise or miscarriage, that your case stands first for the said day, and that the said High Court of Appeal sits day and night, and never rises; and herewith, by order of the said court, I furnish your lordship with a copy (extract) of the record in this case, except of the indictment, whereof, notwithstanding, the substance and effect is supplied to your lordship in this Notice. And farther I am to inform you, that in case the jury then to try your lordship should find you guilty, the right honourable the Lord Chief Justice will, in passing sentence of death upon you, fix the day of execution for the 10th day of ———, being one calendar month from the day of your trial.

It was signed by

CALEB SEARCHER,

Officer of the Crown Solicitor in the Kingdom of Life and Death.

The Judge glanced through the parchment.

“’S’blood! Do they think a man like me is to be bamboozled by their buffoonery?”

The Judge’s coarse features were wrung into one of his sneers; but he was pale. Possibly, after all, there was a conspiracy on foot. It was queer. Did they mean to pistol him in his carriage? or did they only aim at frightening him?

Judge Harbottle had more than enough of animal courage. He was not afraid of highwaymen, and he had fought more than his share of duels, being a foul-mouthed advocate while he held briefs at the bar. No one questioned his fighting qualities. But with respect to this particular case of Pyneweck, he lived in a house of glass. Was there not his pretty, dark-eyed, over-dressed housekeeper, Mrs. Flora Carwell? Very easy for people who knew Shrewsbury to identify Mrs. Pyneweck, if once put upon the scent; and had he not stormed and worked hard in that case? Had he not made it hard sailing for the prisoner? Did he not know very well what the bar thought of it? It would be the worst scandal that ever blasted Judge.

So much there was intimidating in the matter but nothing more. The Judge was a little bit gloomy for a day or two after, and more testy with everyone than usual.

He locked up the papers; and about a week after he asked his housekeeper, one day, in the library:

“Had your husband never a brother?”

Mrs. Carwell squalled on this sudden introduction of the funereal topic, and cried exemplary “piggins full,” as the Judge used pleasantly to say. But he was in no mood for trifling now, and he said sternly:

“Come, madam! this wearies me. Do it another time; and give me an answer to my question.” So she did.

Pyneweck had no brother living. He once had one; but he died in Jamaica.

“How do you know he is dead?” asked the Judge.

“Because he told me so.”

“Not the dead man.”

“Pyneweck told me so.”

“Is that all?” sneered the Judge.

He pondered this matter; and time went on. The Judge was growing a little morose, and less enjoying. The subject struck nearer to his thoughts than he fancied it could have done. But so it is with most undivulged vexations, and there was no one to whom he could tell this one.

It was now the ninth; and Mr Justice Harbottle was glad. He knew nothing would come of it. Still it bothered him; and tomorrow would see it well over.

(What of the paper I have cited? No one saw it during his life; no one, after his death. He spoke of it to Dr. Hedstone; and what purported to be “a copy,” in the old Judge’s handwriting, was found. The original was nowhere. Was it a copy of an illusion, incident to brain disease? Such is my belief.)

CHAPTER VI

Arrested

Judge Harbottle went this night to the play at Drury Lane. He was one of the old fellows who care nothing for late hours, and occasional knocking about in pursuit of pleasure. He had appointed with two cronies of Lincoln’s Inn to come home in his coach with him to sup after the play.

They were not in his box, but were to meet him near the entrance, and get into his carriage there; and Mr. Justice Harbottle, who hated waiting, was looking a little impatiently from the window.

The Judge yawned.

He told the footman to watch for Counsellor Thavies and Counsellor Beller, who were coming; and, with another yawn, he laid his cocked hat on his knees, closed his eyes, leaned back in his corner, wrapped his mantle closer about him, and began to think of pretty Mrs. Abington.

And being a man who could sleep like a sailor, at a moment’s notice, he was thinking of taking a nap. Those fellows had no business to keep a judge waiting.

He heard their voices now. Those rake-hell counsellors were laughing, and bantering, and sparring after their wont. The carriage swayed and jerked, as one got in, and then again as the other followed. The door clapped, and the coach was now jogging and rumbling over the pavement. The Judge was a little bit sulky. He did not care to sit up and open his eyes. Let them suppose he was asleep. He heard them laugh with more malice than good-humour, he thought, as they observed it. He would give them a d – d hard knock or two when they got to his door, and till then he would counterfeit his nap.

The clocks were chiming twelve. Beller and Thavies were silent as tombstones. They were generally loquacious and merry rascals.

The Judge suddenly felt himself roughly seized and thrust from his corner into the middle of the seat, and opening his eyes, instantly he found himself between his two companions.

Before he could blurt out the oath that was at his lips, he saw that they were two strangers – evil-looking fellows, each with a pistol in his hand, and dressed like Bow Street officers.

The Judge clutched at the check-string. The coach pulled up. He stared about him. They were not among houses; but through the windows, under a broad moonlight, he saw a black moor stretching lifelessly from right to left, with rotting trees, pointing fantastic branches in the air, standing here and there in groups, as if they held up their arms and twigs like fingers, in horrible glee at the Judge’s coming.

A footman came to the window. He knew his long face and sunken eyes. He knew it was Dingly Chuff, fifteen years ago a footman in his service, whom he had turned off at a moment’s notice, in a burst of jealousy, and indicted for a missing spoon. The man had died in prison of the jail-fever.

The Judge drew back in utter amazement. His armed companions signed mutely; and they were again gliding over this unknown moor.

The bloated and gouty old man, in his horror considered the question of resistance. But his athletic days were long over. This moor was a desert. There was no help to be had. He was in the hands of strange servants, even if his recognition turned out to be a delusion, and they were under the command of his captors. There was nothing for it but submission, for the present.

Suddenly the coach was brought nearly to a standstill, so that the prisoner saw an ominous sight from the window.

It was a gigantic gallows beside the road; it stood three-sided, and from each of its three broad beams at top depended in chains some eight or ten bodies, from several of which the cere-clothes had dropped away, leaving the skeletons swinging lightly by their chains. A tall ladder reached to the summit of the structure, and on the peat beneath lay bones.

On top of the dark transverse beam facing the road, from which, as from the other two completing the triangle of death, dangled a row of these unfortunates in chains, a hangman, with a pipe in his mouth, much as we see him in the famous print of the “Idle Apprentice,” though here his perch was ever so much higher, was reclining at his ease and listlessly shying bones, from a little heap at his elbow, at the skeletons that hung round, bringing down now a rib or two, now a hand, now half a leg. A long-sighted man could have discerned that he was a dark fellow, lean; and from continually looking down on the earth from the elevation over which, in another sense, he always hung, his nose, his lips, his chin were pendulous and loose, and drawn down into a monstrous grotesque.

This fellow took his pipe from his mouth on seeing the coach, stood up, and cut some solemn capers high on his beam, and shook a new rope in the air, crying with a voice high and distant as the caw of a raven hovering over a gibbet, “A robe for Judge Harbottle!”

The coach was now driving on at its old swift pace.

So high a gallows as that, the Judge had never, even in his most hilarious moments, dreamed of. He thought, he must be raving. And the dead footman! He shook his ears and strained his eyelids; but if he was dreaming, he was unable to awake himself.

There was no good in threatening these scoundrels. A brutum fulmen might bring a real one on his head.

Any submission to get out of their hands; and then heaven and earth he would move to unearth and hunt them down.

Suddenly they drove round a corner of a vast white building, and under a porte-cochère.

CHAPTER VII

Chief-Justice Twofold

The Judge found himself in a corridor lighted with dingy oil lamps, the walls of bare stone; it looked like a passage in a prison. His guards placed him in the hands of other people. Here and there he saw bony and gigantic soldiers passing to and fro, with muskets over their shoulders. They looked straight before them, grinding their teeth, in bleak fury, with no noise but the clank of their shoes. He saw these by glimpses, round corners, and at the ends of passages, but he did not actually pass them by.

And now, passing under a narrow doorway, he found himself in the dock, confronting a judge in his scarlet robes, in a large courthouse. There was nothing to elevate this Temple of Themis above its vulgar kind elsewhere. Dingy enough it looked, in spite of candles lighted in decent abundance. A case had just closed, and the last juror’s back was seen escaping through the door in the wall of the jury-box. There were some dozen barristers, some fiddling with pen and ink, others buried in briefs, some beckoning, with the plumes of their pens, to their attorneys, of whom there were no lack; there were clerks to-ing and fro-ing, and the officers of the court, and the registrar, who was handing up a paper to the judge; and the tipstaff, who was presenting a note at the end of his wand to a king’s counsel over the heads of the crowd between. If this was the High Court of Appeal, which never rose day or night, it might account for the pale and jaded aspect of everybody in it. An air of indescribable gloom hung upon the pallid features of all the people here; no one ever smiled; all looked more or less secretly suffering.

“The King against Elijah Harbottle!” shouted the officer.

“Is the appellant Lewis Pyneweck in court?” asked Chief-Justice Twofold, in a voice of thunder, that shook the woodwork of the court, and boomed down the corridors.

Up stood Pyneweck from his place at the table.

“Arraign the prisoner!” roared the Chief: and Judge Harbottle felt the panels of the dock round him, and the floor, and the rails quiver in the vibrations of that tremendous voice.

The prisoner, in limine, objected to this pretended court, as being a sham, and non-existent in point of law; and then, that, even if it were a court constituted by law (the Judge was growing dazed), it had not and could not have any jurisdiction to try him for his conduct on the bench.

Whereupon the chief-justice laughed suddenly, and everyone in court, turning round upon the prisoner, laughed also, till the laugh grew and roared all round like a deafening acclamation; he saw nothing but glittering eyes and teeth, a universal stare and grin; but though all the voices laughed, not a single face of all those that concentrated their gaze upon him looked like a laughing face. The mirth subsided as suddenly as it began.

The indictment was read. Judge Harbottle actually pleaded! He pleaded “Not Guilty.” A jury were sworn. The trial proceeded. Judge Harbottle was bewildered. This could not be real. He must be either mad, or going mad, he thought.

One thing could not fail to strike even him. This Chief-Justice Twofold, who was knocking him about at every turn with sneer and gibe, and roaring him down with his tremendous voice, was a dilated effigy of himself; an image of Mr. Justice Harbottle, at least double his size, and with all his fierce colouring, and his ferocity of eye and visage, enhanced awfully.

Nothing the prisoner could argue, cite, or state, was permitted to retard for a moment the march of the case towards its catastrophe.

The chief-justice seemed to feel his power over the jury, and to exult and riot in the display of it. He glared at them, he nodded to them; he seemed to have established an understanding with them. The lights were faint in that part of the court. The jurors were mere shadows, sitting in rows; the prisoner could see a dozen pair of white eyes shining, coldly, out of the darkness; and whenever the judge in his charge, which was contemptuously brief, nodded and grinned and gibed, the prisoner could see, in the obscurity, by the dip of all these rows of eyes together, that the jury nodded in acquiescence.

And now the charge was over, the huge chief-justice leaned back panting and gloating on the prisoner. Everyone in the court turned about, and gazed with steadfast hatred on the man in the dock. From the jury-box where the twelve sworn brethren were whispering together, a sound in the general stillness like a prolonged “hiss-s-s!” was heard; and then, in answer to the challenge of the officer, “How say you, gentlemen of the jury, guilty or not guilty?” came in a melancholy voice the finding, “Guilty.”

The place seemed to the eyes of the prisoner to grow gradually darker and darker, till he could discern nothing distinctly but the lumen of the eyes that were turned upon him from every bench and side and corner and gallery of the building. The prisoner doubtless thought that he had quite enough to say, and conclusive, why sentence of death should not be pronounced upon him; but the lord chief-justice puffed it contemptuously away, like so much smoke, and proceeded to pass sentence of death upon the prisoner, having named the tenth of the ensuing month for his execution.

Before he had recovered the stun of this ominous farce, in obedience to the mandate, “Remove the prisoner,” he was led from the dock. The lamps seemed all to have gone out, and there were stoves and charcoal-fires here and there, that threw a faint crimson light on the walls of the corridors through which he passed. The stones that composed them looked now enormous, cracked and unhewn.

He came into a vaulted smithy, where two men, naked to the waist, with heads like bulls, round shoulders, and the arms of giants, were welding red-hot chains together with hammers that pelted like thunderbolts.

They looked on the prisoner with fierce red eyes, and rested on their hammers for a minute; and said the elder to his companion, “Take out Elijah Harbottle’s gyves;” and with a pincers he plucked the end which lay dazzling in the fire from the furnace.

“One end locks,” said he, taking the cool end of the iron in one hand, while with the grip of a vice he seized the leg of the Judge, and locked the ring round his ankle. “The other,” he said with a grin, “is welded.”

The iron band that was to form the ring for the other leg lay still red hot upon the stone floor, with brilliant sparks sporting up and down its surface.

His companion, in his gigantic hands, seized the old Judge’s other leg, and pressed his foot immovably to the stone floor; while his senior, in a twinkling, with a masterly application of pincers and hammer, sped the glowing bar around his ankle so tight that the skin and sinews smoked and bubbled again, and old Judge Harbottle uttered a yell that seemed to chill the very stones, and make the iron chains quiver on the wall.

Chains, vaults, smiths, and smithy all vanished in a moment; but the pain continued. Mr. Justice Harbottle was suffering torture all round the ankle on which the infernal smiths had just been operating.

His friends, Thavies and Beller, were startled by the Judge’s roar in the midst of their elegant trifling about a marriage à-la-mode case which was going on. The Judge was in panic as well as pain. The street lamps and the light of his own hall door restored him.

“I’m very bad,” growled he between his set teeth; “my foot’s blazing. Who was he that hurt my foot? ’Tis the gout – ’tis the gout!” he said, awaking completely. “How many hours have we been coming from the playhouse? ’S’blood, what has happened on the way? I’ve slept half the night!”

There had been no hitch or delay, and they had driven home at a good pace.

The Judge, however, was in gout; he was feverish too; and the attack, though very short, was sharp; and when, in about a fortnight, it subsided, his ferocious joviality did not return. He could not get this dream, as he chose to call it, out of his head.

CHAPTER VIII

Somebody Has Got Into the House

People remarked that the Judge was in the vapours. His doctor said he should go for a fortnight to Buxton.

Whenever the Judge fell into a brown study, he was always conning over the terms of the sentence pronounced upon him in his vision – “in one calendar month from the date of this day;” and then the usual form, “and you shall be hanged by the neck till you are dead,” etc. “That will be the 10th – I’m not much in the way of being hanged. I know what stuff dreams are, and I laugh at them; but this is continually in my thoughts, as if it forecast misfortune of some sort. I wish the day my dream gave me were passed and over. I wish I were well purged of my gout. I wish I were as I used to be. ’Tis nothing but vapours, nothing but a maggot.” The copy of the parchment and letter which had announced his trial with many a snort and sneer he would read over and over again, and the scenery and people of his dream would rise about him in places the most unlikely, and steal him in a moment from all that surrounded him into a world of shadows.

The Judge had lost his iron energy and banter. He was growing taciturn and morose. The Bar remarked the change, as well they might. His friends thought him ill. The doctor said he was troubled with hypochondria, and that his gout was still lurking in his system, and ordered him to that ancient haunt of crutches and chalk-stones, Buxton.

The Judge’s spirits were very low; he was frightened about himself; and he described to his housekeeper, having sent for her to his study to drink a dish of tea, his strange dream in his drive home from Drury Lane Playhouse. He was sinking into the state of nervous dejection in which men lose their faith in orthodox advice, and in despair consult quacks, astrologers, and nursery storytellers. Could such a dream mean that he was to have a fit, and so die on the both? She did not think so. On the contrary, it was certain some good luck must happen on that day.

The Judge kindled; and for the first time for many days, he looked for a minute or two like himself, and he tapped her on the cheek with the hand that was not in flannel.

“Odsbud! odsheart! you dear rogue! I had forgot. There is young Tom – yellow Tom, my nephew, you know, lies sick at Harrogate; why shouldn’t he go that day as well as another, and if he does, I get an estate by it? Why, lookee, I asked Doctor Hedstone yesterday if I was like to take a fit any time, and he laughed, and swore I was the last man in town to go off that way.”

The Judge sent most of his servants down to Buxton to make his lodgings and all things comfortable for him. He was to follow in a day or two.

It was now the 9th; and the next day well over, he might laugh at his visions and auguries.

On the evening of the 9th, Dr. Hedstone’s footman knocked at the Judge’s door. The Doctor ran up the dusky stairs to the drawing-room. It was a March evening, near the hour of sunset, with an east wind whistling sharply through the chimney-stacks. A wood fire blazed cheerily on the hearth. And Judge Harbottle, in what was then called a brigadier-wig, with his red roquelaure on, helped the glowing effect of the darkened chamber, which looked red all over like a room on fire.

The Judge had his feet on a stool, and his huge grim purple face confronted the fire, and seemed to pant and swell, as the blaze alternately spread upward and collapsed. He had fallen again among his blue devils, and was thinking of retiring from the Bench, and of fifty other gloomy things.

But the Doctor, who was an energetic son of Aesculapius, would listen to no croaking, told the Judge he was full of gout, and in his present condition no judge even of his own case, but promised him leave to pronounce on all those melancholy questions, a fortnight later.

In the meantime the Judge must be very careful. He was overcharged with gout, and he must not provoke an attack, till the waters of Buxton should do that office for him, in their own salutary way.

The Doctor did not think him perhaps quite so well as he pretended, for he told him he wanted rest, and would be better if he went forthwith to his bed.

Mr. Gerningham, his valet, assisted him, and gave him his drops; and the Judge told him to wait in his bedroom till he should go to sleep.

Three persons that night had specially odd stories to tell.

The housekeeper had got rid of the trouble of amusing her little girl at this anxious time, by giving her leave to run about the sitting-rooms and look at the pictures and china, on the usual condition of touching nothing. It was not until the last gleam of sunset had for some time faded, and the twilight had so deepened that she could no longer discern the colours on the china figures on the chimney-piece or in the cabinets, that the child returned to the housekeeper’s room to find her mother.

To her she related, after some prattle about the china, and the pictures, and the Judge’s two grand wigs in the dressing-room off the library, an adventure of an extraordinary kind.

In the hall was placed, as was customary in those times, the sedan-chair which the master of the house occasionally used, covered with stamped leather, and studded with gilt nails, and with its red silk blinds down. In this case, the doors of this old-fashioned conveyance were locked, the windows up, and, as I said, the blinds down, but not so closely that the curious child could not peep underneath one of them, and see into the interior.

A parting beam from the setting sun, admitted through the window of a back room, shot obliquely through the open door, and lighting on the chair, shone with a dull transparency through the crimson blind.

To her surprise, the child saw in the shadow a thin man, dressed in black, seated in it; he had sharp dark features; his nose, she fancied, a little awry, and his brown eyes were looking straight before him; his hand was on his thigh, and he stirred no more than the waxen figure she had seen at Southwark fair.

A child is so often lectured for asking questions, and on the propriety of silence, and the superior wisdom of its elders, that it accepts most things at last in good faith; and the little girl acquiesced respectfully in the occupation of the chair by this mahogany-faced person as being all right and proper.

It was not until she asked her mother who this man was, and observed her scared face as she questioned her more minutely upon the appearance of the stranger, that she began to understand that she had seen something unaccountable.

Mrs. Carwell took the key of the chair from its nail over the footman’s shelf, and led the child by the hand up to the hall, having a lighted candle in her other hand. She stopped at a distance from the chair, and placed the candlestick in the child’s hand.

“Peep in, Margery, again, and try if there’s anything there,” she whispered; “hold the candle near the blind so as to throw its light through the curtain.”

The child peeped, this time with a very solemn face, and intimated at once that he was gone.

“Look again, and be sure,” urged her mother.

The little girl was quite certain; and Mrs. Carwell, with her mobcap of lace and cherry-coloured ribbons, and her dark brown hair, not yet powdered, over a very pale face, unlocked the door, looked in, and beheld emptiness.

“All a mistake, child, you see.”

“There! ma’am! see there! He’s gone round the corner,” said the child.

“Where?” said Mrs. Carwell, stepping backward a step.

“Into that room.”

“Tut, child! ’twas the shadow,” cried Mrs. Carwell, angrily, because she was frightened. “I moved the candle.” But she clutched one of the poles of the chair, which leant against the wall in the corner, and pounded the floor furiously with one end of it, being afraid to pass the open door the child had pointed to.

The cook and two kitchen-maids came running upstairs, not knowing what to make of this unwonted alarm.

They all searched the room; but it was still and empty, and no sign of anyone’s having been there.

Some people may suppose that the direction given to her thoughts by this odd little incident will account for a very strange illusion which Mrs. Carwell herself experienced about two hours later.

CHAPTER IX

The Judge Leaves His House

Mrs. Flora Carwell was going up the great staircase with a posset for the Judge in a china bowl, on a little silver tray.

Across the top of the well-staircase there runs a massive oak rail; and, raising her eyes accidentally, she saw an extremely odd-looking stranger, slim and long, leaning carelessly over with a pipe between his finger and thumb. Nose, lips, and chin seemed all to droop downward into extraordinary length, as he leant his odd peering face over the banister. In his other hand he held a coil of rope, one end of which escaped from under his elbow and hung over the rail.

Mrs. Carwell, who had no suspicion at the moment, that he was not a real person, and fancied that he was someone employed in cording the Judge’s luggage, called to know what he was doing there.

Instead of answering, he turned about, and walked across the lobby, at about the same leisurely pace at which she was ascending, and entered a room, into which she followed him. It was an uncarpeted and unfurnished chamber. An open trunk lay upon the floor empty, and beside it the coil of rope; but except herself there her. Perhaps, when she was able to think it over, it was a relief to was no one in the room.

Mrs. Carwell was very much frightened, and now concluded that the child must have seen the same ghost that had just appeared to her. Perhaps, when she was able to think it over, it was a relief to believe so; for the face, figure, and dress described by the child were awfully like Pyneweck; and this certainly was not he.

Very much scared and very hysterical, Mrs. Carwell ran down to her room, afraid to look over her shoulder, and got some companions about her, and wept, and talked, and drank more than one cordial, and talked and wept again, and so on, until, in those early days, it was ten o’clock, and time to go to bed.

A scullery maid remained up finishing some of her scouring and “scalding” for some time after the other servants – who, as I said, were few in number – that night had got to their beds. This was a low-browed, broad-faced, intrepid wench with black hair, who did not “vally a ghost not a button,” and treated the housekeeper’s hysterics with measureless scorn.

The old house was quiet now. It was near twelve o’clock, no sounds were audible except the muffled wailing of the wintry winds, piping high among the roofs and chimneys, or rumbling at intervals, in under gusts, through the narrow channels of the street.

The spacious solitudes of the kitchen level were awfully dark, and this sceptical kitchen-wench was the only person now up and about the house. She hummed tunes to herself, for a time; and then stopped and listened; and then resumed her work again. At last, she was destined to be more terrified than even was the housekeeper.

There was a back kitchen in this house, and from this she heard, as if coming from below its foundations, a sound like heavy strokes, that seemed to shake the earth beneath her feet. Sometimes a dozen in sequence, at regular intervals; sometimes fewer. She walked out softly into the passage, and was surprised to see a dusky glow issuing from this room, as if from a charcoal fire.

The room seemed thick with smoke.

Looking in she very dimly beheld a monstrous figure, over a furnace, beating with a mighty hammer the rings and rivets of a chain.

The strokes, swift and heavy as they looked, sounded hollow and distant. The man stopped, and pointed to something on the floor, that, through the smoky haze, looked, she thought, like a dead body. She remarked no more; but the servants in the room close by, startled from their sleep by a hideous scream, found her in a swoon on the flags, close to the door, where she had just witnessed this ghastly vision.

Startled by the girl’s incoherent asseverations that she had seen the Judge’s corpse on the floor, two servants having first searched the lower part of the house, went rather frightened upstairs to inquire whether their master was well. They found him, not in his bed, but in his room. He had a table with candles burning at his bedside, and was getting on his clothes again; and he swore and cursed at them roundly in his old style, telling them that he had business, and that he would discharge on the spot any scoundrel who should dare to disturb him again.

So the invalid was left to his quietude.

In the morning it was rumoured here and there in the street that the Judge was dead. A servant was sent from the house three doors away, by Counsellor Traverse, to inquire at Judge Harbottle’s hall door.

The servant who opened it was pale and reserved, and would only say that the Judge was ill. He had had a dangerous accident; Doctor Hedstone had been with him at seven o’clock in the morning.

There were averted looks, short answers, pale and frowning faces, and all the usual signs that there was a secret that sat heavily upon their minds and the time for disclosing which had not yet come. That time would arrive when the coroner had arrived, and the mortal scandal that had befallen the house could be no longer hidden. For that morning Mr. Justice Harbottle had been found hanging by the neck from the banister at the top of the great staircase, and quite dead.

There was not the smallest sign of any struggle or resistance. There had not been heard a cry or any other noise in the slightest degree indicative of violence. There was medical evidence to show that, in his atrabilious state, it was quite on the cards that he might have made away with himself. The jury found accordingly that it was a case of suicide. But to those who were acquainted with the strange story which Judge Harbottle had related to at least two persons, the fact that the catastrophe occurred on the morning of March 10th seemed a startling coincidence.

A few days after, the pomp of a great funeral attended him to the grave; and so, in the language of Scripture, “the rich man died, and was buried.”

originally “The Haunted House at Westminster”

“Belgravia” magazine, Jan. 1872

revised to “Mr Justice Harbottle”

In a Glass Darkly (1872)

THE ROOM IN THE DRAGON VOLANT

(1872)

PROLOGUE

The curious case which I am about to place before you, is referred to, very pointedly, and more than once, in the extraordinary Essay upon the Drugs of the Dark and the Middle Ages, from the pen of Doctor Hesselius.

This Essay he entitles Mortis Imago, and he, therein, discusses the Vinum letiferum, the Beatifica, the Somnus Angelorum, the Hypnus Sagarum, the Aqua Thessalliæ, and about twenty other infusions and distillations, well known to the sages of eight hundred years ago, and two of which are still, he alleges, known to the fraternity of thieves, and, among them, as police-office inquiries sometimes disclose to this day, in practical use.

The Essay, Mortis Imago, will occupy, as nearly as I can at present calculate, two volumes, the ninth and tenth, of the collected papers of Dr Martin Hesselius.

This Essay, I may remark in conclusion, is very curiously enriched by citations, in great abundance, from mediaeval verse and prose romance, some of the most valuable of which, strange to say, are Egyptian.

I have selected this particular statement from among many cases equally striking, but hardly, I think, so effective as mere narratives; in this irregular form of publication, it is simply as a story that I present it.

CHAPTER I

On the Road

In the eventful year, 1815, I was exactly three-and-twenty, and had just succeeded to a very large sum in consols and other securities. The first fall of Napoleon had thrown the continent open to English excursionists, anxious, let us suppose, to improve their minds by foreign travel; and I – the slight cheek of the “hundred days” removed, by the genius of Wellington, on the field of Waterloo – was now added to the philosophic throng.

I was posting up to Paris from Bruxelles, following, I presume, the route that the allied army had pursued but a few weeks before – more carriages than you could believe were pursuing the same line. You could not look back or forward, without seeing into far perspective the clouds of dust which marked the line of the long series of vehicles. We were perpetually passing relays of return-horses, on their way, jaded and dusty, to the inns from which they had been taken. They were arduous times for those patient public servants. The whole world seemed posting up to Paris.

I ought to have noted it more particularly, but my head was so full of Paris and the future that I passed the intervening scenery with little patience and less attention; I think, however, that it was about four miles to the frontier side of a rather picturesque little town, the name of which, as of many more important places through which I posted in my hurried journey, I forget, and about two hours before sunset, that we came up with a carriage in distress.

It was not quite an upset. But the two leaders were lying flat. The booted postilions had got down, and two servants who seemed very much at sea in such matters, were by way of assisting them. A pretty little bonnet and head were popped out of the window of the carriage in distress. Its tournure, and that of the shoulders that also appeared for a moment, was captivating: I resolved to play the part of a good Samaritan; stopped my chaise, jumped out, and with my servant lent a very willing hand in the emergency. Alas! the lady with the pretty bonnet wore a very thick black veil. I could see nothing but the pattern of the Bruxelles lace as she drew back.

A lean old gentleman, almost at the same time, stuck his head out of the window. An invalid he seemed, for although the day was hot he wore a black muffler which came up to his ears and nose, quite covering the lower part of his face, an arrangement which he disturbed by pulling it down for a moment, and poured forth a torrent of French thanks, as he uncovered his black wig, and gesticulated with grateful animation.

One of my very few accomplishments, besides boxing, which was cultivated by all Englishmen at that time, was French; and I replied, I hope and believe grammatically. Many bows being exchanged, the old gentleman’s head went in again, and the demure, pretty little bonnet once more appeared.

The lady must have heard me speak to my servant, for she framed her little speech in such pretty, broken English, and in a voice so sweet, that I more than ever cursed the black veil that baulked my romantic curiosity.

The arms that were emblazoned on the panel were peculiar; I remember especially one device – it was the figure of a stork, painted in carmine, upon what the heralds call a “field or.” The bird was standing upon one leg, and in the other claw held a stone. This is, I believe, the emblem of vigilance. Its oddity struck me, and remained impressed upon my memory. There were supporters besides, but I forget what they were. The courtly manners of these people, the style of their servants, the elegance of their travelling carriage, and the supporters to their arms, satisfied me that they were noble.

The lady, you may be sure, was not the less interesting on that account. What a fascination a title exercises upon the imagination! I do not mean on that of snobs or moral flunkies. Superiority of rank is a powerful and genuine influence in love. The idea of superior refinement is associated with it. The careless notice of the squire tells more upon the heart of the pretty milkmaid than years of honest Dobbin’s manly devotion, and so on and up. It is an unjust world!

But in this case there was something more. I was conscious of being good-looking. I really believe I was; and there could be no mistake about my being nearly six feet high. Why need this lady have thanked me? Had not her husband, for such I assumed him to be, thanked me quite enough and for both? I was instinctively aware that the lady was looking on me with no unwilling eyes; and, through her veil, I felt the power of her gaze.

She was now rolling away, with a train of dust behind her wheels in the golden sunlight, and a wise young gentleman followed her with ardent eyes and sighed profoundly as the distance increased.

I told the postilions on no account to pass the carriage, but to keep it steadily in view, and to pull up at whatever posting-house it should stop at. We were soon in the little town, and the carriage we followed drew up at the Belle Étoile, a comfortable old inn. They got out of the carriage and entered the house.

At a leisurely pace we followed. I got down, and mounted the steps listlessly, like a man quite apathetic and careless.

Audacious as I was, I did not care to inquire in what room I should find them. I peeped into the apartment to my right, and then into that on my left. My people were not there. I ascended the stairs. A drawing-room door stood open. I entered with the most innocent air in the world. It was a spacious room, and, beside myself, contained but one living figure – a very pretty and ladylike one. There was the very bonnet with which I had fallen in love. The lady stood with her back toward me. I could not tell whether the envious veil was raised; she was reading a letter.

I stood for a minute in fixed attention, gazing upon her, in vague hope that she might turn about and give me an opportunity of seeing her features. She did not; but with a step or two she placed herself before a little cabriole-table, which stood against the wall, from which rose a tall mirror in a tarnished frame.

I might, indeed, have mistaken it for a picture; for it now reflected a half-length portrait of a singularly beautiful woman.

She was looking down upon a letter which she held in her slender fingers, and in which she seemed absorbed.

The face was oval, melancholy, sweet. It had in it, nevertheless, a faint and undefinably sensual quality also. Nothing could exceed the delicacy of its features, or the brilliancy of its tints. The eyes, indeed, were lowered, so that I could not see their colour; nothing but their long lashes and delicate eyebrows. She continued reading. She must have been deeply interested; I never saw a living form so motionless – I gazed on a tinted statue.

Being at that time blessed with long and keen vision, I saw this beautiful face with perfect distinctness. I saw even the blue veins that traced their wanderings on the whiteness of her full throat.

I ought to have retreated as noiselessly as I came in, before my presence was detected. But I was too much interested to move from the spot, for a few moments longer; and while they were passing, she raised her eyes. Those eyes were large, and of that hue which modern poets term “violet.”

These splendid melancholy eyes were turned upon me from the glass, with a haughty stare, and hastily the lady lowered her black veil, and turned about.

I fancied that she hoped I had not seen her. I was watching every look and movement, the minutest, with an attention as intense as if an ordeal involving my life depended on them.

CHAPTER II

The Inn-Yard of the Belle Étoile

The face was, indeed, one to fall in love with at first sight. Those sentiments that take such sudden possession of young men were now dominating my curiosity. My audacity faltered before her; and I felt that my presence in this room was probably an impertinence. This point she quickly settled, for the same very sweet voice I had heard before, now said coldly, and this time in French, “Monsieur cannot be aware that this apartment is not public.”

I bowed very low, faltered some apologies, and backed to the door.

I suppose I looked penitent, and embarrassed. I certainly felt so; for the lady said, by way it seemed of softening matters, “I am happy, however, to have an opportunity of again thanking Monsieur for the assistance, so prompt and effectual, which he had the goodness to render us today.”

It was more the altered tone in which it was spoken, than the speech itself, that encouraged me. It was also true that she need not have recognized me; and if she had, she certainly was not obliged to thank me over again.

All this was indescribably flattering, and all the more so that it followed so quickly on her slight reproof. The tone in which she spoke had become low and timid, and I observed that she turned her head quickly towards a second door of the room; I fancied that the gentleman in the black wig, a jealous husband perhaps, might reappear through it. Almost at the same moment, a voice at once reedy and nasal was heard snarling some directions to a servant, and evidently approaching. It was the voice that had thanked me so profusely, from the carriage windows, about an hour before.

“Monsieur will have the goodness to retire,” said the lady, in a tone that resembled entreaty, at the same time gently waving her hand toward the door through which I had entered. Bowing again very low, I stepped back, and closed the door.

I ran down the stairs, very much elated. I saw the host of the Belle Étoile which, as I said, was the sign and designation of my inn.

I described the apartment I had just quitted, said I liked it, and asked whether I could have it.

He was extremely troubled, but that apartment and two adjoining rooms were engaged.

“By whom?”

“People of distinction.”

“But who are they? They must have names or titles.”

“Undoubtedly, Monsieur, but such a stream is rolling into Paris, that we have ceased to inquire the names or titles of our guests – we designate them simply by the rooms they occupy.”

“What stay do they make?”

“Even that, Monsieur, I cannot answer. It does not interest us. Our rooms, while this continues, can never be, for a moment, disengaged.”

“I should have liked those rooms so much! Is one of them a sleeping apartment?”

“Yes, sir, and Monsieur will observe that people do not usually engage bedrooms unless they mean to stay the night.”

“Well, I can, I suppose, have some rooms, any, I don’t care in what part of the house?”

“Certainly, Monsieur can have two apartments. They are the last at present disengaged.”

I took them instantly.

It was plain these people meant to make a stay here; at least they would not go till morning. I began to feel that I was all but engaged in an adventure.

I took possession of my rooms, and looked out of the window, which I found commanded the inn-yard. Many horses were being liberated from the traces, hot and weary, and others fresh from the stables being put to. A great many vehicles – some private carriages, others, like mine, of that public class which is equivalent to our old English post-chaise, were standing on the pavement, waiting their turn for relays. Fussy servants were to-ing and fro-ing, and idle ones lounging or laughing, and the scene, on the whole, was animated and amusing.

Among these objects, I thought I recognized the travelling carriage, and one of the servants of the “persons of distinction” about whom I was, just then, so profoundly interested.

I therefore ran down the stairs, made my way to the back door; and so, behold me, in a moment, upon the uneven pavement, among all these sights and sounds which in such a place attend upon a period of extraordinary crush and traffic. By this time the sun was near its setting, and threw its golden beams on the red brick chimneys of the offices, and made the two barrels, that figured as pigeon-houses, on the tops of poles, look as if they were on fire. Everything in this light becomes picturesque; and things interest us which, in the sober grey of morning, are dull enough.

After a little search I lighted upon the very carriage of which I was in quest. A servant was locking one of the doors, for it was made with the security of lock and key. I paused near, looking at the panel of the door.

“A very pretty device that red stork!” I observed, pointing to the shield on the door, “and no doubt indicates a distinguished family?”

The servant looked at me for a moment, as he placed the little key in his pocket, and said with a slightly sarcastic bow and smile, “Monsieur is at liberty to conjecture.”

Nothing daunted, I forthwith administered that laxative which, on occasion, acts so happily upon the tongue – I mean a “tip.”

The servant looked at the Napoleon in his hand, and then in my face, with a sincere expression of surprise. “Monsieur is very generous!”

“Not worth mentioning – who are the lady and gentleman who came here in this carriage, and whom, you may remember, I and my servant assisted today in an emergency, when their horses had come to the ground?”

“They are the Count, and the young lady we call the Countess – but I know not, she may be his daughter.”

“Can you tell me where they live?”

“Upon my honour, Monsieur, I am unable – I know not.”

“Not know where your master lives! Surely you know something more about him than his name?”

“Nothing worth relating, Monsieur; in fact, I was hired in Bruxelles, on the very day they started. Monsieur Picard, my fellow-servant, Monsieur the Comte’s gentleman, he has been years in his service, and knows everything; but he never speaks except to communicate an order. From him I have learned nothing. We are going to Paris, however, and there I shall speedily pick up all about them. At present I am as ignorant of all that as Monsieur himself.”

“And where is Monsieur Picard?”

“He has gone to the cutler’s to get his razors set. But I do not think he will tell anything.”

This was a poor harvest for my golden sowing. The man, I think, spoke truth, and would honestly have betrayed the secrets of the family, if he had possessed any. I took my leave politely; and mounting the stairs again, I found myself once more in my room.

Forthwith I summoned my servant. Though I had brought him with me from England, he was a native of France – a useful fellow, sharp, bustling, and, of course, quite familiar with the ways and tricks of his countrymen.

“St Clair, shut the door; come here. I can’t rest till I have made out something about those people of rank who have got the apartments under mine. Here are fifteen francs; make out the servants we assisted today have them to a petit souper, and come back and tell me their entire history. I have, this moment, seen one of them who knows nothing, and has communicated it. The other, whose name I forget, is the unknown nobleman’s valet, and knows everything. Him you must pump. It is, of course, the venerable peer, and not the young lady who accompanies him, that interests me – you understand? Begone! fly! and return with all the details I sigh for, and every circumstance that can possibly interest me.”

It was a commission which admirably suited the tastes and spirits of my worthy St Clair, to whom, you will have observed, I had accustomed myself to talk with the peculiar familiarity which the old French comedy establishes between master and valet.

I am sure he laughed at me in secret; but nothing could be more polite and deferential.

With several wise looks, nods and shrugs, he withdrew; and looking down from my window, I saw him with incredible quickness enter the yard, where I soon lost sight of him among the carriages.

CHAPTER III

Death and Love Together Mated

When the day drags, when a man is solitary, and in a fever of impatience and suspense; when the minute hand of his watch travels as slowly as the hour hand used to do, and the hour hand has lost all appreciable motion; when he yawns, and beats the devil’s tattoo, and flattens his handsome nose against the window, and whistles tunes he hates, and, in short, does not know what to do with himself, it is deeply to be regretted that he cannot make a solemn dinner of three courses more than once in a day. The laws of matter, to which we are slaves, deny us that resource.

But in the times I speak of, supper was still a substantial meal, and its hour was approaching. This was consolatory. Three-quarters of an hour, however, still interposed. How was I to dispose of that interval?

I had two or three idle books, it is true, as travelling-companions; but there are many moods in which one cannot read. My novel lay with my rug and walking-stick on the sofa, and I did not care if the heroine and the hero were both drowned together in the water barrel that I saw in the inn-yard under my window. I took a turn or two up and down my room, and sighed, looking at myself in the glass, adjusted my great white “choker,” folded and tied after Brummel, the immortal “Beau,” put on a buff waistcoat and my blue swallow-tailed coat with gilt buttons; I deluged my pocket-handkerchief with eau-de-cologne (we had not then the variety of bouquets with which the genius of perfumery has since blessed us) I arranged my hair, on which I piqued myself, and which I loved to groom in those days. That dark-brown chevelure, with a natural curl, is now represented by a few dozen perfectly white hairs, and its place – a smooth, bald, pink head – knows it no more. But let us forget these mortifications. It was then rich, thick, and dark-brown. I was making a very careful toilet. I took my unexceptionable hat from its case, and placed it lightly on my wise head, as nearly as memory and practice enabled me to do so, at that very slight inclination which the immortal person I have mentioned was wont to give to his. A pair of light French gloves and a rather club-like knotted walking-stick, such as just then came into vogue for a year or two again in England, in the phraseology of Sir Walter Scott’s romances “completed my equipment.”

All this attention to effect, preparatory to a mere lounge in the yard, or on the steps of the Belle Étoile, was a simple act of devotion to the wonderful eyes which I had that evening beheld for the first time, and never, never could forget! In plain terms, it was all done in the vague, very vague hope that those eyes might behold the unexceptionable get-up of a melancholy slave, and retain the image, not altogether without secret approbation.

As I completed my preparations the light failed me; the last level streak of sunlight disappeared, and a fading twilight only remained. I sighed in unison with the pensive hour, and threw open the window, intending to look out for a moment before going downstairs. I perceived instantly that the window underneath mine was also open, for I heard two voices in conversation, although I could not distinguish what they were saying.

The male voice was peculiar; it was, as I told you, reedy and nasal. I knew it, of course, instantly. The answering voice spoke in those sweet tones which I recognized only too easily. The dialogue was only for a minute; the repulsive male voice laughed, I fancied, with a kind of devilish satire, and retired from the window, so that I almost ceased to hear it.

The other voice remained nearer the window, but not so near as at first.

It was not an altercation; there was evidently nothing the least exciting in the colloquy. What would I not have given that it had been a quarrel – a violent one – and I the redresser of wrongs, and the defender of insulted beauty! Alas! so far as I could pronounce upon the character of the tones I heard, they might be as tranquil a pair as any in existence. In a moment more the lady began to sing an odd little chanson. I need not remind you how much farther the voice is heard singing than speaking. I could distinguish the words. The voice was of that exquisitely sweet kind which is called, I believe, a semi-contralto; it had something pathetic, and something, I fancied, a little mocking in its tones. I venture a clumsy, but adequate translation of the words:

“Death and Love, together mated,

Watch and wait in ambuscade;

At early morn, or else belated,

They meet and mark the man or maid.

Burning sigh, or breath that freezes,

Numbs or maddens man or maid;

Death or Love the victim seizes,

Breathing from their ambuscade.”

“Enough, Madame!” said the old voice, with sudden severity. “We do not desire, I believe, to amuse the grooms and hostlers in the yard with our music.”

The lady’s voice laughed gaily.

“You desire to quarrel, Madame!” And the old man, I presume, shut down the window. Down it went, at all events, with a rattle that might easily have broken the glass.

Of all thin partitions, glass is the most effectual excluder of sound. I heard no more, not even the subdued hum of the colloquy.

What a charming voice this Countess had! How it melted, swelled, and trembled! How it moved, and even agitated me! What a pity that a hoarse old jackdaw should have power to crow down such a Philomel! “Alas! what a life it is!” I moralized, wisely. “That beautiful Countess, with the patience of an angel and the beauty of a Venus and the accomplishments of all the Muses, a slave! She knows perfectly who occupies the apartments over hers; she heard me raise my window. One may conjecture pretty well for whom that music was intended – aye, old gentleman, and for whom you suspected it to be intended.”

In a very agreeable flutter I left my room and, descending the stairs, passed the Count’s door very much at my leisure. There was just a chance that the beautiful songstress might emerge. I dropped my stick on the lobby, near their door, and you may be sure it took me some little time to pick it up! Fortune, nevertheless, did not favour me. I could not stay on the lobby all night picking up my stick, so I went down to the hall.

I consulted the clock, and found that there remained but a quarter of an hour to the moment of supper.

Everyone was roughing it now, every inn in confusion; people might do at such a juncture what they never did before. Was it just possible that, for once, the Count and Countess would take their chairs at the table-d’hôte?

CHAPTER IV

Monsieur Droqville

Full of this exciting hope I sauntered out upon the steps of the Belle Étoile. It was now night, and a pleasant moonlight over everything. I had entered more into my romance since my arrival, and this poetic light heightened the sentiment. What a drama if she turned out to be the Count’s daughter, and in love with me! What a delightful – tragedy if she turned out to be the Count’s wife! In this luxurious mood I was accosted by a tall and very elegantly made gentleman, who appeared to be about fifty. His air was courtly and graceful, and there was in his whole manner and appearance something so distinguished that it was impossible not to suspect him of being a person of rank.

He had been standing upon the steps, looking out, like me, upon the moonlight effects that transformed, as it were, the objects and buildings in the little street. He accosted me, I say, with the politeness, at once easy and lofty, of a French nobleman of the old school. He asked me if I were not Mr Beckett? I assented; and he immediately introduced himself as the Marquis d’Harmonville (this information he gave me in a low tone), and asked leave to present me with a letter from Lord R – , who knew my father slightly, and had once done me, also, a trifling kindness.

This English peer, I may mention, stood very high in the political world, and was named as the most probable successor to the distinguished post of English Minister at Paris. I received it with a low bow, and read:

My Dear Beckett,

I beg to introduce my very dear friend, the Marquis d’Harmonville, who will explain to you the nature of the services it may be in your power to render him and us.”

He went on to speak of the Marquis as a man whose great wealth, whose intimate relations with the old families, and whose legitimate influence with the court rendered him the fittest possible person for those friendly offices which, at the desire of his own sovereign, and of our government, he has so obligingly undertaken. It added a great deal to my perplexity, when I read, further:

“By-the-by, Walton was here yesterday, and told me that your seat was likely to be attacked; something, he says, is unquestionably going on at Domwell. You know there is an awkwardness in my meddling ever so cautiously. But I advise, if it is not very officious, your making Haxton look after it and report immediately. I fear it is serious. I ought to have mentioned that, for reasons that you will see, when you have talked with him for five minutes, the Marquis – with the concurrence of all our friends – drops his title, for a few weeks, and is at present plain Monsieur Droqville. I am this moment going to town, and can say no more.

Yours faithfully,

R———

I was utterly puzzled. I could scarcely boast of Lord R———’s acquaintance. I knew no one named Haxton, and, except my hatter, no one called Walton; and this peer wrote as if we were intimate friends! I looked at the back of the letter, and the mystery was solved. And now, to my consternation – for I was plain Richard Beckett – I read:

To George Stanhope Beckett, Esq., M.P.

I looked with consternation in the face of the Marquis.

“What apology can I offer to Monsieur the Mar – to Monsieur Droqville? It is true my name is Beckett – it is true I am known, though very slightly, to Lord R———; but the letter was not intended for me. My name is Richard Beckett – this is to Mr Stanhope Beckett, the member for Shillingsworth. What can I say, or do, in this unfortunate situation? I can only give you my honour as a gentleman, that, for me, the letter, which I now return, shall remain as unviolated a secret as before I opened it. I am so shocked and grieved that such a mistake should have occurred!”

I dare say my honest vexation and good faith were pretty legibly written in my countenance; for the look of gloomy embarrassment which had for a moment settled on the face of the Marquis, brightened; he smiled, kindly, and extended his hand.

“I have not the least doubt that Monsieur Beckett will respect my little secret. As a mistake was destined to occur, I have reason to thank my good stars that it should have been with a gentleman of honour. Monsieur Beckett will permit me, I hope, to place his name among those of my friends?”

I thanked the Marquis very much for his kind expressions. He went on to say:

“If, Monsieur, I can persuade you to visit me at Claironville, in Normandy, where I hope to see, on the 15th of August, a great many friends, whose acquaintance it might interest you to make, I shall be too happy.”

I thanked him, of course, very gratefully for his hospitality. He continued: “I cannot, for the present, see my friends, for reasons which you may surmise, at my house in Paris. But Monsieur will be so good as to let me know the hotel he means to stay at in Paris; and he will find that although the Marquis d’Harmonville is not in town, that Monsieur Droqville will not lose sight of him.”

With many acknowledgements I gave him, the information he desired.

“And in the meantime,” he continued, “if you think of any way in which Monsieur Droqville can be of use to you, our communication shall not be interrupted, and I shall so manage matters that you can easily let me know.”

I was very much flattered. The Marquis had, as we say, taken a fancy to me. Such likings at first sight often ripen into lasting friendships. To be sure it was just possible that the Marquis might think it prudent to keep the involuntary depositary of a political secret, even so vague a one, in good humour.

Very graciously the Marquis took his leave, going up the stairs of the Belle Étoile.

I remained upon the steps for a minute, lost in speculation upon this new theme of interest. But the wonderful eyes, the thrilling voice, the exquisite figure of the beautiful lady who had taken possession of my imagination, quickly re-asserted their influence. I was again gazing at the sympathetic moon, and descending the steps I loitered along the pavements among strange objects, and houses that were antique and picturesque, in a dreamy state, thinking.

In a little while I turned into the inn-yard again. There had come a lull. Instead of the noisy place it was an hour or two before, the yard was perfectly still and empty, except for the carriages that stood here and there. Perhaps there was a servants’ table-d’hôte just then. I was rather pleased to find solitude; and undisturbed I found out my lady-love’s carriage, in the moonlight. I mused, I walked round it; I was as utterly foolish and maudlin as very young men, in my situation, usually are. The blinds were down, the doors, I suppose, locked. The brilliant moonlight revealed everything, and cast sharp, black shadows of wheel, and bar, and spring, on the pavement. I stood before the escutcheon painted on the door, which I had examined in the daylight. I wondered how often her eyes had rested on the same object. I pondered in a charming dream. A harsh, loud voice, over my shoulder, said suddenly: “A red stork – good! The stork is a bird of prey; it is vigilant, greedy, and catches gudgeons. Red, too! – blood red! Hal ha! the symbol is appropriate.”

I had turned about, and beheld the palest face I ever saw. It was broad, ugly, and malignant. The figure was that of a French officer, in undress, and was six feet high. Across the nose and eyebrow there was a deep scar, which made the repulsive face grimmer.

The officer elevated his chin and his eyebrows, with a scoffing chuckle, and said: “I have shot a stork, with a rifle bullet, when he thought himself safe in the clouds, for mere sport!” (He shrugged, and laughed malignantly.) “See, Monsieur; when a man like me – a man of energy, you understand, a man with all his wits about him, a man who has made the tour of Europe under canvas, and, parbleu! often without it – resolves to discover a secret, expose a crime, catch a thief, spit a robber on the point of his sword, it is odd if he does not succeed. Ha! ha! ha! Adieu, Monsieur!”

He turned with an angry whisk on his heel, and swaggered with long strides out of the gate.

CHAPTER V

Supper at the Belle Étoile

The French army were in a rather savage temper just then. The English, especially, had but scant courtesy to expect at their hands. It was plain, however, that the cadaverous gentleman who had just apostrophized the heraldry of the Count’s carriage, with such mysterious acrimony, had not intended any of his malevolence for me. He was stung by some old recollection, and had marched off, seething with fury.

I had received one of those unacknowledged shocks which startle us, when, fancying ourselves perfectly alone, we discover on a sudden that our antics have been watched by a spectator, almost at our elbow. In this case the effect was enhanced by the extreme repulsiveness of the face, and, I may add, its proximity, for, as I think, it almost touched mine. The enigmatical harangue of this person, so full of hatred and implied denunciation, was still in my ears. Here at all events was new matter for the industrious fancy of a lover to work upon.

It was time now to go to the table-d’hôte. Who could tell what lights the gossip of the supper-table might throw upon the subject that interested me so powerfully!

I stepped into the room, my eyes searching the little assembly, about thirty people, for the persons who specially interested me. It was not easy to induce people, so hurried and overworked as those of the Belle Étoile just now, to send meals up to one’s private apartments, in the midst of this unparalleled confusion; and, therefore, many people who did not like it might find themselves reduced to the alternative of supping at the table-d’hôte or starving.

The Count was not there, nor his beautiful companion; but the Marquis d’Harmonville, whom I hardly expected to see in so public a place, signed, with a significant smile, to a vacant chair beside himself. I secured it, and he seemed pleased, and almost immediately entered into conversation with me.

“This is, probably, your first visit to France?” he said.

I told him it was, and he said:

“You must not think me very curious and impertinent; but Paris is about the most dangerous capital a high-spirited and generous young gentleman could visit without a Mentor. If you have not an experienced friend as a companion during your visit – .” He paused.

I told him I was not so provided, but that I had my wits about me; that I had seen a good deal of life in England, and that I fancied human nature was pretty much the same in all parts of the world. The Marquis shook his head, smiling.

“You will find very marked differences, notwithstanding,” he said. “Peculiarities of intellect and peculiarities of character, undoubtedly, do pervade different nations; and this results, among the criminal classes, in a style of villainy no less peculiar. In Paris the class who live by their wits is three or four times as great as in London; and they live much better; some of them even splendidly. They are more ingenious than the London rogues; they have more animation and invention, and the dramatic faculty, in which your countrymen are deficient, is everywhere. These invaluable attributes place them upon a totally different level. They can affect the manners and enjoy the luxuries of people of distinction. They live, many of them, by play.”

“So do many of our London rogues.”

“Yes, but in a totally different way. They are the habitués of certain gaming-tables, billiard-rooms, and other places, including your races, where high play goes on; and by superior knowledge of chances, by masking their play, by means of confederates, by means of bribery, and other artifices, varying with the subject of their imposture, they rob the unwary. But here it is more elaborately done, and with a really exquisite finesse. There are people whose manners, style, conversation, are unexceptionable, living in handsome houses in the best situations, with everything about them in the most refined taste, and exquisitely luxurious, who impose even upon the Parisian bourgeois, who believe them to be, in good faith, people of rank and fashion, because their habits are expensive and refined, and their houses are frequented by foreigners of distinction, and, to a degree, by foolish young Frenchmen of rank. At all these houses play goes on. The ostensible host and hostess seldom join in it; they provide it simply to plunder their guests, by means of their accomplices, and thus wealthy strangers are inveigled and robbed.”

“But I have heard of a young Englishman, a son of Lord Rooksbury, who broke two Parisian gaming-tables only last year.

“I see,” he said, laughing, “you are come here to do likewise. I, myself, at about your age, undertook the same spirited enterprise. I raised no less a sum than five hundred thousand francs to begin with; I expected to carry all before me by the simple expedient of going on doubling my stakes. I had heard of it, and I fancied that the sharpers, who kept the table, knew nothing of the matter. I found, however, that they not only knew all about it, but had provided against the possibility of any such experiments; and I was pulled up before I had well begun by a rule which forbids the doubling of an original stake more than four times consecutively.”

“And is that rule in force still?” I inquired, chap-fallen.

He laughed and shrugged, “Of course it is, my young friend. People who live by an art always understand it better than an amateur. I see you had formed the same plan, and no doubt came provided.”

I confessed I had prepared for conquest upon a still grander scale. I had arrived with a purse of thirty thousand pounds sterling.

“Any acquaintance of my very dear friend, Lord R – , interests me; and, besides ray regard for him, I am charmed with you; so you will pardon all my, perhaps, too officious questions and advice.”

I thanked him most earnestly for his valuable counsel, and begged that he would have the goodness to give me all the advice in his power.

“Then if you take my advice,” said he, “you will leave your money in the bank where it lies. Never risk a Napoleon in a gaming house. The night I went to break the bank I lost between seven and eight thousand pounds sterling of your English money; and my next adventure, I had obtained an introduction to one of those elegant gaming-houses which affect to be the private mansions of persons of distinction, and was saved from ruin by a gentleman whom, ever since, I have regarded with increasing respect and friendship. It oddly happens he is in this house at this moment. I recognized his servant, and made him a visit in his apartments here, and found him the same brave, kind, honourable man I always knew him. But that he is living so entirely out of the world, now, I should have made a point of introducing you. Fifteen years ago he would have been the man of all others to consult. The gentleman I speak of is the Comte de St Alyre. He represents a very old family. He is the very soul of honour, and the most sensible man in the world, except in one particular.”

“And that particular?” I hesitated. I was now deeply interested.

“Is that he has married a charming creature, at least five-and-forty years younger than himself, and is, of course, although I believe absolutely without cause, horribly jealous.”

“And the lady?”

“The Countess is, I believe, in every way worthy of so good a man,” he answered, a little drily. “I think I heard her sing this evening.”

“Yes, I daresay; she is very accomplished.” After a few moments’ silence he continued.

“I must not lose sight of you, for I should be sorry, when next you meet my friend Lord R – , that you had to tell him you had been pigeoned in Paris. A rich Englishman as you are, with so large a sum at his Paris bankers, young, gay, generous, a thousand ghouls and harpies will be contending who shall be the first to seize and devour you.”

At this moment I received something like a jerk from the elbow of the gentleman at my right. It was an accidental jog, as he turned in his seat.

“On the honour of a soldier, there is no man’s flesh in this company heals so fast as mine.”

The tone in which this was spoken was harsh and stentorian, and almost made me bounce. I looked round and recognized the officer whose large white face had half scared me in the inn-yard, wiping his mouth furiously, and then with a gulp of Magon, he went on:

“No one! It’s not blood; it is ichor! it’s miracle! Set aside stature, thew, bone, and muscle – set aside courage, and by all the angels of death, I’d fight a lion naked, and dash his teeth down his jaws with my fist, and flog him to death with his own tail! Set aside, I say, all those attributes, which I am allowed to possess, and I am worth six men in any campaign, for that one quality of healing as I do – rip me up, punch me through, tear me to tatters with bombshells, and nature has me whole again, while your tailor would fine – draw an old coat. Parbleu! gentlemen, if you saw me naked, you would laugh! Look at my hand, a sabre-cut across the palm, to the bone, to save my head, taken up with three stitches, and five days afterwards I was playing ball with an English general, a prisoner in Madrid, against the wall of the convent of the Santa Maria de la Castita! At Arcola, by the great devil himself! that was an action. Every man there, gentlemen, swallowed as much smoke in five minutes as would smother you all in this room! I received, at the same moment, two musket balls in the thighs, a grape shot through the calf of my leg, a lance through my left shoulder, a piece of a shrapnel in the left deltoid, a bayonet through the cartilage of my right ribs, a sabre-cut that carried away a pound of flesh from my chest, and the better part of a congreve rocket on my forehead. Pretty well, ha, ha! and all while you’d say bah! and in eight days and a half I was making a forced march, without shoes, and only one gaiter, the life and soul of my company, and as sound as a roach!”

“Bravo! Bravissimo! Per Baccho! un gallant’ uomo!” exclaimed, in a martial ecstasy, a fat little Italian, who manufactured toothpicks and wicker cradles on the island of Notre Dame; “your exploits shall resound through Europe! and the history of those wars should be written in your blood!”

“Never mind! a trifle!” exclaimed the soldier. “At Ligny, the other day, where we smashed the Prussians into ten hundred thousand milliards of atoms, a bit of a shell cut me across the leg and opened an artery. It was spouting as high as the chimney, and in half a minute I had lost enough to fill a pitcher. I must have expired in another minute, if I had not whipped off my sash like a flash of lightning, tied it round my leg above the wound, whipped a bayonet out of the back of a dead Prussian, and passing it under, made a tourniquet of it with a couple of twists, and so stayed the haemorrhage and saved my life. But, sacré bleu! gentlemen, I lost so much blood, I have been as pale as the bottom of a plate ever since. No matter. A trifle. Blood well spent, gentlemen.” He applied himself now to his bottle of vin ordinaire.

The Marquis had closed his eyes, and looked resigned and disgusted, while all this was going on.

“Garçon,” said the officer, for the first time speaking in a low tone over the back of his chair to the waiter; “who came in that travelling carriage, dark yellow and black, that stands in the middle of the yard, with arms and supporters emblazoned on the door, and a red stork, as red as my facings?”

The waiter could not say.

The eye of the eccentric officer, who had suddenly grown grim and serious, and seemed to have abandoned the general conversation to other people, lighted, as it were accidentally, on me.

“Pardon me, Monsieur,” he said. “Did I not see you examining the panel of that carriage at the same time that I did so, this evening? Can you tell me who arrived in it?”

“I rather think the Count and Countess de St Alyre.”

“And are they here, in the Belle Étoile?” he asked.

“They have got apartments upstairs,” I answered.

He started up, and half pushed his chair from the table. He quickly sat down again, and I could hear him sacré-ing and muttering to himself, and grinning and scowling. I could not tell whether he was alarmed or furious.

I turned to say a word or two to the Marquis, but he was gone. Several other people had dropped out also, and the supper party soon broke up. Two or three substantial pieces of wood smouldered on the hearth, for the night had turned out chilly. I sat down by the fire in a great armchair of carved oak, with a marvellously high back that looked as old as the days of Henry IV.

“Garçon,” said I, “do you happen to know who that officer is?”

“That is Colonel Gaillarde, Monsieur.”

“Has he been often here?”

“Once before, Monsieur, for a week; it is a year since.”

“He is the palest man I ever saw.”

“That is true, Monsieur; he has been often taken for a revenant.”

“Can you give me a bottle of really good Burgundy?”

“The best in France, Monsieur.”

“Place it, and a glass by my side, on this table, if you please. I may sit here for half an hour.”

“Certainly, Monsieur.”

I was very comfortable, the wine excellent, and my thoughts glowing and serene. “Beautiful Countess! Beautiful Countess! shall we ever be better acquainted?”

CHAPTER VI

The Naked Sword

A man who has been posting all day long, and changing the air he breathes every half hour, who is well pleased with himself, and has nothing on earth to trouble him, and who sits alone by a fire in a comfortable chair after having eaten a hearty supper, may be pardoned if he takes an accidental nap.

I had filled my fourth glass when I fell asleep. My head, I daresay, hung uncomfortably; and it is admitted that a variety of French dishes is not the most favourable precursor to pleasant dreams.

I had a dream as I took mine ease in mine inn on this occasion. I fancied myself in a huge cathedral, without light, except from four tapers that stood at the corners of a raised platform hung with black, on which lay, draped also in black, what seemed to me the dead body of the Countess de St Alyre. The place seemed empty, it was cold, and I could see only (in the halo of the candles) a little way round.

The little I saw bore the character of Gothic gloom, and helped my fancy to shape and furnish the black void that yawned all round me. I heard a sound like the slow tread of two persons walking up the flagged aisle. A faint echo told of the vastness of the place. An awful sense of expectation was upon me, and I was horribly frightened when the body that lay on the catafalque said (without stirring), in a whisper that froze me, “They come to place me in the grave alive; save me.”

I found that I could neither speak nor move. I was horribly frightened.

The two people who approached now emerged from the darkness. One, the Count de St Alyre, glided to the head of the figure and placed his long thin hands under it. The white-faced Colonel, with the scar across his face, and a look of infernal triumph, placed his hands under her feet, and they began to raise her.

With an indescribable effort I broke the spell that bound me, and started to my feet with a gasp.

I was wide awake, but the broad, wicked face of Colonel Gaillarde was staring, white as death, at me from the other side of the hearth. “Where is she?” I shuddered.

“That depends on who she is, Monsieur,” replied the Colonel, curtly.

“Good heavens!” I gasped, looking about me.

The Colonel, who was eyeing me sarcastically, had had his demi-tasse of café noir, and now drank his tasse, diffusing a pleasant perfume of brandy.

“I fell asleep and was dreaming,” I said, lest any strong language, founded on the rôle he played in my dream, should have escaped me. “I did not know for some moments where I was.”

“You are the young gentleman who has the apartments over the Count and Countess de St Alyre?” he said, winking one eye, close in meditation, and glaring at me with the other.

“I believe so – yes,” I answered.

“Well, younker, take care you have not worse dreams than that some night,” he said, enigmatically, and wagged his head with a chuckle. “Worse dreams,” he repeated.

“What does Monsieur the Colonel mean?” I inquired.

“I am trying to find that out myself,” said the Colonel; “and I think I shall. When I get the first inch of the thread fast between my finger and thumb, it goes hard but I follow it up, bit by bit, little by little, tracing it this way and that, and up and down, and round about, until the whole clue is wound up on my thumb, and the end, and its secret, fast in my fingers. Ingenious! Crafty as five foxes! wide awake as a weazel! Parbleu! if I had descended to that occupation I should have made my fortune as a spy. Good wine here?” he glanced interrogatively at my bottle.

“Very good,” said I. “Will Monsieur the Colonel try a glass?”

He took the largest he could find, and filled it, raised it with a bow, and drank it slowly. “Ah! ah! Bah! That is not it,” he exclaimed, with some disgust, filling it again. “You ought to have told me to order your Burgundy, and they would not have brought you that stuff.”

I got away from this man as soon as I civilly could, and, putting on my hat, I walked out with no other company than my sturdy walking-stick. I visited the inn-yard, and looked up to the windows of the Countess’s apartments. They were closed, however, and I had not even the unsubstantial consolation of contemplating the light in which that beautiful lady was at that moment writing, or reading, or sitting and thinking of – anyone you please.

I bore this serious privation as well as I could, and took a little saunter through the town. I shan’t bore you with moonlight effects, nor with the maunderings of a man who has fallen in love at first sight with a beautiful face. My ramble, it is enough to say, occupied about half an hour, and, returning by a slight detour, I found myself in a little square, with about two high gabled houses on each side, and a rude stone statue, worn by centuries of rain, on a pedestal in the centre of the pavement. Looking at this statue was a slight and rather tall man, whom I instantly recognized as the Marquis d’Harmonville: he knew me almost as quickly. He walked a step towards me, shrugged and laughed:

“You are surprised to find Monsieur Droqville staring at that old stone figure by moonlight. Anything to pass the time. You, I see, suffer from ennui, as I do. These little provincial towns! Heavens! what an effort it is to live in them! If I could regret having formed in early life a friendship that does me honour, I think its condemning me to a sojourn in such a place would make me do so. You go on towards Paris, I suppose, in the morning?”

“I have ordered horses.”

“As for me I await a letter, or an arrival, either would emancipate me; but I can’t say how soon either event will happen.”

“Can I be of any use in this matter?” I began.

“None, Monsieur, I thank you a thousand times. No, this is a piece in which every rôle is already cast. I am but an amateur, and induced solely by friendship, to take a part.”

So he talked on, for a time, as we walked slowly toward the Belle Étoile, and then came a silence, which I broke by asking him if he knew anything of Colonel Gaillarde.

“Oh! yes, to be sure. He is a little mad; he has had some bad injuries of the head. He used to plague the people in the War Office to death. He has always some delusion. They contrived some employment for him – not regimental, of course – but in this campaign Napoleon, who could spare nobody, placed him in command of a regiment. He was always a desperate fighter, and such men were more than ever needed.”

There is, or was, a second inn in this town called l’Écu de France. At its door the Marquis stopped, bade me a mysterious good-night, and disappeared.

As I walked slowly toward my inn, I met, in the shadow of a row of poplars, the garçon who had brought me my Burgundy a little time ago. I was thinking of Colonel Gaillarde, and I stopped the little waiter as he passed me.

“You said, I think, that Colonel Gaillarde was at the Belle Étoile for a week at one time.”

“Yes, Monsieur.”

“Is he perfectly in his right mind?”

The waiter stared. “Perfectly, Monsieur.”

“Has he been suspected at any time of being out of his mind?”

“Never, Monsieur; he is a little noisy, but a very shrewd man.”

“What is a fellow to think?” I muttered, as I walked on.

I was soon within sight of the lights of the Belle Étoile. A carriage, with four horses, stood in the moonlight at the door, and a furious altercation was going on in the hall, in which the yell of Colonel Gaillarde out-topped all other sounds.

Most young men like, at least, to witness a row. But, intuitively, I felt that this would interest me in a very special manner. I had only fifty yards to run, when I found myself in the hall of the old inn. The principal actor in this strange drama was, indeed, the Colonel, who stood facing the old Count de St Alyre, who, in his travelling costume, with his black silk scarf covering the lower part of his face, confronted him; he had evidently been intercepted in an endeavour to reach his carriage. A little in the rear of the Count stood the Countess, also in travelling costume, with her thick black veil down, and holding in her delicate fingers a white rose. You can’t conceive a more diabolical effigy of hate and fury than the Colonel; the knotted veins stood out on his forehead, his eyes were leaping from their sockets, he was grinding his teeth, and froth was on his lips. His sword was drawn in his hand, and he accompanied his yelling denunciations with stamps upon the floor and flourishes of his weapon in the air.

The host of the Belle Étoile was talking to the Colonel in soothing terms utterly thrown away. Two waiters, pale with fear, stared uselessly from behind. The Colonel screamed and thundered, and whirled his sword. “I was not sure of your red birds of prey; I could not believe you would have the audacity to travel on high roads, and to stop at honest inns, and lie under the same roof with honest men. You! you! both – vampires, wolves, ghouls. Summon the gendarmes, I say. By St Peter and all the devils, if either of you try to get out of that door I’ll take your heads off.”

For a moment I had stood aghast. Here was a situation! I walked up to the lady; she laid her hand wildly upon my arm. “Oh! Monsieur,” she whispered, in great agitation, “that dreadful madman! What are we to do? He won’t let us pass; he will kill my husband.”

“Fear nothing, Madame,” I answered, with romantic devotion, and stepping between the Count and Gaillarde, as he shrieked his invective, “Hold your tongue, and clear the way, you ruffian, you bully, you coward!” I roared.

A faint cry escaped the lady, which more than repaid the risk I ran, as the sword of the frantic soldier, after a moment’s astonished pause, flashed in the air to cut me down.

CHAPTER VII

The White Rose

I was too quick for Colonel Gaillarde. As he raised his sword, reckless of all consequences but my condign punishment and quite resolved to cleave me to the teeth, I struck him across the side of his head with my heavy stick, and while he staggered back I struck him another blow, nearly in the same place, that felled him to the floor, where he lay as if dead.

I did not care one of his own regimental buttons, whether he was dead or not; I was, at that moment, carried away by such a tumult of delightful and diabolical emotions!

I broke his sword under my foot, and flung the pieces across the street. The old Count de St Alyre skipped nimbly without looking to the right or left, or thanking anybody, over the floor, out of the door, down the steps, and into his carriage. Instantly I was at the side of the beautiful Countess, thus left to shift for herself; I offered her my arm, which she took, and I led her to the carriage. She entered, and I shut the door. All this without a word.

I was about to ask if there were any commands with which she would honour me – my hand was laid upon the lower edge of the window, which was open.

The lady’s hand was laid upon mine timidly and excitedly. Her lips almost touched my cheek as she whispered hurriedly:

“I may never see you more, and, oh! that I could forget you. Go – farewell – for God’s sake, go!”

I pressed her hand for a moment. She withdrew it, but tremblingly pressed into mine the rose which she had held in her fingers during the agitating scene she had just passed through.

All this took place while the Count was commanding, entreating, cursing his servants, tipsy, and out of the way during the crisis, my conscience afterwards insinuated, by my clever contrivance. They now mounted to their places with the agility of alarm. The postilions’ whips cracked, the horses scrambled into a trot, and away rolled the carriage, with its precious freightage, along the quaint main street, in the moonlight, toward Paris.

I stood on the pavement till it was quite lost to eye and ear in the distance.

With a deep sigh, I then turned, my white rose folded in my handkerchief – the little parting gage – the

Favour secret, sweet, and precious,

which no mortal eye but hers and mine had seen conveyed to me.

The care of the host of the Belle Étoile, and his assistants, had raised the wounded hero of a hundred fights partly against the wall, and propped him at each side with portmanteaus and pillows, and poured a glass of brandy, which was duly placed to his account, into his big mouth, where, for the first time, such a Godsend remained unswallowed.

A bald-headed little military surgeon of sixty, with spectacles, who had cut off eighty-seven legs and arms to his own share, after the battle of Eylau, having retired with his sword and his saw, his laurels and his sticking-plaster to this, his native town, was called in, and rather thought the gallant Colonel’s skull was fractured; at all events, there was concussion of the seat of thought, and quite enough work for his remarkable self-healing powers to occupy him for a fortnight.

I began to grow a little uneasy. A disagreeable surprise, if my excursion, in which I was to break banks and hearts, and, as you see, heads, should end upon the gallows or the guillotine. I was not clear, in those times of political oscillation, which was the established apparatus.

The Colonel was conveyed, snorting apoplectically, to his room.

I saw my host in the apartment in which we had supped. Wherever you employ a force of any sort, to carry a point of real importance, reject all nice calculations of economy. Better to be a thousand per cent over the mark, than the smallest fraction of a unit under it. I instinctively felt this.

I ordered a bottle of my landlord’s very best wine; made him partake with me, in the proportion of two glasses to one; and then told him that he must not decline a trifling souvenir from a guest who had been so charmed with all he had seen of the renowned Belle Étoile. Thus saying, I placed five-and-thirty Napoleons in his hand: at touch of which his countenance, by no means encouraging before, grew sunny, his manners thawed, and it was plain, as he dropped the coins hastily into his pocket, that benevolent relations had been established between us.

I immediately placed the Colonel’s broken head upon the tapis. We both agreed that if I had not given him that rather smart tap of my walking-cane, he would have beheaded half the inmates of the Belle Étoile. There was not a waiter in the house who would not verify that statement on oath.

The reader may suppose that I had other motives, beside the desire to escape the tedious inquisition of the law, for desiring to recommence my journey to Paris with the least possible delay. Judge what was my horror then to learn that, for love or money, horses were nowhere to be had that night. The last pair in the town had been obtained from the Écu de France by a gentleman who dined and supped at the Belle Étoile, and was obliged to proceed to Paris that night.

Who was the gentleman? Had he actually gone? Could he possibly be induced to wait till morning?

The gentleman was now upstairs getting his things together, and his name was Monsieur Droqville.

I ran upstairs. I found my servant St Clair in my room. At sight of him, for a moment, my thoughts were turned into a different channel.

“Well, St Clair, tell me this moment who the lady is?” I demanded.

“The lady is the daughter or wife, it matters not which, of the Count de St Alyre – the old gentleman who was so near being sliced like a cucumber tonight, I am informed, by the sword of the general whom Monsieur, by a turn of fortune, has put to bed of an apoplexy.”

“Hold your tongue, fool! The man’s beastly drunk – he’s sulking – he could talk if he liked – who cares? Pack up my things. Which are Monsieur Droqville’s apartments?”

He knew, of course; he always knew everything.

Half an hour later Monsieur Droqville and I were travelling towards Paris in my carriage and with his horses. I ventured to ask the Marquis d’Harmonville, in a little while, whether the lady, who accompanied the Count, was certainly the Countess. “Has he not a daughter?”

“Yes; I believe a very beautiful and charming young lady – I cannot say – it may have been she, his daughter by an earlier marriage. I saw only the Count himself today.”

The Marquis was growing a little sleepy, and, in a little while, he actually fell asleep in his corner. I dozed and nodded; but the Marquis slept like a top. He awoke only for a minute or two at the next posting-house where he had fortunately secured horses by sending on his man, he told me. “You will excuse my being so dull a companion,” he said, “but till tonight I have had but two hours’ sleep, for more than sixty hours. I shall have a cup of coffee here; I have had my nap. Permit me to recommend you to do likewise. Their coffee is really excellent.” He ordered two cups of café noir, and waited, with his head from the window. “We will keep the cups,” he said, as he received them from the waiter, “and the tray. Thank you.”

There was a little delay as he paid for these things; and then he took in the little tray, and handed me a cup of coffee.

I declined the tray; so he placed it on his own knees, to act as a miniature table.

“I can’t endure being waited for and hurried,” he said, “I like to sip my coffee at leisure.”

I agreed. It really was the very perfection of coffee.

“I, like Monsieur le Marquis, have slept very little for the last two or three nights; and find it difficult to keep awake. This coffee will do wonders for me; it refreshes one so.”

Before we had half done, the carriage was again in motion.

For a time our coffee made us chatty, and our conversation was animated.

The Marquis was extremely good-natured, as well as clever, and gave me a brilliant and amusing account of Parisian life, schemes, and dangers, all put so as to furnish me with practical warnings of the most valuable kind.

In spite of the amusing and curious stories which the Marquis related with so much point and colour, I felt myself again becoming gradually drowsy and dreamy.

Perceiving this, no doubt, the Marquis good-naturedly suffered our conversation to subside into silence. The window next him was open. He threw his cup out of it; and did the same kind office for mine, and finally the little tray flew after, and I heard it clank on the road; a valuable waif, no doubt, for some early wayfarer in wooden shoes.

I leaned back in my corner; I had my beloved souvenir – my white rose – close to my heart, folded, now, in white paper. It inspired all manner of romantic dreams. I began to grow more and more sleepy. But actual slumber did not come. I was still viewing, with my half-closed eyes, from my corner, diagonally, the interior of the carriage.

I wished for sleep; but the barrier between waking and sleeping seemed absolutely insurmountable; and, instead, I entered into a state of novel and indescribable indolence.

The Marquis lifted his despatch-box from the floor, placed it on his knees, unlocked it, and took out what proved to be a lamp, which he hung with two hooks, attached to it, to the window opposite to him. He lighted it with a match, put on his spectacles, and taking out a bundle of letters began to read them carefully.

We were making way very slowly. My impatience had hitherto employed four horses from stage to stage. We were in this emergency, only too happy to have secured two. But the difference in pace was depressing.

I grew tired of the monotony of seeing the spectacled Marquis reading, folding, and docketing, letter after letter. I wished to shut out the image which wearied me, but something prevented my being able to shut my eyes. I tried again and again; but, positively, I had lost the power of closing them.

I would have rubbed my eyes, but I could not stir my hand, my will no longer acted on my body – I found that I could not move one joint, or muscle, no more than I could, by an effort of my will, have turned the carriage about.

Up to this I had experienced no sense of horror. Whatever it was, simple nightmare was not the cause. I was awfully frightened! Was I in a fit?

It was horrible to see my good-natured companion pursue his occupation so serenely, when he might have dissipated my horrors by a single shake.

I made a stupendous exertion to call out, but in vain; I repeated the effort again and again, with no result.

My companion now tied up his letters, and looked out of the window, humming an air from an opera. He drew back his head, and said, turning to me:

“Yes, I see the lights; we shall be there in two or three minutes.”

He looked more closely at me, and with a kind smile, and a little shrug, he said, “Poor child! how fatigued he must have been – how profoundly he sleeps! when the carriage stops he will waken.”

He then replaced his letters in the despatch-box, locked it, put his spectacles in his pocket, and again looked out of the window.

We had entered a little town. I suppose it was past two o’clock by this time. The carriage drew up, I saw an inn door open, and a light issuing from it.

“Here we are!” said my companion, turning gaily to me. But I did not awake.

“Yes, how tired he must have been!” he exclaimed, after he had waited for an answer. My servant was at the carriage door, and opened it.

“Your master sleeps soundly, he is so fatigued! It would be cruel to disturb him. You and I will go in, while they change the horses, and take some refreshment, and choose something that Monsieur Beckett will like to take in the carriage, for when he awakes by-and-by, he will, I am sure, be hungry.”

He trimmed his lamp, poured in some oil; and taking care not to disturb me, with another kind smile and another word of caution to my servant he got out, and I heard him talking to St Clair, as they entered the inn door, and I was left in my corner, in the carriage, in the same state.

CHAPTER VIII

A Three Minutes’ Visit

I have suffered extreme and protracted bodily pain, at different periods of my life, but anything like that misery, thank God, I never endured before or since. I earnestly hope it may not resemble any type of death to which we are liable. I was, indeed, a spirit in prison; and unspeakable was my dumb and unmoving agony.

The power of thought remained clear and active. Dull terror filled my mind. How would this end? Was it actual death?

You will understand that my faculty of observing was unimpaired. I could hear and see anything as distinctly as ever I did in my life. It was simply that my will had, as it were, lost its hold of my body.

I told you that the Marquis d’Harmonville had not extinguished his carriage lamp on going into this village inn. I was listening intently, longing for his return, which might result, by some lucky accident, in awaking me from my catalepsy.

Without any sound of steps approaching, to announce an arrival, the carriage door suddenly opened, and a total stranger got in silently and shut the door.

The lamp gave about as strong a light as a wax-candle, so I could see the intruder perfectly. He was a young man, with a dark grey loose surtout, made with a sort of hood, which was pulled over his head. I thought, as he moved, that I saw the gold band of a military undress cap under it; and I certainly saw the lace and buttons of a uniform, on the cuffs of the coat that were visible under the wide sleeves of his outside wrapper.

This young man had thick moustaches and an imperial, and I observed that he had a red scar running upward from his lip across his cheek.

He entered, shut the door softly, and sat down beside me. It was all done in a moment; leaning toward me, and shading his eyes with his gloved hand, he examined my face closely for a few seconds.

This man had come as noiselessly as a ghost; and everything he did was accomplished with the rapidity and decision that indicated a well-defined and prearranged plan. His designs were evidently sinister. I thought he was going to rob and, perhaps, murder me. I lay, nevertheless, like a corpse under his hands. He inserted his hand in my breast pocket, from which he took my precious white rose and all the letters it contained, among which was a paper of some consequence to me.

My letters he glanced at. They were plainly not what he wanted. My precious rose, too, he laid aside with them. It was evidently about the paper I have mentioned that he was concerned; for the moment he opened it he began with a pencil, in a small pocketbook, to make rapid notes of its contents.

This man seemed to glide through his work with a noiseless and cool celerity which argued, I thought, the training of the police department.

He re-arranged the papers, possibly in the very order in which he had found them, replaced them in my breast-pocket, and was gone. His visit, I think, did not quite last three minutes. Very soon after his disappearance I heard the voice of the Marquis once more. He got in, and I saw him look at me and smile, half-envying me, I fancied, my sound repose. If he had but known all!

He resumed his reading and docketing by the light of the little lamp which had just subserved the purposes of a spy.

We were now out of the town, pursuing our journey at the same moderate pace. We had left the scene of my police visit, as I should have termed it, now two leagues behind us, when I suddenly felt a strange throbbing in one ear, and a sensation as if air passed through it into my throat. It seemed as if a bubble of air, formed deep in my car, swelled, and burst there. The indescribable tension of my brain seemed all at once to give way; there was an odd humming in my head, and a sort of vibration through every nerve of my body, such as I have experienced in a limb that has been, in popular phraseology, asleep. I uttered a cry and half rose from my seat, and then fell back trembling, and with a sense of mortal faintness.

The Marquis stared at me, took my hand, and earnestly asked if I was ill. I could answer only with a deep groan.

Gradually the process of restoration was completed; and I was able, though very faintly, to tell him how very ill I had been; and then to describe the violation of my letters, during the time of his absence from the carriage.

“Good heaven!” he exclaimed, “the miscreant did not get at my despatch-box?”

I satisfied him, so far as I had observed, on that point. He placed the box on the seat beside him, and opened and examined its contents very minutely.

“Yes, undisturbed; all safe, thank heaven!” he murmured. “There are half-a-dozen letters here that I would not have some people read for a great deal.”

He now asked with a very kind anxiety all about the illness I complained of. When he had heard me, he said:

“A friend of mine once had an attack as like yours as possible. It was on board ship, and followed a state of high excitement. He was a brave man like you; and was called on to exert both his strength and his courage suddenly. An hour or two after, fatigue overpowered him, and he appeared to fall into a sound sleep. He really sank into a state which he afterwards described so that I think it must have been precisely the same affection as yours.”

“I am happy to think that my attack was not unique. Did he ever experience a return of it?”

“I knew him for years after, and never heard of any such thing. What strikes me is a parallel in the predisposing causes of each attack. Your unexpected and gallant hand-to-hand encounter, at such desperate odds, with an experienced swordsman, like that insane colonel of dragoons, your fatigue, and, finally, your composing yourself, as my other friend did, to sleep.”

“I wish,” he resumed, “one could make out who the coquin was who examined your letters. It is not worth turning back, however, because we should learn nothing. Those people always manage so adroitly. I am satisfied, however, that he must have been an agent of the police. A rogue of any other kind would have robbed you.”

I talked very little, being ill and exhausted, but the Marquis talked on agreeably.

“We grow so intimate,” said he, at last, “that I must remind you that I am not, for the present, the Marquis d’Harmonville, but only Monsieur Droqville; nevertheless, when we get to Paris, although I cannot see you often I may be of use. I shall ask you to name to me the hotel at which you mean to put up; because the Marquis being, as you are aware, on his travels, the Hotel d’Harmonville is, for the present, tenanted only by two or three old servants, who must not even see Monsieur Droqville. That gentleman will, nevertheless, contrive to get you access to the box of Monsieur le Marquis, at the Opera, as well, possibly, as to other places more difficult; and so soon as the diplomatic office of the Marquis d’Harmonville is ended, and he at liberty to declare himself, he will not excuse his friend, Monsieur Beckett, from fulfilling his promise to visit him this autumn at the Château d’Harmonville.”

You may be sure I thanked the Marquis.

The nearer we got to Paris, the more I valued his protection. The countenance of a great man on the spot, just then, taking so kind an interest in the stranger whom he had, as it were, blundered upon, might make my visit ever so many degrees more delightful than I had anticipated.

Nothing could be more gracious than the manner and looks of the Marquis; and, as I still thanked him, the carriage suddenly stopped in front of the place where a relay of horses awaited us, and where, as it turned out, we were to part.

CHAPTER IX

Gossip and Counsel

My eventful journey was over at last. I sat in my hotel window looking out upon brilliant Paris, which had, in a moment, recovered all its gaiety, and more than its accustomed bustle. Everyone had read of the kind of excitement that followed the catastrophe of Napoleon, and the second restoration of the Bourbons. I need not, therefore, even if, at this distance, I could, recall and describe my experiences and impressions of the peculiar aspect of Paris, in those strange times. It was, to be sure, my first visit. But often as I have seen it since, I don’t think I ever saw that delightful capital in a state, pleasurably so excited and exciting.

I had been two days in Paris, and had seen all sorts of sights, and experienced none of that rudeness and insolence of which others complained from the exasperated officers of the defeated French army.

I must say this, also. My romance had taken complete possession of me; and the chance of seeing the object of my dream gave a secret and delightful interest to my rambles and drives in the streets and environs, and my visits to the galleries and other sights of the metropolis.

I had neither seen nor heard of Count or Countess, nor had the Marquis d’Harmonville made any sign. I had quite recovered the strange indisposition under which I had suffered during my night journey.

It was now evening, and I was beginning to fear that my patrician acquaintance had quite forgotten me, when the waiter presented me the card of “Monsieur Droqville”; and, with no small elation and hurry, I desired him to show the gentleman up.

In came the Marquis d’Harmonville, kind and gracious as ever.

“I am a night-bird at present,” said he, so soon as we had exchanged the little speeches which are usual. “I keep in the shade during the daytime, and even now I hardly ventured to come in a close carriage. The friends for whom I have undertaken a rather critical service, have so ordained it. They think all is lost if I am known to be in Paris. First, let me present you with these orders for my box. I am so vexed that I cannot command it oftener during the next fortnight; during my absence I had directed my secretary to give it for any night to the first of my friends who might apply, and the result is, that I find next to nothing left at my disposal.”

I thanked him very much.

“And now a word in my office of Mentor. You have not come here, of course, without introductions?”

I produced half-a-dozen letters, the addresses of which he looked at.

“Don’t mind these letters,” he said. “I will introduce you. I will take you myself from house to house. One friend at your side is worth many letters. Make no intimacies, no acquaintances, until then. You young men like best to exhaust the public amusements of a great city, before embarrassing yourselves with the engagements of society. Go to all these. It will occupy you, day and night, for at least three weeks. When this is over, I shall be at liberty, and will myself introduce you to the brilliant but comparatively quiet routine of society. Place yourself in my hands; and in Paris remember, when once in society, you are always there.”

I thanked him very much, and promised to follow his counsels implicitly. He seemed pleased, and said:

“I shall now tell you some of the places you ought to go to. Take your map, and write letters or numbers upon the points I will indicate, and we will make out a little list. All the places that I shall mention to you are worth seeing.”

In this methodical way, and with a great deal of amusing and scandalous anecdote, he furnished me with a catalogue and a guide, which, to a seeker of novelty and pleasure, was invaluable.

“In a fortnight, perhaps in a week,” he said, “I shall be at leisure to be of real use to you. In the meantime, be on your guard. You must not play; you will be robbed if you do. Remember, you are surrounded, here, by plausible swindlers and villains of all kinds, who subsist by devouring strangers. Trust no one but those you know.”

I thanked him again, and promised to profit by his advice. But my heart was too full of the beautiful lady of the Belle Étoile, to allow our interview to close without an effort to learn something about her. I therefore asked for the Count and Countess de St Alyre, whom I had had the good fortune to extricate from an extremely unpleasant row in the hall of the inn.

Alas! he had not seen them since. He did not know where they were staying. They had a fine old house only a few leagues from Paris; but he thought it probable that they would remain, for a few days at least, in the city, as preparations would, no doubt, be necessary, after so long an absence, for their reception at home.

“How long have they been away?”

“About eight months, I think.”

“They are poor, I think you said?”

“What you would consider poor. But, Monsieur, the Count has an income which affords them the comforts and even the elegancies of life, living as they do, in a very quiet and retired way, in this cheap country.”

“Then they are very happy?”

“One would say they ought to be happy.”

“And what prevents?”

“He is jealous.”

“But his wife – she gives him no cause.”

“I am afraid she does.”

“How, Monsieur?”

“I always thought she was a little too – a great deal too—”

“Too what, Monsieur?”

“Too handsome. But although she has remarkable fine eyes, exquisite features, and the most delicate complexion in the world, I believe that she is a woman of probity. You have never seen her?”

“There was a lady, muffled up in a cloak, with a very thick veil on, the other night, in the hall of the Belle Étoile, when I broke that fellow’s head who was bullying the old Count. But her veil was so thick I could not see a feature through it!” My answer was diplomatic, you observe. “She may have been the Count’s daughter. Do they quarrel?”

“Who, he and his wife?”

“Yes.”

“A little.”

“Oh! and what do they quarrel about?”

“It is a long story; about the lady’s diamonds. They are valuable – they are worth, La Perelleuse says, about a million of francs. The Count wishes them sold and turned into revenue, which he offers to settle as she pleases. The Countess, whose they are, resists, and for a reason which, I rather think, she can’t disclose to him.”

“And pray what is that?” I asked, my curiosity a good deal piqued.

“She is thinking, I conjecture, how well she will look in them when she marries her second husband.”

“Oh? – yes, to be sure. But the Count de St Alyre is a good man?”

“Admirable, and extremely intelligent.”

“I should wish so much to be presented to the Count: you tell me he’s so—”

“So agreeably married. But they are living quite out of the world. He takes her now and then to the Opera, or to a public entertainment; but that is all.”

“And he must remember so much of the old régime, and so many of the scenes of the revolution!”

“Yes, the very man for a philosopher, like you! And he falls asleep after dinner; and his wife don’t. But, seriously, he has retired from the gay and the great world, and has grown apathetic; and so has his wife; and nothing seems to interest her now, not even – her husband!

The Marquis stood up to take his leave.

“Don’t risk your money,” said he. “You will soon have an opportunity of laying out some of it to great advantage. Several collections of really good pictures, belonging to persons who have mixed themselves up in this Bonapartist restoration, must come within a few weeks to the hammer. You can do wonders when these sales commence. There will be startling bargains! Reserve yourself for them. I shall let you know all about it. By-the-by,” he said, stopping short as he approached the door, “I was so near forgetting. There is to be next week, the very thing you would enjoy so much, because you see so little of it in England – I mean a bal masqué, conducted, it is said, with more than usual splendour. It takes place at Versailles – all the world will be there; there is such a rush for cards! But I think I may promise you one. Good-night! Adieu!”

CHAPTER X

The Black Veil

Speaking the language fluently, and with unlimited money, there was nothing to prevent my enjoying all that was enjoyable in the French capital. You may easily suppose how two days were passed. At the end of that time, and at about the same hour, Monsieur Droqville called again.

Courtly, good-natured, gay, as usual, he told me that the masquerade ball was fixed for the next Wednesday, and that he had applied for a card for me.

How awfully unlucky. I was so afraid I should not be able to go.

He stared at me for a moment with a suspicious and menacing look, which I did not understand, in silence, and then inquired rather sharply. And will Monsieur Beckett be good enough to say why not?

was a little surprised, but answered the simple truth: I had made an engagement for that evening with two or three English friends, and did not see how I could.

“Just so! You English, wherever you are, always look out for your English boors, your beer and ‘bifstek’; and when you come here, instead of trying to learn something of the people you visit, and pretend to study, you are guzzling and swearing, and smoking with one another, and no wiser or more polished at the end of your travels than if you had been all the time carousing in a booth at Greenwich.”

He laughed sarcastically, and looked as if he could have poisoned me.

“There it is,” said he, throwing the card on the table. “Take it or leave it, just as you please. I suppose I shall have my trouble for my pains; but it is not usual when a man such as I takes trouble, asks a favour, and secures a privilege for an acquaintance, to treat him so.”

This was astonishingly impertinent.

I was shocked, offended, penitent. I had possibly committed unwittingly a breach of good breeding, according to French ideas, which almost justified the brusque severity of the Marquis’s undignified rebuke.

In a confusion, therefore, of many feelings, I hastened to make my apologies, and to propitiate the chance friend who had showed me so much disinterested kindness.

I told him that I would, at any cost, break through the engagement in which I had unluckily entangled myself; that I had spoken with too little reflection, and that I certainly had not thanked him at all in proportion to his kindness, and to my real estimate of it.

“Pray say not a word more; my vexation was entirely on your account; and I expressed it, I am only too conscious, in terms a great deal too strong, which, I am sure, your good nature will pardon. Those who know me a little better are aware that I sometimes say a good deal more than I intend; and am always sorry when I do. Monsieur Beekett will forget that his old friend Monsieur Droqville has lost his temper in his cause, for a moment, and – we are as good friends as before.”

He smiled like the Monsieur Droqville of the Belle Étoile, and extended his hand, which I took very respectfully and cordially.

Our momentary quarrel had left us only better friends.

The Marquis then told me I had better secure a bed in some hotel at Versailles, as a rush would be made to take them; and advised my going down next morning for the purpose.

I ordered horses accordingly for eleven o’clock; and, after a little more conversation, the Marquis d’Harmonville bade me good-night, and ran down the stairs with his handkerchief to his mouth and nose, and, as I saw from my window, jumped into his close carriage again and drove away.

Next day I was at Versailles. As I approached the door of the Hotel de France it was plain that I was not a moment too soon, if, indeed, I were not already too late.

A crowd of carriages were drawn up about the entrance, so that I had no chance of approaching except by dismounting and pushing my way among the horses. The hall was full of servants and gentlemen screaming to the proprietor, who in a state of polite distraction was assuring them, one and all, that there was not a room or a closet disengaged in his entire house.

I slipped out again, leaving the hall to those who were shouting, expostulating, and wheedling, in the delusion that the host might, if he pleased, manage something for them. I jumped into my carriage and drove, at my horses’ best pace, to the Hotel du Reservoir. The blockade about this door was as complete as the other. The result was the same. It was very provoking, but what was to be done? My postilion had, a little officiously, while I was in the hall talking with the hotel authorities, got his horses, bit by bit, as other carriages moved away, to the very steps of the inn door.

This arrangement was very convenient so far as getting in again was concerned. But, this accomplished, how were we to get on? There were carriages in front, and carriages behind, and no less than four rows of carriages, of all sorts, outside.

I had at this time remarkably long and clear sight, and if I had been impatient before, guess what my feelings were when I saw an open carriage pass along the narrow strip of roadway left open at the other side, a barouche in which I was certain I recognized the veiled Countess and her husband. This carriage had been brought to a walk by a cart which occupied the whole breadth of the narrow way, and was moving with the customary tardiness of such vehicles.

I should have done more wisely if I had jumped down on the trottoir, and run round the block of carriages in front of the barouche. But, unfortunately, I was more of a Murat than a Moltke, and preferred a direct charge upon my object to relying on tactique. I dashed across the back seat of a carriage which was next mine, I don’t know how; tumbled through a sort of gig, in which an old gentleman and a dog were dozing; stepped with an incoherent apology over the side of an open carriage, in which were four gentlemen engaged in a hot dispute; tripped at the far side in getting out, and fell flat across the backs of a pair of horses, who instantly began plunging and threw me head foremost in the dust.

To those who observed my reckless charge, without being in the secret of my object, I must have appeared demented. Fortunately, the interesting barouche had passed before the catastrophe, and covered as I was with dust, and my hat blocked, you may be sure I did not care to present myself before the object of my Quixotic devotion.

I stood for a while amid a storm of sacré-ing, tempered disagreeably with laughter; and in the midst of these, while endeavouring to beat the dust from my clothes with my handkerchief, I heard a voice with which I was acquainted call, “Monsieur Beckett.”

I looked and saw the Marquis peeping from a carriage-window. It was a welcome sight. In a moment I was at his carriage side.

“You may as well leave Versailles,” he said; “you have learned, no doubt, that there is not a bed to hire in either of the hotels; and I can add that there is not a room to let in the whole town. But I have managed something for you that will answer just as well. Tell your servant to follow us, and get in here and sit beside me.

Fortunately an opening in the closely-packed carriages had just occurred, and mine was approaching.

I directed the servant to follow us; and the Marquis having said a word to his driver, we were immediately in motion.

“I will bring you to a comfortable place, the very existence of which is known to but few Parisians, where, knowing how things were here, I secured a room for you. It is only a mile away, and an old comfortable inn, called the Le Dragon Volant. It was fortunate for you that my tiresome business called me to this place so early.”

I think we had driven about a mile-and-a-half to the further side of the palace when we found ourselves upon a narrow old road, with the woods of Versailles on one side, and much older trees, of a size seldom seen in France, on the other.

We pulled up before an antique and solid inn, built of Caen stone, in a fashion richer and more florid than was ever usual in such houses, and which indicated that it was originally designed for the private mansion of some person of wealth, and probably, as the wall bore many carved shields and supporters, of distinction also. A kind of porch, less ancient than the rest, projected hospitably with a wide and florid arch, over which, cut in high relief in stone, and painted and gilded, was the sign of the inn. This was the Flying Dragon, with wings of brilliant red and gold, expanded, and its tail, pale green and gold, twisted and knotted into ever so many rings, and ending in a burnished point barbed like the dart of death.

“I shan’t go in – but you will find it a comfortable place; at all events better than nothing. I would go in with you, but my incognito forbids. You will, I daresay, be all the better pleased to learn that the inn is haunted – I should have been, in my young days, I know. But don’t allude to that awful fact in hearing of your host, for I believe it is a sore subject. Adieu. If you want to enjoy yourself at the ball, take my advice and go in a domino. I think I shall look in; and certainly, if I do, in the same costume. How shall we recognize one another? Let me see, something held in the fingers – a flower won’t do, so many people will have flowers. Suppose you get a red cross a couple of inches long – you’re an Englishman – stitched or pinned on the breast of your domino, and I a white one? Yes, that will do very well; and whatever room you go into keep near the door till we meet. I shall look for you at all the doors I pass; and you, in the same way, for me; and we must find each other soon. So that is understood. I can’t enjoy a thing of that kind with any but a young person; a man of my age requires the contagion of young spirits and the companionship of someone who enjoys everything spontaneously. Farewell; we meet tonight.”

By this time I was standing on the road; I shut the carriage door; bid him good-bye; and away he drove.

CHAPTER XI

The Dragon Volant

I took one look about me.

The building was picturesque; the trees made it more so. The antique and sequestered character of the scene contrasted strangely with the glare and bustle of the Parisian life, to which my eye and ear had become accustomed.

Then I examined the gorgeous old sign for a minute or two. Next I surveyed the exterior of the house more carefully. It was large and solid, and squared more with my ideas of an ancient English hostelrie, such as the Canterbury Pilgrims might have put up at, than a French house of entertainment. Except, indeed, for a round turret, that rose at the left flank of the house, and terminated in the extinguisher-shaped roof that suggests a French château.

I entered and announced myself as Monsieur Beckett, for whom a room had been taken. I was received with all the consideration due to an English milord, with, of course, an unfathomable purse.

My host conducted me to my apartment. It was a large room, a little sombre, panelled with dark wainscoting, and furnished in a stately and sombre style, long out of date. There was a wide hearth, and a heavy mantelpiece, carved with shields, in which I might, had I been curious enough, have discovered a correspondence with the heraldry on the outer walls. There was something interesting, melancholy, and even depressing in all this. I went to the stone-shafted window, and looked out upon a small park, with a thick wood, forming the background of a château which presented a cluster of such conical-topped turrets as I have just now mentioned.

The wood and château were melancholy objects. They showed signs of neglect, and almost of decay; and the gloom of fallen grandeur, and a certain air of desertion hung oppressively over the scene.

I asked my host the name of the château.

“That, Monsieur, is the Château de la Carque,” he answered.

“It is a pity it is so neglected,” I observed. “I should say, perhaps, a pity that its proprietor is not more wealthy?”

“Perhaps so, Monsieur.”

“Perhaps?” – I repeated, and looked at him. “Then I suppose he is not very popular.”

“Neither one thing nor the other, Monsieur,” he answered; “I meant only that we could not tell what use he might make of riches.”

“And who is he?” I inquired.

“The Count de St Alyre.”

“Oh! The Count! You are quite sure?” I asked, very eagerly.

It was now the innkeeper’s turn to look at me.

“Quite sure, Monsieur, the Count de St Alyre.”

“Do you see much of him in this part of the world?”

“Not a great deal, Monsieur; he is often absent for a considerable time.”

“And is he poor?” I inquired.

“I pay rent to him for this house. It is not much; but I find he cannot wait long for it,” he replied, smiling satirically.

“From what I have heard, however, I should think he cannot be very poor?” I continued.

“They say, Monsieur, he plays. I know not. He certainly is not rich. About seven months ago, a relation of his died in a distant place. His body was sent to the Count’s house here, and by him buried in Père la Chaise, as the poor gentleman had desired. The Count was in profound affliction; although he got a handsome legacy, they say, by that death. But money never seems to do him good for any time.”

“He is old, I believe?”

“Old? We call him the ‘Wandering Jew,’ except, indeed, that he has not always the five sous in his pocket. Yet, Monsieur, his courage does not fail him. He has taken a young and handsome wife.”

“And she?” I urged—

“Is the Countess de St Alyre.

“Yes; but I fancy we may say something more? She has attributes?”

“Three, Monsieur, three, at least most amiable.”

“Ah! And what are they?”

“Youth, beauty, and – diamonds.

I laughed. The sly old gentleman was foiling my curiosity.

“I see, my friend,” said I, “you are reluctant—”

“To quarrel with the Count,” he concluded. “True. You see, Monsieur, he could vex me in two or three ways, so could I him. But, on the whole, it is better each to mind his business, and to maintain peaceful relations; you understand.”

It was, therefore, no use trying, at least for the present. Perhaps he had nothing to relate. Should I think differently, by-and-by, I could try the effect of a few Napoleons. Possibly he meant to extract them.

The host of the Dragon Volant was an elderly man, thin, bronzed, intelligent, and with an air of decision, perfectly military. I learned afterwards that he had served under Napoleon in his early Italian campaigns.

“One question, I think you may answer,” I said, “without risking a quarrel. Is the Count at home?”

“He has many homes, I conjecture,” said the host evasively. “But – but I think I may say, Monsieur, that he is, I believe, at present staying at the Château de la Carque.”

I looked out of the window, more interested than ever, across the undulating grounds to the château, with its gloomy background of foliage.

“I saw him today, in his carriage at Versailles,” I said.

“Very natural.”

“Then his carriage, and horses, and servants, are at the château?”

“The carriage he puts up here, Monsieur, and the servants are hired for the occasion. There is but one who sleeps at the château. Such a life must be terrifying for Madame the Countess,” he replied.

“The old screw!” I thought. “By this torture, he hopes to extract her diamonds. What a life! What fiends to contend with – jealousy and extortion!”

The knight having made his speech to himself, cast his eyes once more upon the enchanter’s castle, and heaved a gentle sigh – a sigh of longing, of resolution, and of love.

What a fool I was! and yet, in the sight of angels, are we any wiser as we grow older? It seems to me, only, that our illusions change as we go on; but, still, we are madmen all the same.

“Well, St Clair,” said I, as my servant entered, and began to arrange my things.

“You have got a bed?”

“In the cock-loft, Monsieur, among the spiders, and, par ma foi! the cats and the owls. But we agree very well. Vive la bagatelle!”

“I had no idea it was so full.”

“Chiefly the servants, Monsieur, of those persons who were fortunate enough to get apartments at Versailles.”

“And what do you think of the Dragon Volant?”

“The Dragon Volant! Monsieur; the old fiery dragon! The devil himself, if all is true! On the faith of a Christian, Monsieur, they say that diabolical miracles have taken place in this house.”

“What do you mean? Revenants?”

“Not at all, sir; I wish it was no worse. Revenants? No! People who have never returned – who vanished, before the eyes of half-a-dozen men all looking at them.”

“What do you mean, St Clair? Let us hear the story, or miracle, or whatever it is.”

“It is only this, Monsieur, that an ex-master-of-the-horse of the late king, who lost his head – Monsieur will have the goodness to recollect, in the revolution – being permitted by the Emperor to return to France, lived here in this hotel, for a month, and at the end of that time vanished, visibly, as I told you, before the faces of half-a-dozen credible witnesses! The other was a Russian nobleman, six feet high and upwards, who, standing in the centre of the room, downstairs, describing to seven gentlemen of unquestionable veracity the last moments of Peter the Great, and having a glass of eau de vie in his left hand, and his tasse de café, nearly finished, in his right, in like manner vanished. His boots were found on the floor where he had been standing; and the gentleman at his right found, to his astonishment, his cup of coffee in his fingers, and the gentleman at his left, his glass of eau de vie—”

“Which he swallowed in his confusion,” I suggested.

“Which was preserved for three years among the curious articles of this house, and was broken by the curé while conversing with Mademoiselle Fidone in the housekeeper’s room; but of the Russian nobleman himself, nothing more was ever seen or heard. Parbleu! when we go out of the Dragon Volant, I hope it may be by the door. I heard all this, Monsieur, from the postilion who drove us.”

“Then it must be true!” said I, jocularly: but I was beginning to feel the gloom of the view, and of the chamber in which I stood; there had stolen over me, I know not how, a presentiment of evil; and my joke was with an effort, and my spirit flagged.

CHAPTER XII

The Magician

No more brilliant spectacle than this masked ball could be imagined. Among other salons and galleries, thrown open, was the enormous Perspective of the “Grande Galerie des Glaces,” lighted up on that occasion with no less than four thousand wax candles, reflected and repeated by all the mirrors, so that the effect was almost dazzling. The grand suite of salons was thronged with masques, in every conceivable costume. There was not a single room deserted. Every place was animated with music voices, brilliant colours, flashing jewels, the hilarity of extemporized comedy, and all the spirited incidents of a cleverly sustained masquerade. I had never seen before anything in the least comparable to this magnificent fête. I moved along, indolently, in my domino and mask, loitering, now and then, to enjoy a clever dialogue, a farcical song, or an amusing monologue, but, at the same time, keeping my eyes about me, lest my friend in the black domino, with the little white cross on his breast, should pass me by.

I had delayed and looked about me, specially, at every door I passed, as the Marquis and I had agreed; but he had not yet appeared.

While I was thus employed, in the very luxury of lazy amusement, I saw a gilded sedan chair, or, rather, a Chinese palanquin, exhibiting the fantastic exuberance of “Celestial” decoration, borne forward on gilded poles by four richly-dressed Chinese; one with a wand in his hand marched in front, and another behind; and a slight and solemn man, with a long black beard, a tall fez, such as a dervish is represented as wearing, walked close to its side. A strangely-embroidered robe fell over his shoulders, covered with hieroglyphic symbols; the embroidery was in black and gold, upon a variegated ground of brilliant colours. The robe was bound about his waist with a broad belt of gold, with cabalistic devices traced on it in dark red and black; red stockings, and shoes embroidered with gold, and pointed and curved upward at the toes, in Oriental fashion, appeared below the skirt of the robe. The man’s face was dark, fixed, and solemn, and his eyebrows black, and enormously heavy – he carried a singular-looking book under his arm, a wand of polished black wood in his other hand, and walked with his chin sunk on his breast, and his eyes fixed upon the floor. The man in front waved his wand right and left to clear the way for the advancing palanquin, the curtains of which were closed; and there was something so singular, strange and solemn about the whole thing, that I felt at once interested.

I was very well pleased when I saw the bearers set down their burthen within a few yards of the spot on which I stood.

The bearers and the men with the gilded wands forthwith clapped their hands, and in silence danced round the palanquin a curious and half-frantic dance, which was yet, as to figures and postures, perfectly methodical. This was soon accompanied by a clapping of hands and a ha-ha-ing, rhythmically delivered.

While the dance was going on a hand was lightly laid on my arm, and, looking round, a black domino with a white cross stood beside me.

“I am so glad I have found you,” said the Marquis; “and at this moment. This is the best group in the rooms. You must speak to the wizard. About an hour ago I lighted upon them, in another salon, and consulted the oracle by putting questions. I never was more amazed. Although his answers were a little disguised it was soon perfectly plain that he knew every detail about the business, which no one on earth had heard of but myself, and two or three other men, about the most cautious Persons in France. I shall never forget that shock. I saw other people who consulted him, evidently as much surprised and more frightened than I. I came with the Count de St Alyre and the Countess.”

He nodded toward a thin figure, also in a domino. It was the Count.

“Come,” he said to me, “I’ll introduce you.”

I followed, you may suppose, readily enough.

The Marquis presented me, with a very prettily-turned allusion to my fortunate intervention in his favour at the Belle Étoile; and the Count overwhelmed me with polite speeches, and ended by saying, what pleased me better still:

“The Countess is near us, in the next salon but one, chatting with her old friend the Duchesse d’Argensaque; I shall go for her in a few minutes; and when I bring her here, she shall make your acquaintance; and thank you, also, for your assistance, rendered with so much courage when we were so very disagreeably interrupted.”

“You must, positively, speak with the magician,” said the Marquis to the Count de St Alyre, “you will be so much amused. I did so; and, I assure you, I could not have anticipated such answers! I don’t know what to believe.”

“Really! Then, by all means, let us try,” he replied.

We three approached, together, the side of the palanquin, at which the black-bearded magician stood.

A young man, in a Spanish dress, who, with a friend at his side, had just conferred with the conjuror, was saying, as he passed us by:

“Ingenious mystification! Who is that in the palanquin? He seems to know everybody!”

The Count, in his mask and domino, moved along, stiffly, with us, toward the palanquin. A clear circle was maintained by the Chinese attendants, and the spectators crowded round in a ring.

One of these men – he who with a gilded wand had preceded the procession – advanced, extending his empty hand, palm upward.

“Money?” inquired the Count.

“Gold,” replied the usher.

The Count placed a piece of money in his hand; and I and the Marquis were each called on in turn to do likewise as we entered the circle. We paid accordingly.

The conjuror stood beside the palanquin, its silk curtain in his hand; his chin sunk, with its long, jet-black beard, on his chest; the outer hand grasping the black wand, on which he leaned; his eyes were lowered, as before, to the ground; his face looked absolutely lifeless. Indeed, I never saw face or figure so moveless, except in death. The first question the Count put, was: “Am I married, or unmarried?”

The conjuror drew back the curtain quickly, and placed his car toward a richly-dressed Chinese, who sat in the litter; withdrew his head, and closed the curtain again; and then answered: “Yes.”

The same preliminary was observed each time, so that the man with the black wand presented himself, not as a prophet, but as a medium; and answered, as it seemed, in the words of a greater than himself.

Two or three questions followed, the answers to which seemed to amuse the Marquis very much; but the point of which I could not see, for I knew next to nothing of the Count’s peculiarities and adventures.

“Does my wife love me?” asked he, playfully.

“As well as you deserve.”

“Whom do I love best in the world?”

“Self.”

“Oh! That I fancy is pretty much the case with everyone. But, putting myself out of the question, do I love anything on earth better than my wife?”

“Her diamonds.”

“Oh!” said the Count. The Marquis, I could see, laughed.

“Is it true,” said the Count, changing the conversation peremptorily, “that there has been a battle in Naples?”

“No; in France.”

“Indeed,” said the Count, satirically, with a glance round.

“And may I inquire between what powers, and on what particular quarrel?”

“Between the Count and Countess de St Alyre, and about a document they subscribed on the 25th July, 1811.”

The Marquis afterwards told me that this was the date of their marriage settlement.

The Count stood stock-still for a minute or so; and one could fancy that they saw his face flushing through his mask.

Nobody, but we two, knew that the inquirer was the Count de St Alyre.

I thought he was puzzled to find a subject for his next question; and, perhaps, repented having entangled himself in such a colloquy. If so, he was relieved; for the Marquis, touching his arms, whispered.

“Look to your right, and see who is coming.”

I looked in the direction indicated by the Marquis, and I saw a gaunt figure stalking toward us. It was not a masque. The face was broad, scarred, and white. In a word, it was the ugly face of Colonel Gaillarde, who, in the costume of a corporal of the Imperial Guard, with his left arm so adjusted as to look like a stump, leaving the lower part of the coat-sleeve empty, and pinned up to the breast. There were strips of very real sticking-plaster across his eyebrow and temple, where my stick had left its mark, to score, hereafter, among the more honourable scars of war.

CHAPTER XIII

The Oracle Tells Me Wonders

I forgot for a moment how impervious my mask and domino were to the hard stare of the old campaigner, and was preparing for an animated scuffle. It was only for a moment, of course; but the count cautiously drew a little back as the gasconading corporal, in blue uniform, white vest, and white gaiters – for my friend Gaillarde was as loud and swaggering in his assumed character as in his real one of a colonel of dragoons – drew near. He had already twice all but got himself turned out of doors for vaunting the exploits of Napoleon le Grand, in terrific mock-heroics, and had very nearly come to hand-grips with a Prussian hussar. In fact, he would have been involved in several sanguinary rows already, had not his discretion reminded him that the object of his coming there at all, namely, to arrange a meeting with an affluent widow, on whom he believed he had made a tender impression, would not have been promoted by his premature removal from the festive scene of which he was an ornament, in charge of a couple of gendarmes.

“Money! Gold! Bah! What money can a wounded soldier like your humble servant have amassed, with but his sword-hand left, which, being necessarily occupied, places not a finger at his command with which to scrape together the spoils of a routed enemy?”

“No gold from him,” said the magician. “His scars frank him.”

“Bravo, Monsieur le prophète! Bravissimo! Here I am. Shall I begin, mon sorcier, without further loss of time, to question you?”

Without waiting for an answer, he commenced, in stentorian tones. After half-a-dozen questions and answers, he asked: “Whom do I pursue at present?”

“Two persons.”

“Ha! Two? Well, who are they?”

“An Englishman, whom if you catch, he will kill you; and a French widow, whom if you find, she will spit in your face.”

“Monsieur le magicien calls a spade a spade, and knows that his cloth protects him. No matter! Why do I pursue them?”

“The widow has inflicted a wound on your heart, and the Englishman a wound on your head. They are each separately too strong for you; take care your pursuit does not unite them.”

“Bah! How could that be?”

“The Englishman protects ladies. He has got that fact into your head. The widow, if she sees, will marry him. It takes some time, she will reflect, to become a colonel, and the Englishman is unquestionably young.”

“I will cut his cock’s-comb for him,” he ejaculated with an oath and a grin; and in a softer tone he asked, “Where is she?”

“Near enough to be offended if you fail.”

“So she ought, by my faith. You are right, Monsieur le prophète! A hundred thousand thanks! Farewell!” And staring about him, and stretching his lank neck as high as he could, he strode away with his scars, and white waistcoat and gaiters, and his bearskin shako.

I had been trying to see the person who sat in the palanquin. I had only once an opportunity of a tolerably steady peep. What I saw was singular. The oracle was dressed, as I have said, very richly, in the Chinese fashion. He was a figure altogether on a larger scale than the interpreter, who stood outside. The features seemed to me large and heavy, and the head was carried with a downward inclination! the eyes were closed, and the chin rested on the breast of his embroidered pelisse. The face seemed fixed, and the very image of apathy. Its character and pose seemed an exaggerated repetition of the immobility of the figure who communicated with the noisy outer world. This face looked blood-red; but that was caused, I concluded, by the light entering through the red silk curtains. All this struck me almost at a glance; I had not many seconds in which to make my observation. The ground was now clear, and the Marquis said, “Go forward, my friend.”

I did so. When I reached the magician, as we called the man with the black wand, I glanced over my shoulder to see whether the Count was near.

No, he was some yards behind; and he and the Marquis, whose curiosity seemed to be by this time satisfied, were now conversing generally upon some subject of course quite different.

I was relieved, for the sage seemed to blurt out secrets in an unexpected way; and some of mine might not have amused the Count.

I thought for a moment. I wished to test the prophet. A Church-of-England man was a rara avis in Paris.

“What is my religion?” I asked.

“A beautiful heresy,” answered the oracle instantly.

“A heresy? – and pray how is it named?”

“Love.”

“Oh! Then I suppose I am a polytheist, and love a great many?”

“One.”

“But, seriously,” I asked, intending to turn the course of our colloquy a little out of an embarrassing channel, “have I ever learned any words of devotion by heart?”

“Yes.”

“Can you repeat them?”

“Approach.”

I did, and lowered my ear.

The man with the black wand closed the curtains, and whispered, slowly and distinctly, these words which, I need scarcely tell you, I instantly recognized:

“I may never see you more; and, oh! I that I could forget you! – go – farewell – for God’s sake, go!”

I started as I heard them. They were, you know, the last words whispered to me by the Countess.

“Good Heavens! How miraculous! Words heard most assuredly, by no ear on earth but my own and the lady’s who uttered them, till now!

I looked at the impassive face of the spokesman with the wand. There was no trace of meaning, or even of a consciousness that the words he had uttered could possibly interest me.

“What do I most long for?” I asked, scarcely knowing what I said.

“Paradise.”

“And what prevents my reaching it?”

“A black veil.”

Stronger and stronger! The answers seemed to me to indicate the minutest acquaintance with every detail of my little romance, of which not even the Marquis knew anything! And I, the questioner, masked and robed so that my own brother could not have known me!

“You said I loved someone. Am I loved in return?” I asked.

“Try.”

I was speaking lower than before, and stood near the dark man with the beard, to prevent the necessity of his speaking in a loud key.

“Does anyone love me?” I repeated.

“Secretly,” was the answer.

“Much or little?” I inquired.

“Too well.”

“How long will that love last?”

“Till the rose casts its leaves.”

The rose – another allusion!

“Then – darkness!” I sighed. “But till then I live in light.”

“The light of violet eyes.”

Love, if not a religion, as the oracle had just pronounced it, is, at least, a superstition. How it exalts the imagination! How it enervates the reason! How credulous it makes us!

All this which, in the case of another I should have laughed at, most powerfully affected me in my own. It inflamed my ardour, and half crazed my brain, and even influenced my conduct.

The spokesman of this wonderful trick – if trick it were – now waved me backward with his wand, and as I withdrew, my eyes still fixed upon the group, and this time encircled with an aura of mystery in my fancy; backing toward the ring of spectators, I saw him raise his hand suddenly, with a gesture of command, as a signal to the usher who carried the golden wand in front.

The usher struck his wand on the ground, and, in a shrill voice, proclaimed: “The great Confu is silent for an hour.”

Instantly the bearers pulled down a sort of blind of bamboo, which descended with a sharp clatter, and secured it at the bottom; and then the man in the tall fez, with the black beard and wand, began a sort of dervish dance. In this the men with the gold wands joined, and finally, in an outer ring, the bearers, the palanquin being the centre of the circles described by these solemn dancers, whose pace, little by little, quickened, whose gestures grew sudden, strange, frantic, as the motion became swifter and swifter, until at length the whirl became so rapid that the dancers seemed to fly by with the speed of a mill-wheel, and amid a general clapping of hands, and universal wonder, these strange performers mingled with the crowd, and the exhibition, for the time at least, ended.

The Marquis d’Harmonville was standing not far away, looking on the ground, as one could judge by his attitude and musing. I approached, and he said:

“The Count has just gone away to look for his wife. It is a pity she was not here to consult the prophet; it would have been amusing, I daresay, to see how the Count bore it. Suppose we follow him. I have asked him to introduce you.”

With a beating heart, I accompanied the Marquis d’Harmonville.

CHAPTER XIV

Mademoiselle De La Vallière

We wandered through the salons, the Marquis and I. It was no easy matter to find a friend in rooms so crowded.

“Stay here,” said the Marquis, “I have thought of a way of finding him. Besides, his jealousy may have warned him that there is no particular advantage to be gained by presenting you to his wife; I had better go and reason with him, as you seem to wish an introduction so very much.”

This occurred in the room that is now called the “Salon d’Apollon.” The paintings remained in my memory, and my adventure of that evening was destined to occur there.

I sat down upon a sofa, and looked about me. Three or four persons beside myself were seated on this roomy piece of gilded furniture. They were chatting all very gaily; all – except the person who sat next me, and she was a lady. Hardly two feet interposed between us. The lady sat apparently in a reverie. Nothing could be more graceful. She wore the costume perpetuated in Collignan’s full-length portrait of Mademoiselle de la Valière. It is, as you know, not only rich, but elegant. Her hair was powdered, but one could perceive that it was naturally a dark brown. One pretty little foot appeared, and could anything be more exquisite than her hand?

It was extremely provoking that this lady wore her mask, and did not, as many did, hold it for a time in her hand.

I was convinced that she was pretty. Availing myself of the privilege of a masquerade, a microcosm in which it is impossible, except by voice and allusion, to distinguish friend from foe, I spoke:

“It is not easy, Mademoiselle, to deceive me,” I began.

“So much the better for Monsieur,” answered the mask, quietly.

“I mean,” I said, determined to tell my fib, “that beauty is a gift more difficult to conceal than Mademoiselle supposes.”

“Yet Monsieur has succeeded very well,” she said in the same sweet and careless tones.

“I see the costume of this, the beautiful Mademoiselle de la Valière, upon a form that surpasses her own; I raise my eyes, and I behold a mask, and yet I recognize the lady; beauty is like that precious stone in the ‘Arabian Nights,’ which emits, no matter how concealed, a light that betrays it.”

“I know the story,” said the young lady. “The light betrayed it, not in the sun but in darkness. Is there so little light in these rooms, Monsieur, that a poor glowworm can show so brightly? I thought we were in a luminous atmosphere, wherever a certain Countess moved?”

Here was an awkward speech! How was I to answer? This lady might be, as they say some ladies are, a lover of mischief, or an intimate of the Countess de St Alyre. Cautiously, therefore, I inquired,

“What Countess?”

“If you know me, you must know that she is my dearest friend. Is she not beautiful?”

“How can I answer, there are so many countesses.”

“Everyone who knows me, knows who my best beloved friend is. You don’t know me?”

“That is cruel. I can scarcely believe I am mistaken.”

“With whom were you walking, just now?” she asked.

“A gentleman, a friend,” I answered.

“I saw him, of course, a friend; but I think I know him, and should like to be certain. Is he not a certain Marquis?”

Here was another question that was extremely awkward.

“There are so many people here, and one may walk, at one time with one, and at another with a different one, that—”

“That an unscrupulous person has no difficulty in evading a simple question like mine. Know then, once for all, that nothing disgusts a person of spirit so much as suspicion. You, Monsieur, are a gentleman of discretion. I shall respect you accordingly.”

“Mademoiselle would despise me, were I to violate a confidence.”

“But you don’t deceive me. You imitate your friend’s diplomacy. I hate diplomacy. It means fraud and cowardice. Don’t you think I know him? The gentleman with the cross of white ribbon on his breast? I know the Marquis d’Harmonville perfectly. You see to what good purpose your ingenuity has been expended.”

“To that conjecture I can answer neither yes nor no.”

“You need not. But what was your motive in mortifying a lady?”

“It is the last thing on earth I should do.”

“You affected to know me, and you don’t; through caprice, or listlessness, or curiosity, you wished to converse, not with a lady, but with a costume. You admired, and you pretend to mistake me for another. But who is quite perfect? Is truth any longer to be found on earth?”

“Mademoiselle has formed a mistaken opinion of me.”

“And you also of me; you find me less foolish than you supposed. I know perfectly whom you intend amusing with compliments and melancholy declamation, and whom, with that amiable purpose, you have been seeking.”

“Tell me whom you mean,” I entreated. “Upon one condition.”

“What is that?”

“That you will confess if I name the lady.”

“You describe my object unfairly,” I objected. “I can’t admit that I proposed speaking to any lady in the tone you describe.”

“Well, I shan’t insist on that; only if I name the lady, you will promise to admit that I am right.”

“Must I promise?”

“Certainly not, there is no compulsion; but your promise is the only condition on which I will speak to you again.”

I hesitated for a moment; but how could she possibly tell? The Countess would scarcely have admitted this little romance to anyone; and the mask in the La Vallière costume could not possibly know who the masked domino beside her was.

“I consent,” I said, “I promise.”

“You must promise on the honour of a gentleman.”

“Well, I do; on the honour of a gentleman.”

“Then this lady is the Countess de St Alyre.”

I was unspeakably surprised; I was disconcerted; but I remembered my promise, and said:

“The Countess de St Alyre is unquestionably the lady to whom I hoped for an introduction tonight; but I beg to assure you, also on the honour of a gentleman, that she has not the faintest imaginable suspicion that I was seeking such an honour, nor, in all probability, does she remember that such a person as I exists. I had the honour to render her and the Count a trifling service, too trifling, I fear, to have earned more than an hour’s recollection.”

“The world is not so ungrateful as you suppose; or if it be, there are, nevertheless, a few hearts that redeem it. I can answer for the Countess de St Alyre, she never forgets a kindness. She does not show all she feels; for she is unhappy, and cannot.”

“Unhappy! I feared, indeed, that might be. But for all the rest that you are good enough to suppose, it is but a flattering dream.”

“I told you that I am the Countess’s friend, and being so I must know something of her character; also, there are confidences between us, and I may know more than you think of those trifling services of which you suppose the recollection is so transitory.”

I was becoming more and more interested. I was as wicked as other young men, and the heinousness of such a pursuit was as nothing, now that self-love and all the passions that mingle in such a romance were roused. The image of the beautiful Countess had now again quite superseded the pretty counterpart of La Vallièe, who was before me. I would have given a great deal to hear, in solemn earnest, that she did remember the champion who, for her sake, had thrown himself before the sabre of an enraged dragoon, with only a cudgel in his hand, and conquered.

“You say the Countess is unhappy,” said I. “What causes her unhappiness?”

“Many things. Her husband is old, jealous, and tyrannical. Is not that enough? Even when relieved from his society, she is lonely.”

“But you are her friend?” I suggested.

“And you think one friend enough?” she answered; “she has one alone, to whom she can open her heart.”

“Is there room for another friend?”

“Try.”

“How can I find a way?”

“She will aid you.”

“How?”

She answered by a question. “Have you secured rooms in either of the hotels of Versailles?”

“No, I could not. I am lodged in the Dragon Volant, which stands at the verge of the grounds of the Château de la Carque.”

“That is better still. I need not ask if you have courage for an adventure. I need not ask if you are a man of honour. A lady may trust herself to you, and fear nothing. There are few men to whom the interview, such as I shall arrange, could be granted with safety. You shall meet her at two o’clock this morning in the Park of the Château de la Carque. What room do you occupy in the Dragon Volant?”

I was amazed at the audacity and decision of this girl. Was she, as we say in England, hoaxing me?

“I can describe that accurately,” said I. “As I look from the rear of the house, in which my apartment is, I am at the extreme right, next the angle; and one pair of stairs up, from the hall.”

“Very well; you must have observed, if you looked into the park, two or three clumps of chestnut and lime trees, growing so close together as to form a small grove. You must return to your hotel, change your dress, and, preserving a scrupulous secrecy as to why or where you go, leave the Dragon Volant, and climb the park wall, unseen; you will easily recognize the grove I have mentioned; there you will meet the Countess, who will grant you an audience of a few minutes, who will expect the most scrupulous reserve on your part, and who will explain to you, in a few words, a great deal which I could not so well tell you here.”

I cannot describe the feeling with which I heard these words. I was astounded. Doubt succeeded. I could not believe these agitating words.

“Mademoiselle will believe that if I only dared assure myself that so great a happiness and honour were really intended for me, my gratitude would be as lasting as my life. But how dare I believe that Mademoiselle does not speak, rather from her own sympathy or goodness, than from a certainty that the Countess de St Alyre would concede so great an honour?”

“Monsieur believes either that I am not, as I pretend to be, in the secret which he hitherto supposed to be shared by no one but the Countess and himself, or else that I am cruelly mystifying him. That I am in her confidence, I swear by all that is dear in a whispered farewell. By the last companion of this flower!” and she took for a moment in her fingers the nodding head of a white rosebud that was nestled in her bouquet. “By my own good star, and hers – or shall I call it our ‘belle étoile?’ Have I said enough?”

“Enough?” I repeated, “more than enough – a thousand thanks.”

“And being thus in her confidence, I am clearly her friend; and being a friend would it be friendly to use her dear name so; and all for sake of practising a vulgar trick upon you – a stranger?”

“Mademoiselle will forgive me. Remember how very precious is the hope of seeing, and speaking to the Countess. Is it wonderful, then, that I should falter in my belief? You have convinced me, however, and will forgive my hesitation.”

“You will be at the place I have described, then, at two o’clock?”

“Assuredly,” I answered.

“And Monsieur, I know, will not fail through fear. No, he need not assure me; his courage is already proved.”

“No danger, in such a case, will be unwelcome to me.”

“Had you not better go now, Monsieur, and rejoin your friend?”

“I promised to wait here for my friend’s return. The Count de St Alyre said that he intended to introduce me to the Countess.”

“And Monsieur is so simple as to believe him?”

“Why should I not?”

“Because he is jealous and cunning. You will see. He will never introduce you to his wife. He will come here and say he cannot find her, and promise another time.”

“I think I see him approaching, with my friend. No – there is no lady with him.”

“I told you so. You will wait a long time for that happiness, if it is never to reach you except through his hands. In the meantime, you had better not let him see you so near me. He will suspect that we have been talking of his wife; and that will whet his jealousy and his vigilance.”

I thanked my unknown friend in the mask, and withdrawing a few steps, came, by a little “circumbendibus,” upon the flank of the Count. I smiled under my mask as he assured me that the Duchess de la Roqueme had changed her place, and taken the Countess with her; but he hoped, at some very early time, to have an opportunity of enabling her to make my acquaintance.

I avoided the Marquis d’Harmonville, who was following the Count. I was afraid he might propose accompanying me home, and had no wish to be forced to make an explanation.

I lost myself quickly, therefore, in the crowd, and moved, as rapidly as it would allow me, toward the Galerie des Glaces, which lay in the direction opposite to that in which I saw the Count and my friend the Marquis moving.

CHAPTER XV

Strange Story of the Dragon Volant

These fêtes were earlier in those days, and in France, than our modern balls are in London. I consulted my watch. It was a little past twelve.

It was a still and sultry night; the magnificent suite of rooms, vast as some of them were, could not be kept at a temperature less than oppressive, especially to people with masks on. In some places the crowd was inconvenient, and the profusion of lights added to the heat. I removed my mask, therefore, as I saw some other people do, who were as careless of mystery as I. I had hardly done so, and began to breathe more comfortably, when I heard a friendly English voice call me by my name. It was Tom Whistlewick, of the – th Dragoons. He had unmasked, with a very flushed face, as I did. He was one of those Waterloo heroes, new from the mint of glory, whom, as a body, all the world, except France, revered; and the only thing I knew against him, was a habit of allaying his thirst, which was excessive, at balls, fêtes, musical parties, and all gatherings, where it was to be had, with champagne; and, as he introduced me to his friend, Monsieur Carmaignac, I observed that he spoke a little thick. Monsieur Carmaignac was little, lean, and as straight as a ramrod. He was bald, took snuff, and wore spectacles; and, as I soon learned, held an official position.

Tom was facetious, sly, and rather difficult to understand, in his present pleasant mood. He was elevating his eyebrows and screwing his lips oddly, and fanning himself vaguely with his mask.

After some agreeable conversation I was glad to observe that he preferred silence, and was satisfied with the rôle of listener, as I and Monsieur Carmaignac chatted; and he seated himself, with extraordinary caution and indecision, upon a bench, beside us, and seemed very soon to find a difficulty in keeping his eyes open.

“I heard you mention,” said the French gentleman, “that you had engaged an apartment in the Dragon Volant, about half a league from this. When I was in a different police department, about four years ago, two very strange cases were connected with that house. One was of a wealthy émigré, permitted to return to France by the Em – by Napoleon. He vanished. The other – equally strange – was the case of a Russian of rank and wealth. He disappeared just as mysteriously.”

“My servant,” I said, “gave me a confused account of some occurrences, and, as well as I recollect, he described the same persons – I mean a returned French nobleman and a Russian gentleman. But he made the whole story so marvellous – I mean in the supernatural sense – that, I confess, I did not believe a word of it.”

“No, there was nothing supernatural; but a great deal inexplicable,” said the French gentleman. “Of course, there may be theories; but the thing was never explained, nor, so far as I know, was a ray of light ever thrown upon it.”

“Pray let me hear the story,” I said. “I think I have a claim, as it affects my quarters. You don’t suspect the people of the house?”

“Oh! it has changed hands since then. But there seemed to be a fatality about a particular room.”

“Could you describe that room?”

“Certainly. It is a spacious, panelled bedroom, up one pair of stairs, in the back of the house, and at the extreme right, as you look from its windows.”

“Ho! Really? Why, then, I have got the very room!” I said, beginning to be more interested – perhaps the least bit in the world, disagreeably. “Did the people die, or were they actually spirited away?”

“No, they did not die – they disappeared very oddly. I’ll tell you the particulars – I happen to know them exactly, because I made an official visit, on the first occasion, to the house, to collect evidence; and although I did not go down there, upon the second, the papers came before me, and I dictated the official letter despatched to the relations of the people who had disappeared; they had applied to the government to investigate the affair. We had letters from the same relations more than two years later, from which we learned that the missing men had never turned up.”

He took a pinch of snuff, and looked steadily at me.

“Never! I shall relate all that happened, so far as we could discover. The French noble, who was the Chevalier Château Blassemare, unlike most émigrés had taken the matter in time, sold a large portion of his property before the revolution had proceeded so far as to render that next to impossible, and retired with a large sum. He brought with him about half a million of francs, the greater part of which he invested in the French funds; a much larger sum remained in Austrian land and securities. You will observe then that this gentleman was rich, and there was no allegation of his having lost money, or being in any way embarrassed. You see?

I assented.

“This gentleman’s habits were not expensive in proportion to his means. He had suitable lodgings in Paris; and for a time, society, and theatres, and other reasonable amusements, engrossed him. He did not play. He was a middle-aged man, affecting youth, with the vanities which are usual in such persons; but, for the rest, he was a gentle and polite person, who disturbed nobody – a person, you see, not likely to provoke an enmity.”

“Certainly not,” I agreed.

“Early in the summer of 1811 he got an order permitting him to copy a picture in one of these salons, and came down here, to Versailles, for the purpose. His work was getting on slowly. After a time he left his hotel here, and went, by way of change, to the Dragon Volant; there he took, by special choice, the bedroom which has fallen to you by chance. From this time, it appeared, he painted little; and seldom visited his apartments in Paris. One night he saw the host of the Dragon Volant, and told him that he was going into Paris, to remain for a day or two, on very particular business; that his servant would accompany him, but that he would retain his apartments at the Dragon Volant, and return in a few days. He left some clothes there, but packed a portmanteau, took his dressing case and the rest, and, with his servant behind his carriage, drove into Paris. You observe all this, Monsieur?”

“Most attentively,” I answered.

“Well, Monsieur, as soon as they were approaching his lodgings, he stopped the carriage on a sudden, told his servant that he had changed his mind; that he would sleep elsewhere that night, that he had very particular business in the north of France, not far from Rouen, that he would set out before daylight on his journey, and return in a fortnight. He called a fiacre, took in his hand a leather bag which, the servant said, was just large enough to hold a few shirts and a coat, but that it was enormously heavy, as he could testify, for he held it in his hand, while his master took out his purse to count thirty-six Napoleons, for which the servant was to account when he should return. He then sent him on, in the carriage; and he, with the bag I have mentioned, got into the fiacre. Up to that, you see, the narrative is quite clear.”

“Perfectly,” I agreed.

“Now comes the mystery,” said Monsieur Carmaignac. “After that, the Count Château Blassemare was never more seen, so far as we can make out, by acquaintance or friend. We learned that the day before the Count’s stockbroker had, by his direction, sold all his stock in the French funds, and handed him the cash it realized. The reason he gave him for this measure tallied with what he said to his servant. He told him that he was going to the north of France to settle some claims, and did not know exactly how much might be required. The bag, which had puzzled the servant by its weight, contained, no doubt, a large sum in gold. Will Monsieur try my snuff?”

He politely tendered his open snuffbox, of which I partook, experimentally.

“A reward was offered,” he continued, “when the inquiry was instituted, for any information tending to throw a light upon the mystery, which might be afforded by the driver of the ‘employed on the night of’ (so-and-so), ‘at about the hour of half-past ten, by a gentleman, with a black-leather travelling-bag in his hand, who descended from a private carriage, and gave his servant some money, which he counted twice over.’ About a hundred-and-fifty drivers applied, but not one of them was the right man. We did, however, elicit a curious and unexpected piece of evidence in quite another quarter. What a racket that plaguey harlequin makes with his sword!”

“Intolerable!” I chimed in.

The harlequin was soon gone, and he resumed.

“The evidence I speak of came from a boy, about twelve years old, who knew the appearance of the Count perfectly, having been often employed by him as a messenger. He stated that about half-past twelve o’clock, on the same night – upon which you are to observe, there was a brilliant moon – he was sent, his mother having been suddenly taken ill, for the sage femme who lived within a stone’s throw of the Dragon Volant. His father’s house, from which he started, was a mile away, or more, from that inn, in order to reach which he had to pass round the park of the Chéteau de la Carque, at the site most remote from the point to which he was going. It passes the old churchyard of St Aubin, which is separated from the road only by a very low fence, and two or three enormous old trees. The boy was a little nervous as he approached this ancient cemetery; and, under the bright moonlight, he saw a man whom he distinctly recognized as the Count, whom they designated by a sobriquet which means ‘the man of smiles.’ He was looking rueful enough now, and was seated on the side of a tombstone, on which he had laid a pistol, while he was ramming home the charge of another.

“The boy got cautiously by, on tiptoe, with his eyes all the time on the Count Château Blassernare, or the man he mistook for him – his dress was not what he usually wore, but the witness swore that he could not be mistaken as to his identity. He said his face looked grave and stern; but though he did not smile, it was the same face he knew so well. Nothing would make him swerve from that. If that were he, it was the last time he was seen. He has never been heard of since. Nothing could be heard of him in the neighbourhood of Rouen. There has been no evidence of his death; and there is no sign that he is living.”

“That certainly is a most singular case,” I replied, and was about to ask a question or two, when Tom Whistlewick who, without my observing it, had been taking a ramble, returned, a great deal more awake, and a great deal less tipsy.

“I say, Carmaignac, it is getting late, and I must go; I really must, for the reason I told you – and, Beckett, we must soon meet again.”

“I regret very much, Monsieur, my not being able at present to relate to you the other case, that of another tenant of the very same room – a case more mysterious and sinister than the last – and which occurred in the autumn of the same year.”

“Will you both do a very good-natured thing, and come and dine with me at the Dragon Volant tomorrow?”

So, as we pursued our way along the Galerie des Glaces, I extracted their promise.

“By Jove!” said Whistlewick, when this was done; “look at that pagoda, or sedan chair, or whatever it is, just where those fellows set it down, and not one of them near it! I can’t imagine how they tell fortunes so devilish well. Jack Nuffles – I met him here tonight – says they are gipsies – where are they, I wonder? I’ll go over and have a peep at the prophet.”

I saw him plucking at the blinds, which were constructed something on the principle of Venetian blinds; the red curtains were inside; but they did not yield, and he could only peep under one that did not come quite down.

When he rejoined us, he related: “I could scarcely see the old fellow, it’s so dark. He is covered with gold and red, and has an embroidered hat on like a mandarin’s; he’s fast asleep; and, by Jove, he smells like a polecat! It’s worth going over only to have it to say. Fiew! pooh! oh! It is a perfume. Faugh!

Not caring to accept this tempting invitation, we got along slowly toward the door. I bade them good-night, reminding them of their promise. And so found my way at last to my carriage; and was soon rolling slowly toward the Dragon Volant, on the loneliest of roads, under old trees, and the soft moonlight.

What a number of things had happened within the last two hours! what a variety of strange and vivid pictures were crowded together in that brief space! What an adventure was before me!

The silent, moonlighted, solitary road, how it contrasted with the many-eddied whirl of pleasure from whose roar and music, lights, diamonds and colours I had just extricated myself.

The sight of lonely nature at such an hour, acts like a sudden sedative. The madness and guilt of my pursuit struck me with a momentary compunction and horror. I wished I had never entered the labyrinth which was leading me, I knew not whither. It was too late to think of that now; but the bitter was already stealing into my cup; and vague anticipations lay, for a few minutes, heavy on my heart. It would not have taken much to make me disclose my unmanly state of mind to my lively friend Alfred Ogle, nor even to the milder ridicule of the agreeable Tom Whistlewick.

CHAPTER XVI

The Parc of the Château De La Carque

There was no danger of the Dragon Volant’s closing its doors on that occasion till three or four in the morning. There were quartered there many servants of great people, whose masters would not leave the ball till the last moment, and who could not return to their corners in the Dragon Volant till their last services had been rendered.

I knew, therefore, I should have ample time for my mysterious excursion without exciting curiosity by being shut out.

And now we pulled up under the canopy of boughs, before the sign of the Dragon Volant, and the light that shone from its hall door.

I dismissed my carriage, ran up the broad staircase, mask in hand, with my domino fluttering about me, and entered the large bedroom. The black wainscoting and stately furniture, with the dark curtains of the very tall bed, made the night there more sombre.

An oblique patch of moonlight was thrown upon the floor from the window to which I hastened. I looked out upon the landscape slumbering in those silvery beams. There stood the outline of the Château de la Carque, its chimneys and many turrets with their extinguisher-shaped roofs black against the soft grey sky. There, also, more in the foreground, about midway between the window where I stood and the château, but a little to the left, I traced the tufted masses of the grove which the lady in the mask had appointed as the trysting-place, where I and the beautiful Countess were to meet that night.

I took “the bearings” of this gloomy bit of wood, whose foliage glimmered softly at top in the light of the moon.

You may guess with what a strange interest and swelling of the heart I gazed on the unknown scene of my coming adventure.

But time was flying, and the hour already near. I threw my robe upon a sofa; I groped out a pair of hoots, which I substituted for those thin heelless shoes, in those days called “pumps,” without which a gentleman could not attend an evening party. I put on my hat and, lastly, I took a pair of loaded pistols, which I had been advised were satisfactory companions in the then unsettled state of French society; swarms of disbanded soldiers, some of them alleged to be desperate characters, being everywhere to be met with. These preparations made, I confess I took a looking-glass to the window to see how I looked in the moonlight; and being satisfied, I replaced it, and ran downstairs.

In the hall I called for my servant.

“St Clair,” said I; “I mean to take a little moonlight ramble, only ten minutes or so. You must not go to bed until I return. If the night is very beautiful, I may possibly extend my ramble a little.”

So down the steps I lounged, looking first over my right, and then over my left shoulder, like a man uncertain which direction to take, and I sauntered up the road, gazing now at the moon, and now at the thin white clouds in the opposite direction, whistling, all the time, an air which I had picked up at one of the theatres.

When I had got a couple of hundred yards away from the Dragon Volant, my minstrelsy totally ceased; and I turned about, and glanced sharply down the road, that looked as white as hoarfrost under the moon, and saw the gable of the old inn, and a window, partly concealed by the foliage, with a dusky light shining from it.

No sound of footstep was stirring; no sign of human figure in sight. I consulted my watch, which the light was sufficiently strong to enable me to do. It now wanted but eight minutes of the appointed hour. A thick mantle of ivy at this point covered the wall and rose in a clustering head at top.

It afforded me facilities for scaling the wall, and a partial screen for my operations if any eye should chance to be looking that way. And now it was done. I was in the park of the Château de la Carque, as nefarious a poacher as ever trespassed on the grounds of unsuspicious lord!

Before me rose the appointed grove, which looked as black as a clump of gigantic hearse plumes. It seemed to tower higher and higher at every step; and cast a broader and blacker shadow toward my feet. On I marched, and was glad when I plunged into the shadow which concealed me. Now I was among the grand old lime and chestnut trees – my heart beat fast with expectation.

This grove opened, a little, near the middle; and, in the space thus cleared, there stood with a surrounding flight of steps a small Greek temple or shrine, with a statue in the centre. It was built of white marble with fluted Corinthian columns, and the crevices were tufted with grass; moss had shown itself on pedestal and cornice, and signs of long neglect and decay were apparent in its discoloured and weather-worn marble. A few feet in front of the steps a fountain, fed from the great ponds at the other side of the château, was making a constant tinkle and plashing in a wide marble basin, and the jet of water glimmered like a shower of diamonds in the broken moonlight. The very neglect and half-ruinous state of all this made it only the prettier, as well as sadder. I was too intently watching for the arrival of the lady, in the direction of the château, to study these things; but the half-noted effect of them was romantic, and suggested somehow the grotto and the fountain, and the apparition of Egeria.

As I watched a voice spoke to me, a little behind my left shoulder. I turned, almost with a start, and the masque, in the costume of Mademoiselle de la Vallière, stood there.

“The Countess will be here presently,” she said. The lady stood upon the open space, and the moonlight fell unbroken upon her. Nothing could be more becoming; her figure looked more graceful and elegant than ever. “In the meantime I shall tell you some peculiarities of her situation. She is unhappy; miserable in an ill-assorted marriage, with a jealous tyrant who now would constrain her to sell her diamonds, which are—”

“Worth thirty thousand pounds sterling. I heard all that from a friend. Can I aid the Countess in her unequal struggle? Say but how the greater the danger or the sacrifice, the happier will it make me. Can I aid her?”

“If you despise a danger – which, yet, is not a danger; if you despise, as she does, the tyrannical canons of the world; and if you are chivalrous enough to devote yourself to a lady’s cause, with no reward but her poor gratitude; if you can do these things you can aid her, and earn a foremost place, not in her gratitude only, but in her friendship.”

At those words the lady in the mask turned away and seemed to weep.

I vowed myself the willing slave of the Countess. “But,” I added, “you told me she would soon be here.”

“That is, if nothing unforeseen should happen; but with the eye of the Count de St Alyre in the house, and open, it is seldom safe to stir.”

“Does she wish to see me?” I asked, with a tender hesitation.

“First, say have you really thought of her, more than once, since the adventure of the Belle Étoile?”

“She never leaves my thoughts; day and night her beautiful eyes haunt me; her sweet voice is always in my ear.

“Mine is said to resemble hers,” said the mask.

“So it does,” I answered. “But it is only a resemblance.”

“Oh! then mine is better?”

“Pardon me, Mademoiselle, I did not say that. Yours is a sweet voice, but I fancy a little higher.”

“A little shriller, you would say,” answered the De la Vallière, I fancied a good deal vexed.

“No, not shriller: your voice is not shrill, it is beautifully sweet; but not so pathetically sweet as hers.”

“That is prejudice, Monsieur; it is not true.”

I bowed; I could not contradict a lady.

“I see, Monsieur, you laugh at me; you think me vain, because I claim in some points to be equal to the Countess de St Alyre. I challenge you to say, my hand, at least, is less beautiful than hers.” As she thus spoke she drew her glove off, and extended her hand, back upward, in the moonlight.

The lady seemed really nettled. It was undignified and irritating; for in this uninteresting competition the precious moments were flying, and my interview leading apparently to nothing.

“You will admit, then, that my hand is as beautiful as hers?”

“I cannot admit it. Mademoiselle,” said I, with the honesty of irritation. “I will not enter into comparisons, but the Countess de St Alyre is, in all respects, the most beautiful lady I ever beheld.”

The masque laughed coldly, and then, more and more softly, said, with a sigh, “I will prove all I say.” And as she spoke she removed the mask: and the Countess de St Alyre, smiling, confused, bashful, more beautiful than ever, stood before me!

“Good Heavens!” I exclaimed. “How monstrously stupid I have been. And it was to Madame la Comtesse that I spoke for so long in the salon!” I gazed on her in silence. And with a low sweet laugh of good nature she extended her hand. I took it and carried it to my lips.

“No, you must not do that,” she said quietly, “we are not old enough friends yet. I find, although you were mistaken, that you do remember the Countess of the Belle Étoile, and that you are a champion true and fearless. Had you yielded to the claims just now pressed upon you by the rivalry of Mademoiselle de la Valière, in her mask, the Countess de St Alyre should never have trusted or seen you more. I now am sure that you are true, as well as brave. You now know that I have not forgotten you; and, also, that if you would risk your life for me, I, too, would brave some danger, rather than lose my friend forever. I have but a few moments more. Will you come here again tomorrow night, at a quarter past eleven? I will be here at that moment; you must exercise the most scrupulous care to prevent suspicion that you have come here, Monsieur. You owe that to me.”

She spoke these last words with the most solemn entreaty.

I vowed again and again that I would die rather than permit the least rashness to endanger the secret which made all the interest and value of my life.

She was looking, I thought, more and more beautiful every moment. My enthusiasm expanded in proportion.

“You must come tomorrow night by a different route,” she said; “and if you come again, we can change it once more. At the other side of the château there is a little churchyard, with a ruined chapel. The neighbours are afraid to pass it by night. The road is deserted there, and a stile opens a way into these grounds. Cross it and you can find a covert of thickets, to within fifty steps of this spot.”

I promised, of course, to observe her instructions implicitly.

“I have lived for more than a year in an agony of irresolution. I have decided at last. I have lived a melancholy life; a lonelier life than is passed in the cloister. I have had no one to confide in; no one to advise me; no one to save me from the horrors of my existence. I have found a brave and prompt friend at last. Shall I ever forget the heroic tableau of the hall of the Belle Étoile? Have you – have you really kept the rose I gave you, as we parted? Yes – you swear it. You need not; I trust you. Richard, how often have I in solitude repeated your name, learned from my servant. Richard, my hero! Oh! Richard! Oh, my king! I love you!”

I would have folded her to my heart – thrown myself at her feet. But this beautiful and – shall I say it – inconsistent woman repelled me.

“No, we must not waste our moments in extravagances. Understand my case. There is no such thing as indifference in the married state. Not to love one’s husband,” she continued, “is to hate him. The Count, ridiculous in all else, is formidable in his jealousy. In mercy, then, to me, observe caution. Affect to all you speak to, the most complete ignorance of all the people in the Château de la Carque; and, if anyone in your presence mentions the Count or Countess de St Alyre, be sure you say you never saw either. I shall have more to say to you tomorrow night. I have reasons that I cannot now explain, for all I do, and all I postpone. Farewell. Go! Leave me.”

She waved me back, peremptorily. I echoed her “farewell,” and obeyed.

This interview had not lasted, I think, more than ten minutes. I scaled the park wall again, and reached the Dragon Volant before its doors were closed.

I lay awake in my bed, in a fever of elation. I saw, till the dawn broke, and chased the vision, the beautiful Countess de St Alyre, always in the dark, before me.

CHAPTER XVII

The Tenant of the Palanquin

The Marquis called on me next day. My late breakfast was still upon the table. He had come, he said, to ask a favour. An accident had happened to his carriage in the crowd on leaving the ball, and he begged, if I were going into Paris, a seat in mine. I was going in, and was extremely glad of his company. He came with me to my hotel; we went up to my rooms. I was surprised to see a man seated in an easy chair, with his back towards us, reading a newspaper. He rose. It was the Count de St Alyre, his gold spectacles on his nose; his black wig, in oily curls, lying close to his narrow head, and showing like carved ebony over a repulsive visage of boxwood. His black muffler had been pulled down. His right arm was in a sling. I don’t know whether there was anything unusual in his countenance that day, or whether it was but the effect of prejudice arising from all I had heard in my mysterious interview in his park, but I thought his countenance was more strikingly forbidding than I had seen it before.

I was not callous enough in the ways of sin to meet this man, injured at least in intent, thus suddenly, without a momentary disturbance.

He smiled.

“I called, Monsieur Beckett, in the hope of finding you here,” he croaked, “and I meditated, I fear, taking a great liberty, but my friend the Marquis d’Harmonville, on whom I have perhaps some claim, will perhaps give me the assistance I require so much.”

“With great pleasure,” said the Marquis, “but not till after six o’clock. I must go this moment to a meeting of three or four people whom I cannot disappoint, and I know, perfectly, we cannot break up earlier.”

“What am I to do?” exclaimed the Count, “an hour would have done it all. Was ever contre-temps so unlucky?”

“I’ll give you an hour, with pleasure,” said I.

“How very good of you, Monsieur, I hardly dare to hope it. The business, for so gay and charming a man as Monsieur Beckett, is a little funeste. Pray read this note which reached me this morning.”

It certainly was not cheerful. It was a note stating that the body of his, the Count’s cousin, Monsieur de St Amand, who had died at his house, the Château Clery, had been, in accordance with his written directions, sent for burial at Père la Chaise, and, with the permission of the Count de St Alyre, would reach his house (the Château de la Carque) at about ten o’clock on the night following, to be conveyed thence in a hearse, with any member of the family who might wish to attend the obsequies.

“I did not see the poor gentleman twice in my life,” said the Count, “but this office, as he has no other kinsman, disagreeable as it is, I could scarcely decline, and so I want to attend at the office to have the book signed, and the order entered. But here is another misery. By ill luck I have sprained my thumb, and can’t sign my name for a week to come. However, one name answers as well as another. Yours as well as mine. And as you are so good as to come with me, all will go right.”

Away we drove. The Count gave me a memorandum of the Christian and surnames of the deceased, his age, the complaint he died of, and the usual particulars; also a note of the exact position in which a grave, the dimensions of which were described, of the ordinary simple kind, was to be dug, between two vaults belonging to the family of St Amand. The funeral, it was stated, would arrive at half-past one o’clock a.m. (the next night but one); and he handed me the money, with extra fees, for a burial by night. It was a good deal; and I asked him, as he entrusted the whole affair to me, in whose name I should take the receipt.

“Not in mine, my good friend. They wanted me to become an executor, which I, yesterday, wrote to decline; and I am informed that if the receipt were in my name it would constitute me an executor in the eye of the law, and fix me in that position. Take it, pray, if you have no objection, in your own name.”

This, accordingly, I did.

You will see, by-and-by, why I am obliged to mention all these particulars.

The Count, meanwhile, was leaning back in the carriage, with his black silk muffler up to his nose, and his hat shading his eyes, while he dozed in his corner; in which state I found him on my return.

Paris had lost its charm for me. I hurried through the little business I had to do, longed once more for my quiet room in the Dragon Volant, the melancholy woods of the Château de la Carque, and the tumultuous and thrilling influence of proximity to the object of my wild but wicked romance.

I was delayed some time by my stockbroker. I had a very large sum, as I told you, at my banker’s, uninvested. I cared very little for a few day’s interest – very little for the entire sum, compared with the image that occupied my thoughts, and beckoned me with a white arm, through the dark, toward the spreading lime trees and chestnuts of the Château de la Carque. But I had fixed this day to meet him, and was relieved when he told me that I had better let it lie in my banker’s hands for a few days longer, as the funds would certainly fall immediately. This accident, too, was not without its immediate bearing on my subsequent adventures.

When I reached the Dragon Volant, I found, in my sitting-room, a good deal to my chagrin, my two guests, whom I had quite forgotten. I inwardly cursed my own stupidity for having embarrassed myself with their agreeable society. It could not be helped now, however, and a word to the waiters put all things in train for dinner.

Tom Whistlewick was in great force; and he commenced almost immediately with a very odd story.

He told me that not only Versailles, but all Paris was in a ferment, in consequence of a revolting, and all but sacrilegious practical joke, played of on the night before.

The pagoda, as he persisted in calling the palanquin, had been left standing on the spot where we last saw it. Neither conjuror, nor usher, nor bearers had ever returned. When the ball closed, and the company at length retired, the servants who attended to put out the lights, and secure the doors, found it still there.

It was determined, however, to let it stand where it was until next morning, by which time, it was conjectured, its owners would send messengers to remove it.

None arrived. The servants were then ordered to take it away; and its extraordinary weight, for the first time, reminded them of its forgotten human occupant. Its door was forced; and, judge what was their disgust, when they discovered, not a living man, but a corpse! Three or four days must have passed since the death of the burly man in the Chinese tunic and painted cap. Some people thought it was a trick designed to insult the Allies, in whose honour the ball was got up. Others were of opinion that it was nothing worse than a daring and cynical jocularity which, shocking as it was, might yet be forgiven to the high spirits and irrepressible buffoonery of youth. Others, again, fewer in number, and mystically given, insisted that the corpse was bona fide necessary to the exhibition, and that the disclosures and allusions which had astonished so many people were distinctly due to necromancy.

“The matter, however, is now in the hands of the police,” observed Monsieur Carmaignac, “and we are not the body they were two or three months ago, if the offenders against propriety and public feeling are not traced and convicted, unless, indeed, they have been a great deal more cunning than such fools generally are.”

I was thinking within myself how utterly inexplicable was my colloquy with the conjuror, so cavalierly dismissed by Monsieur Carmaignac as a “fool”; and the more I thought the more marvellous it seemed.

“It certainly was an original joke, though not a very clear one,” said Whistlewick.

“Not even original,” said Carmaignac. “Very nearly the same thing was done, a hundred years ago or more, at a state ball in Paris; and the rascals who played the trick were never found out.”

In this Monsieur Carmaignac, as I afterwards discovered, spoke truly; for, among my books of French anecdote and memoirs, the very incident is marked by my own hand.

While we were thus talking the waiter told us that dinner was served, and we withdrew accordingly; my guests more than making amends for my comparative taciturnity.

CHAPTER XVIII

The Churchyard

Our dinner was really good, so were the wines; better, perhaps, at this out-of-the-way inn, than at some of the more pretentious hotels in Paris. The moral effect of a really good dinner is immense – we all felt it. The serenity and good nature that follow are more solid and comfortable than the tumultuous benevolences of Bacchus.

My friends were happy, therefore, and very chatty; which latter relieved me of the trouble of talking, and prompted them to entertain me and one another incessantly with agreeable stories and conversation, of which, until suddenly a subject emerged which interested me powerfully, I confess, so much were my thoughts engaged elsewhere, I heard next to nothing.

“Yes,” said Carmaignac, continuing a conversation which had escaped me, “there was another case, beside that Russian nobleman, odder still. I remembered it this morning, but cannot recall the name. He was a tenant of the very same room. By-the-by, Monsieur, might it not be as well,” he added, turning to me with a laugh, half joke whole earnest, as they say, “if you were to get into another apartment, now that the house is no longer crowded? that is, if you mean to make any stay here.”

“A thousand thanks! no. I’m thinking of changing my hotel; and I can run into town so easily at night; and though I stay here for this night at least, I don’t expect to vanish like those others. But you say there is another adventure, of the same kind, connected with the same room. Do let us hear it. But take some wine first.”

The story he told was curious.

“It happened,” said Carmaignac, “as well as I recollect, before either of the other cases. A French gentleman – I wish I could remember his name – the son of a merchant, came to this inn (the Dragon Volant), and was put by the landlord into the same room of which we have been speaking. Your apartment, Monsieur. He was by no means young – past forty – and very far from good-looking. The people here said that he was the ugliest man, and the most good-natured, that ever lived. He played on the fiddle, sang, and wrote poetry. His habits were odd and desultory. He would sometimes sit all day in his room writing, singing, and fiddling, and go out at night for a walk. An eccentric man! He was by no means a millionaire, but he had a modicum bonum, you understand – a trifle more than half a million of francs. He consulted his stockbroker about investing this money in foreign stocks, and drew the entire sum from his banker. You now have the situation of affairs when the catastrophe occurred.”

“Pray fill your glass,” I said.

“Dutch courage, Monsieur, to face the catastrophe!” said Whistlewick, filling his own.

“Now, that was the last that ever was heard of his money,” resumed Carmaignac. “You shall hear about himself. The night after this financial operation he was seized with a poetic frenzy: he sent for the then landlord of this house, and told him that he long meditated an epic, and meant to commence that night, and that he was on no account to be disturbed until nine o’clock in the morning. He had two pairs of wax candles, a little cold supper on a side-table, his desk open, paper enough upon it to contain the entire Henriade, and a proportionate store of pens and ink.

“Seated at this desk he was seen by the waiter who brought him a cup of coffee at nine o’clock, at which time the intruder said he was writing fast enough to set fire to the paper – that was his phrase; he did not look up, he appeared too much engrossed. But when the waiter came back, half an hour afterwards, the door was locked; and the poet, from within, answered that he must not be disturbed.

“Away went the garçon, and next morning at nine o’clock knocked at his door and, receiving no answer, looked through the keyhole; the lights were still burning, the window-shutters were closed as he had left them; he renewed his knocking, knocked louder, no answer came. He reported this continued and alarming silence to the innkeeper, who, finding that his guest had not left his key in the lock, succeeded in finding another that opened it. The candles were just giving up the ghost in their sockets, but there was light enough to ascertain that the tenant of the room was gone! The bed had not been disturbed; the window-shutter was barred. He must have let himself out, and, locking the door on the outside, put the key in his pocket, and so made his way out of the house. Here, however, was another difficulty: the Dragon Volant shut its doors and made all fast at twelve o’clock; after that hour no one could leave the house, except by obtaining the key and letting himself out, and of necessity leaving the door unsecured, or else by collusion and aid of some person in the house.

“Now it happened that, some time after the doors were secured, at half-past twelve, a servant who had not been apprised of his order to be left undisturbed, seeing a light shine through the keyhole, knocked at the door to inquire whether the poet wanted anything. He was very little obliged to his disturber, and dismissed him with a renewed charge that he was not to be interrupted again during the night. This incident established the fact that he was in the house after the doors had been locked and barred. The inn-keeper himself kept the keys, and swore that he found them hung on the wall above his head, in his bed, in their usual place, in the morning; and that nobody could have taken them away without awakening him. That was all we could discover. The Count de St Alyre, to whom this house belongs, was very active and very much chagrined. But nothing was discovered.”

“And nothing heard since of the epic poet?” I asked.

“Nothing – not the slightest clue – he never turned up again. I suppose he is dead; if he is not, he must have got into some devilish bad scrape, of which we have heard nothing, that compelled him to abscond with all the secrecy and expedition in his power. All that we know for certain is that, having occupied the room in which you sleep, he vanished, nobody ever knew how, and never was heard of since.”

“You have now mentioned three cases,” I said, “and all from the same room.”

“Three. Yes, all equally unintelligible. When men are murdered, the great and immediate difficulty the assassins encounter is how to conceal the body.’ It is very hard to believe that three persons should have been consecutively murdered in the same room, and their bodies so effectually disposed of that no trace of them was ever discovered.”

From this we passed to other topics, and the grave Monsieur Carmaignac amused us with a perfectly prodigious collection of scandalous anecdote, which his opportunities in the police department had enabled him to accumulate.

My guests happily had engagements in Paris, and left me about ten.

I went up to my room, and looked out upon the grounds of the Château de la Carque. The moonlight was broken by clouds, and the view of the park in this desultory light acquired a melancholy and fantastic character.

The strange anecdotes recounted of the room in which I stood by Monsieur Carmaignac returned vaguely upon my mind, drowning in sudden shadows the gaiety of the more frivolous stories with which he had followed them. I looked round me on the room that lay in ominous gloom, with an almost disagreeable sensation. I took my pistols now with an undefined apprehension that they might be really needed before my return tonight. This feeling, be it understood, in no wise chilled my ardour. Never had my enthusiasm mounted higher. My adventure absorbed and carried me away; but it added a strange and stern excitement to the expedition.

I loitered for a time in my room. I had ascertained the exact point at which the little churchyard lay. It was about a mile away. I did not wish to reach it earlier than necessary.

I stole quietly out and sauntered along the road to my left, and thence entered a narrower track, still to my left, which, skirting the park wall and describing a circuitous route all the way, under grand old trees, passes the ancient cemetery. That cemetery is embowered in trees and occupies little more than half an acre of ground to the left of the road, interposing between it and the park of the Château de la Carque.

Here, at this haunted spot, I paused and listened. The place was utterly silent. A thick cloud had darkened the moon, so that I could distinguish little more than the outlines of near objects, and that vaguely enough; and sometimes, as it were, floating in black fog, the white surface of a tombstone emerged.

Among the forms that met my eye against the iron-grey of the horizon, were some of those shrubs or trees that grow like our junipers, some six feet high, in form like a miniature poplar, with the darker foliage of the yew. I do not know the name of the plant, but I have often seen it in such funereal places.

Knowing that I was a little too early, I sat down upon the edge of a tombstone to wait, as, for aught I knew, the beautiful Countess might have wise reasons for not caring that I should enter the grounds of the château earlier than she had appointed. In the listless state induced by waiting, I sat there, with my eyes on the object straight before me, which chanced to be that faint black outline I have described. It was right before me, about half-a-dozen steps away.

The moon now began to escape from under the skirt of the cloud that had hid her face for so long; and, as the light gradually improved, the tree on which I had been lazily staring began to take a new shape. It was no longer a tree, but a man standing motionless. Brighter and brighter grew the moonlight, clearer and clearer the image became, and at last stood out perfectly distinctly. It was Colonel Gaillarde. Luckily, he was not looking toward me. I could only see him in profile; but there was no mistaking the white moustache, the farouche visage, and the gaunt six-foot stature. There he was, his shoulder toward me, listening and watching, plainly, for some signal or person expected, straight in front of him.

If he were, by chance, to turn his eyes in my direction, I knew that I must reckon upon an instantaneous renewal of the combat only commenced in the hall of Belle Étoile. In any case, could malignant fortune have posted, at this place and hour, a more dangerous watcher? What ecstasy to him, by a single discovery, to hit me so hard, and blast the Countess de St Alyre, whom he seemed to hate.

He raised his arm; he whistled softly; I heard an answering whistle as low; and, to my relief, the Colonel advanced in the direction of this sound, widening the distance between us at every step; and immediately I heard talking, but in a low and cautious key. I recognized, I thought, even so, the peculiar voice of Gaillarde. I stole softly forward in the direction in which those sounds were audible. In doing so, I had, of course, to use the extremest caution.

I thought I saw a hat above a jagged piece of ruined wall, and then a second – yes, I saw two hats conversing; the voices came from under them. They moved off, not in the direction of the park, but of the road, and I lay along the grass, peeping over a grave, as a skirmisher might observing the enemy. One after the other, the figures emerged full into view as they mounted the stile at the roadside. The Colonel, who was last, stood on the wall for awhile, looking about him, and then jumped down on the road. I heard their steps and talk as they moved away together, with their backs toward me, in the direction which led them farther and farther from the Dragon Volant.

I waited until these sounds were quite lost in distance before I entered the park. I followed the instructions I had received from the Countess de St Alyre, and made my way among brushwood and thickets to the point nearest the ruinous temple, and crossed the short intervening space of open ground rapidly.

I was now once more under the gigantic boughs of the old lime and chestnut trees; softly, and with a heart throbbing fast, I approached the little structure.

The moon was now shining steadily, pouring down its radiance on the soft foliage, and here and there mottling the verdure under my feet.

I reached the steps; I was among its worn marble shafts. She was not there, nor in the inner sanctuary, the arched windows of which were screened almost entirely by masses of ivy. The lady had not yet arrived.

CHAPTER XIX

The Key

I stood now upon the steps, watching and listening. In a minute or two I heard the crackle of withered sticks trod upon, and, looking in the direction, I saw a figure approaching among the trees, wrapped in a mantle.

I advanced eagerly. It was the Countess. She did not speak, but gave me her hand, and I led her to the scene of our last interview. She repressed the ardour of my impassioned greeting with a gentle but peremptory firmness. She removed her hood, shook back her beautiful hair, and, gazing on me with sad and glowing eyes, sighed deeply. Some awful thought seemed to weigh upon her,

“Richard, I must speak plainly. The crisis of my life has come. I am sure you would defend me. I think you pity me; perhaps you even love me.”

At these words I became eloquent, as young madmen in my plight do. She silenced me, however, with the same melancholy firmness.

“Listen, dear friend, and then say whether you can aid me. How madly I am trusting you; and yet my heart tells me how wisely! To meet you here as I do – what insanity it seems! How poorly you must think of me! But when you know all, you will judge me fairly. Without your aid I cannot accomplish my purpose. That purpose unaccomplished, I must die. I am chained to a man whom I despise – whom I abhor. I have resolved to fly. I have jewels, principally diamonds, for which I am offered thirty thousand pounds of your English money. They are my separate property by my marriage settlement; I will take them with me. You are a judge, no doubt, of jewels. I was counting mine when the hour came, and brought this in my hand to show you. Look.”

“It is magnificent!” I exclaimed, as a collar of diamonds twinkled and flashed in the moonlight, suspended from her pretty fingers. I thought, even at that tragic moment, that she prolonged the show, with a feminine delight in these brilliant toys.

“Yes,” she said, “I shall part with them all. I will turn them into money and break, for ever, the unnatural and wicked bonds that tied me, in the name of a sacrament, to a tyrant. A man young, handsome, generous, brave, as you, can hardly be rich. Richard, you say you love me; you shall share all this with me. We will fly together to Switzerland; we will evade pursuit; in powerful friends will intervene and arrange a separation, and shall, at length, be happy and reward my hero.”

You may suppose the style, florid and vehement, in which poured forth my gratitude, vowed the devotion of my life, and placed myself absolutely at her disposal.

“Tomorrow night,” she said, “my husband will attend the remains of his cousin, Monsieur de St Amand, to Père la Chaise. The hearse, he says, will leave this at half-past nine. You must be here, where we stand, at nine o’clock.”

I promised punctual obedience.

“I will not meet you here; but you see a red light in the window of the tower at that angle of the château?

I assented.

“I placed it there, that, tomorrow night, when it comes, you may recognize it. So soon as that rose-coloured light appears at that window, it will be a signal to you that the funeral has left the château, and that you may approach safely. Come, then, to that window; I will open it and admit you. Five minutes after a travelling-carriage, with four horses, shall stand ready in the porte-cochère. I will place my diamonds in your hands; and so soon as we enter the carriage our flight commences. We shall have at least five hours’ start; and with energy, stratagem, and resource, I fear nothing. Are you ready to undertake all this for my sake?”

Again I vowed myself her slave.

“My only difficulty,” she said, “is how we shall quickly enough convert my diamonds into money; I dare not remove them while my husband is in the house.”

Here was the opportunity I wished for. I now told her that I had in my banker’s hands no less a sum than thirty thousand pounds, with which, in the shape of gold and notes, I should come furnished, and thus the risk and loss of disposing of her diamonds in too much haste would be avoided.

“Good Heaven!” she exclaimed, with a kind of disappointment. “You are rich, then? and I have lost the felicity of making my generous friend more happy. Be it so! since so it must be. Let us contribute, each, in equal shares, to our common fund. Bring you, your money; I, my jewels. There is a happiness to me even in mingling my resources with yours.”

On this there followed a romantic colloquy, all poetry and passion, such as I should in vain endeavour to reproduce. Then came a very special instruction.

“I have come provided, too, with a key, the use of which I must explain.”

It was a double key – a long, slender stem, with a key at each end – one about the size which opens an ordinary room door; the other as small, almost, as the key of a dressing-case.

“You cannot employ too much caution tomorrow night. An interruption would murder all my hopes. I have learned that you occupy the haunted room in the Dragon Volant. It is the very room I would have wished you in. I will tell you why – there is a story of a man who, having shut himself up in that room one night, disappeared before morning. The truth is, he wanted, I believe, to escape from creditors; and the host of the Dragon Volant at that time, being a rogue, aided him in absconding. My husband investigated the matter, and discovered how his escape was made. It was by means of this key. Here is a memorandum and a plan describing how they are to be applied. I have taken them from the Count’s escritoire. And now, once more I must leave to your ingenuity how to mystify the people at the Dragon Volant. Be sure you try the keys first, to see that the locks turn freely. I will have my jewels ready. You, whatever we divide, had better bring your money, because it may be many months before you can revisit Paris, or disclose our place of residence to anyone: and our passports-arrange all that; in what names, and whither, you please. And now, dear Richard” (she leaned her arm fondly on my shoulder, and looked with ineffable passion in my eyes, with her other hand clasped in mine), “my very life is in your hands; I have staked all on your fidelity.”

As she spoke the last word, she, on a sudden, grew deadly pale, and gasped, “Good God! who is here?”

At the same moment she receded through the door in the marble screen, close to which she stood, and behind which was a small roofless chamber, as small as the shrine, the window of which was darkened by a clustering mass of ivy so dense that hardly a gleam of light came through the leaves.

I stood upon the threshold which she had just crossed, looking in the direction in which she had thrown that one terrified glance. No wonder she was frightened. Quite close upon us, not twenty yards away, and approaching at a quick step, very distinctly lighted by the moon, Colonel Gaillarde and his companion were coming. The shadow of the cornice and a piece of wall were upon me. Unconscious of this, I was expecting the moment when, with one of his frantic yells, he should spring forward to assail me.

I made a step backward, drew one of my pistols from my pocket, and cocked it. It was obvious he had not seen me.

I stood, with my finger on the trigger, determined to shoot him dead if he should attempt to enter the place where the Countess was. It would, no doubt, have been a murder; but, in my mind, I had no question or qualm about it. When once we engage in secret and guilty practices we are nearer other and greater crimes than we at all suspect.

“There’s the statue,” said the Colonel, in his brief discordant tones. “That’s the figure.”

“Alluded to in the stanzas?” inquired his companion.

“The very thing. We shall see more next time. Forward, Monsieur; let us march.” And, much to my relief, the gallant Colonel turned on his heel and marched through the trees, with his back toward the château, striding over the grass, as I quickly saw, to the park wall, which they crossed not far from the gables of the Dragon Volant.

I found the Countess trembling in no affected, but a very real terror. She would not hear of my accompanying her toward the château. But I told her that I would prevent the return of the mad Colonel; and upon that point, at least, that she need fear nothing. She quickly recovered, again bade me a fond and lingering good-night, and left me, gazing after her, with the key in my hand, and such a phantasmagoria floating in my brain as amounted very nearly to madness.

There was I, ready to brave all dangers, all right and reason, plunge into murder itself, on the first summons, and entangle myself in consequences inextricable and horrible (what cared I?) for a woman of whom I knew nothing, but that she was beautiful and reckless!

I have often thanked heaven for its mercy in conducting me through the labyrinths in which I had all but lost myself.

CHAPTER XX

A High-Cauld-Cap

I was now upon the road, within two or three hundred yards of the Dragon Volant. I had undertaken an adventure with a vengeance! And by way of prelude, there not improbably awaited me, at my inn, another encounter, perhaps, this time, not so lucky, with the grotesque sabreur.

I was glad I had my pistols. I certainly was bound by no law to allow a ruffian to cut me down, unresisting.

Stooping boughs from the old park, gigantic poplars on the other side, and the moonlight over all, made the narrow road to the inn door picturesque.

I could not think very clearly just now; events were succeeding one another so rapidly, and I, involved in the action of a drama so extravagant and guilty, hardly knew myself or believed my own story, as I slowly paced towards the still open door of the Flying Dragon. No sign of the Colonel, visible or audible, was there. In the hall I inquired. No gentleman had arrived at the inn for the last half hour. I looked into the public room. It was deserted. The clock struck twelve, and I heard the servant barring the great door. I took my candle. The lights in this rural hostelry were by this time out, and the house had the air of one that had settled to slumber for many hours. The cold moonlight streamed in at the window on the landing as I ascended the broad staircase; and I paused for a moment to look over the wooded grounds to the turreted château, to me, so full of interest. I bethought me, however, that prying eyes might read a meaning in this midnight gazing, and possibly the Count himself might, in his jealous mood, surmise a signal in this unwonted light in the stair-window of the Dragon Volant.

On opening my room door, with a little start, I met an extremely old woman with the longest face I ever saw; she had what used to be termed a high-cauld-cap on, the white border of which contrasted with her brown and yellow skin, and made her wrinkled face more ugly. She raised her curved shoulders, and looked up in my face, with eyes unnaturally black and bright.

“I have lighted a little wood, Monsieur, because the night is chill.”

I thanked her, but she did not go. She stood with her candle in her tremulous fingers.

“Excuse an old woman, Monsieur,” she said; “but what on earth can a young English milord, with all Paris at his feet, find to amuse him in the Dragon Volant?”

Had I been at the age of fairy tales, and in daily intercourse with the delightful Countess d’Aulnois, I should have seen in this withered apparition, the genius loci, the malignant fairy, at the stamp of whose foot the ill-fated tenants of this very room had, from time to time, vanished. I was past that, however; but the old woman’s dark eyes were fixed on mine with a steady meaning that plainly told me that my secret was known. I was embarrassed and alarmed; I never thought of asking her what business that was of hers.

“These old eyes saw you in the park of the château tonight.”

“I!” I began, with all the scornful surprise I could affect.

“It avails nothing, Monsieur; I know why you stay here; and I tell you to begone. Leave this house tomorrow morning, and never come again.”

She lifted her disengaged hand, as she looked at me with intense horror in her eyes.

“There is nothing on earth – I don’t know what you mean,” I answered; “and why should you care about me?”

“I don’t care about you, Monsieur – I care about the honour of an ancient family, whom I served in their happier days, when to be noble was to be honoured. But my words are thrown away, Monsieur; you are insolent. I will keep my secret, and you, yours; that is all. You will soon find it hard enough to divulge it.”

The old woman went slowly from the room and shut the door, before I had made up my mind to say anything. I was standing where she had left me, nearly five minutes later. The jealousy of Monsieur the Count, I assumed, appears to this old creature about the most terrible thing in creation. Whatever contempt I might entertain for the dangers which this old lady so darkly intimated, it was by no means pleasant, you may suppose, that a secret so dangerous should be so much as suspected by a stranger, and that stranger a partisan of the Count de St Alyre.

Ought I not, at all risks, to apprise the Countess, who had trusted me so generously, or, as she said herself, so madly, of the fact that our secret was, at least, suspected by another? But was there not greater danger in attempting to communicate? What did the beldame mean by saying, “Keep your secret, and I’ll keep mine”?

I had a thousand distracting questions before me. My progress seemed like a journey through the Spessart, where at every step some new goblin or monster starts from the ground or steps from behind a tree.

Peremptorily I dismissed these harassing and frightful doubts. I secured my door, sat myself down at my table and, with a candle at each side, placed before me the piece of vellum which contained the drawings and notes on which I was to rely for full instructions as to how to use the key.

When I had studied this for awhile I made my investigation. The angle of the room at the right side of the window was cut off by an oblique turn in the wainscot. I examined this carefully, and, on pressure, a small bit of the frame of the woodwork slid aside, and disclosed a keyhole. On removing my finger, it shot back to its place again, with a spring. So far I had interpreted my instructions successfully. A similar search, next the door, and directly under this, was rewarded by a like discovery. The small end of the key fitted this, as it had the upper keyhole; and now, with two or three hard jerks at the key, a door in the panel opened, showing a strip of the bare wall and a narrow, arched doorway, piercing the thickness of the wall; and within which I saw a screw staircase of stone.

Candle in hand I stepped in. I do not know whether the quality of air, long undisturbed, is peculiar; to me it has always seemed so, and the damp smell of the old masonry hung in this atmosphere. My candle faintly lighted the bare stone wall that enclosed the stair, the foot of which I could not see. Down I went, and a few turns brought me to the stone floor. Here was another door, of the simple, old, oak kind, deep sunk in the thickness of the wall. The large end of the key fitted this. The lock was stiff; I set the candle down upon the stair, and applied both hands; it turned with difficulty and, as it revolved, uttered a shriek that alarmed me for my secret.

For some minutes I did not move. In a little time, however, I took courage, and opened the door. The night air floating in puffed out the candle. There was a thicket of holly and underbrush, as dense as a jungle, close about the door. I should have been in pitch-darkness, were it not that through the topmost leaves there twinkled, here and there, a glimmer of moonshine.

Softly, lest anyone should have opened his window at the sound of the rusty bolt, I struggled through this till I gained a view of the open grounds. Here I found that the brushwood spread a good way up the park, uniting with the wood that approached the little temple I have described.

A general could not have chosen a more effectually-covered approach from the Dragon Volant to the trysting-place where hitherto I had conferred with the idol of my lawless adoration.

Looking back upon the old inn I discovered that the stair I descended was enclosed in one of those slender turrets that decorate such buildings. It was placed at that angle which corresponded with the part of the panelling of my room indicated in the plan I had been studying.

Thoroughly satisfied with my experiment I made my way back to the door with some little difficulty, remounted to my room, locked my secret door again; kissed the mysterious key that her hand had pressed that night, and placed it under my pillow, upon which, very soon after, my giddy head was laid, not, for some time, to sleep soundly.

CHAPTER XXI

I See Three Men in a Mirror

I awoke very early next morning, and was too excited to sleep again. As soon as I could, without exciting remark, I saw my host. I told him that I was going into town that night, and thence to – , where I had to see some people on business, and requested him to mention my being there to any friend who might call. That I expected to be back in about a week, and that in the meantime my servant, St Clair, would keep the key of my room and look after my things.

Having prepared this mystification for my landlord, I drove into Paris, and there transacted the financial part of the affair. The problem was to reduce my balance, nearly thirty thousand pounds, to a shape in which it would be not only easily portable, but available, wherever I might go, without involving correspondence, or any other incident which would disclose my place of residence for the time being. All these points were as nearly provided for as, they could be. I need not trouble you about my arrangements for passports. It is enough to say that the point I selected for our flight was, in the spirit of romance, one of the most beautiful and sequestered nooks in Switzerland.

Luggage, I should start with none. The first considerable town we reached next morning, would supply an extemporized wardrobe. It was now two o’clock; only two! How on earth was I to dispose of the remainder of the day?

I had not yet seen the cathedral of Notre Dame, and thither I drove. I spent an hour or more there; and then to the Conciergerie, the Palais de Justice, and the beautiful Sainte Chapelle. Still there remained some time to get rid of, and I strolled into the narrow streets adjoining the cathedral. I recollect seeing, in one of them, an old house with a mural inscription stating that it had been the residence of Canon Fulbert, the uncle of Abelard’s Eloise. I don’t know whether these curious old streets, in which I observed fragments of ancient Gothic churches fitted up as warehouses, are still extant. I lighted, among other dingy and eccentric shops, upon one that seemed that of a broker of all sorts of old decorations, armour, china, furniture. I entered the shop; it was dark, dusty, and low. The proprietor was busy scouring a piece of inlaid armour, and allowed me to poke about his shop, and examine the curious things accumulated there, just as I pleased. Gradually I made my way to the farther end of it, where there was but one window with many panes, each with a bull’s eye in it, and in the dirtiest Possible state. When I reached this window, I turned about, and in a recess, standing at right angles with the side wall of the shop, was a large mirror in an old-fashioned dingy frame. Reflected in this I saw what in old houses I have heard termed an “alcove,” in which, among lumber and various dusty articles hanging on the wall, there stood a table, at which three persons were seated, as it seemed to me, in earnest conversation. Two of these persons I instantly recognized; one was Colonel Gaillarde, the other was the Marquis d’Harmonville. The third, who was fiddling with a pen, was a lean, pale man, pitted with the smallpox, with lank black hair, and about as mean-looking a person as I had ever seen in my life. The Marquis looked up, and his glance was instantaneously followed by his two companions. For a moment I hesitated what to do. But it was plain that I was not recognized, as indeed I could hardly have been, the light from the window being behind me, and the portion of the shop immediately before me being very dark indeed.

Perceiving this, I had presence of mind to affect being entirely engrossed by the objects before me, and strolled slowly down the shop again. I paused for a moment to hear whether I was followed, and was relieved when I heard no step. You may be sure I did not waste more time in that shop, where I had just made a discovery so curious and so unexpected.

It was no business of mine to inquire what brought Colonel Gaillarde and the Marquis together, in so shabby and even dirty a place, or who the mean person, biting the feather end of his pen, might be. Such employments as the Marquis had accepted sometimes make strange bedfellows.

I was glad to get away, and just as the sun set I had reached the steps of the Dragon Volant, and dismissed the vehicle in which I arrived, carrying in my hand a strong box, of marvellously small dimensions considering all it contained, strapped in a leather cover which disguised its real character.

When I got to my room I summoned St Clair. I told him nearly the same story I had already told my host. I gave him fifty pounds, with orders to expend whatever was necessary on himself, and in payment for my rooms till my return. I then ate a slight and hasty dinner. My eyes were often upon the solemn old clock over the chimney-piece, which was my sole accomplice in keeping tryst in this iniquitous venture. The sky favoured my design, and darkened all things with a sea of clouds.

The innkeeper met me in the hall, to ask whether I should want a vehicle to Paris? I was prepared for this question, and instantly answered that I meant to walk to Versailles and take a carriage there. I called St Clair.

“Go,” said I, “and drink a bottle of wine with your friends. I shall call you if I should want anything; in the meantime, here is the key to my room; I shall be writing some notes, so don’t allow anyone to disturb me for at least half an hour. At the end of that time you will probably find that I have left this for Versailles; and should you not find me in the room, you may take that for granted; and you take charge of everything, and lock the door, you understand?”

St Clair took his leave, wishing me all happiness, and no doubt promising himself some little amusement with my money. With my candle in my hand, I hastened upstairs. It wanted now but five minutes to the appointed time. I do not think there is anything of the coward in my nature; but I confess, as the crisis approached, I felt something of the suspense and awe of a soldier going into action. Would I have receded? Not for all this earth could offer.

I bolted my door, put on my greatcoat, and placed my pistols one in each pocket. I now applied my key to the secret locks; drew the wainscot door a little open, took my strong box under my arm, extinguished my candle, unbolted my door, listened at it for a few moments to be sure that no one was approaching, and then crossed the floor of my room swiftly, entered the secret door, and closed the spring lock after me. I was upon the screw-stair in total darkness, the key in my fingers. Thus far the undertaking was successful.

CHAPTER XXII

Rapture

Down the screw-stair I went in utter darkness; and having reached the stone floor I discerned the door and groped out the keyhole. With more caution, and less noise than upon the night before, I opened the door and stepped out into the thick brushwood. It was almost as dark in this jungle.

Having secured the door I slowly pushed my way through the bushes, which soon became less dense. Then, with more case, but still under thick cover, I pursued in the track of the wood, keeping near its edge.

At length, in the darkened air, about fifty yards away, the shafts of the marble temple rose like phantoms before me, seen through the trunks of the old trees. Everything favoured my enterprise. I had effectually mystified my servant and the people of the Dragon Volant, and so dark was the night, that even had I alarmed the suspicions of all the tenants of the inn, I might safely defy their united curiosity, though posted at every window of the house.

Through the trunks, over the roots of the old trees, I reached the appointed place of observation. I laid my treasure in its leathern case in the embrasure, and leaning my arms upon it, looked steadily in the direction of the château. The outline of the building was scarcely discernible, blending dimly, as it did, with the sky. No light in any window was visible. I was plainly to wait; but for how long?

Leaning on my box of treasure, gazing toward the massive shadow that represented the château, in the midst of my ardent and elated longings, there came upon me an odd thought, which you will think might well have struck me long before. It seemed on a sudden, as it came, that the darkness deepened, and a chill stole into the air around me.

Suppose I were to disappear finally, like those other men whose stories I had listened to! Had I not been at all the pains that mortal could to obliterate every trace of my real proceedings, and to mislead everyone to whom I spoke as to the direction in which I had gone?

This icy, snakelike thought stole through my mind, and was gone.

It was with me the full-blooded season of youth, conscious strength, rashness, passion, pursuit, the adventure! Here were a pair of double-barrelled pistols, four lives in my hands? What could possibly happen? The Count – except for the sake of my dulcinea, what was it to me whether the old coward whom I had seen, in an ague of terror before the brawling Colonel, interposed or not? I was assuming the worst that could happen. But with an ally so clever and courageous as my beautiful Countess, could any such misadventure befall? Bah! I laughed at all such fancies.

As I thus communed with myself, the signal light sprang up. He rose-coloured light, couleur de rose, emblem of sanguine hope and the dawn of a happy day.

Clear, soft, and steady, glowed the light from the window. The stone shafts showed black against it. Murmuring words of passionate love as I gazed upon the signal, I grasped my strong box under my arm, and with rapid strides approached the Château de la Carque. No sign of light or life, no human voice, no tread of foot, no bark of dog indicated a chance of interruption. A blind was down; and as I came close to the tall window, I found that half-a-dozen steps led up to it, and that a large lattice, answering for a door, lay open.

A shadow from within fell upon the blind; it was drawn aside, and as I ascended the steps, a soft voice murmured – “Richard, dearest Richard, come, oh! come! how I have longed for this moment!”

Never did she look so beautiful. My love rose to passionate enthusiasm. I only wished there were some real danger in the adventure worthy of such a creature. When the first tumultuous greeting was over, she made me sit beside her on a sofa. There we talked for a minute or two. She told me that the Count had gone, and was by that time more than a mile on his way, with the funeral, to Père la Chaise. Here were her diamonds. She exhibited, hastily, an open casket containing a profusion of the largest brilliants.

“What is this?” she asked.

“A box containing money to the amount of thirty thousand pounds,” I answered.

“What! all that money?” she exclaimed.

“Every sou.”

“Was it not unnecessary to bring so much, seeing all these?” she said, touching her diamonds. “It would have been kind of you to allow me to provide for both, for a time at least. It would have made me happier even than I am.”

“Dearest, generous angel!” Such was my extravagant declamation. “You forget that it may be necessary, for a long time, to observe silence as to where we are, and impossible to communicate safely with anyone.”

“You have then here this great sum – are you certain; have you counted it?”

“Yes, certainly; I received it today,” I answered, perhaps showing a little surprise in my face. “I counted it, of course, on drawing it from my bankers.”

“It makes me feel a little nervous, travelling with so much money; but these jewels make as great a danger; that can add but little to it. Place them side by side; you shall take off your greatcoat when we are ready to go, and with it manage to conceal these boxes. I should not like the drivers to suspect that we were conveying such a treasure. I must ask you now to close the curtains of that window, and bar the shutters.”

I had hardly done this when a knock was heard at the room door.

“I know who this is,” she said, in a whisper to me.

I saw that she was not alarmed. She went softly to the door, and a whispered conversation for a minute followed.

“My trusty maid, who is coming with us. She says we cannot safely go sooner than ten minutes. She is bringing some coffee to the next room.”

She opened the door and looked in.

“I must tell her not to take too much luggage. She is so odd! Don’t follow – stay where you are – it is better that she should not see you.”

She left the room with a gesture of caution.

A change had come over the manner of this beautiful woman. For the last few minutes a shadow had been stealing over her, an air of abstraction, a look bordering on suspicion. Why was she pale? Why had there come that dark look in her eyes? Why had her very voice become changed? Had anything gone suddenly wrong? Did some danger threaten?

This doubt, however, speedily quieted itself. If there had been anything of the kind, she would, of course, have told me. It was only natural that, as the crisis approached, she should become more and more nervous. She did not return quite so soon as I had expected. To a man in my situation absolute quietude is next to impossible. I moved restlessly about the room. It was a small one. There was a door at the other end. I opened it, rashly enough. I listened, it was perfectly silent. I was in an excited, eager state, and every faculty engrossed about what was coming, and in so far detached from the immediate present. I can’t account, in any other way, for my having done so many foolish things that night, for I was, naturally, by no means deficient in cunning. About the most stupid of those was, that instead of immediately closing that door, which I never ought to have opened, I actually took a candle and walked into the room.

There I made, quite unexpectedly, a rather startling discovery.

CHAPTER XXIII

A Cup of Coffee

The room was carpetless. On the floor were a quantity of shavings, and some score of bricks. Beyond these, on a narrow table, lay an object which I could hardly believe I saw aright.

I approached and drew from it a sheet which had very slightly disguised its shape. There was no mistake about it. It was a coffin; and on the lid was a plate, with the inscription in French:

PIERRE DE LA ROCHE ST AMAND.

ÂGÉ DE XXIII ANS.

I drew back with a double shock. So, then, the funeral after all had not yet left! Here lay the body. I had been deceived. This, no doubt, accounted for the embarrassment so manifest in the Countess’s manner. She would have done more wisely had she told me the true state of the case.

I drew back from this melancholy room, and closed the door. Her distrust of me was the worst rashness she could have committed. There is nothing more dangerous than misapplied caution. In entire ignorance of the fact I had entered the room, and there I might have lighted upon some of the very persons it was our special anxiety that I should avoid.

These reflections were interrupted, almost as soon as began, by the return of the Countess de St Alyre. I saw at a glance that she detected in my face some evidence of what had happened, for she threw a hasty look towards the door.

“Have you seen anything – anything to disturb you, dear Richard? Have you been out of this room?”

I answered promptly, “Yes,” and told her frankly what had happened.

“Well, I did not like to make you more uneasy than necessary. Besides, it is disgusting and horrible. The body is there; but the Count had departed a quarter of an hour before I lighted the coloured lamp, and prepared to receive you. The body did not arrive till eight or ten minutes after he had set out. He was afraid lest the people at Père la Chaise should suppose that the funeral was postponed. He knew that the remains of poor Pierre would certainly reach this tonight, although an unexpected delay has occurred; and there are reasons why he wishes the funeral completed before tomorrow. The hearse with the body must leave this in ten minutes. So soon as it is gone, we shall be free to set out upon our wild and happy journey. The horses are to the carriage in the porte-cochère. As for this funeste horror” (she shuddered very prettily), “let us think of it no more.”

She bolted the door of communication, and when she turned it was with such a pretty penitence in her face and attitude, that I was ready to throw myself at her feet.

“It is the last time,” she said, in a sweet sad little pleading, “I shall ever practise a deception on my brave and beautiful Richard – my hero! Am I forgiven?”

Here was another scene of passionate effusion, and lovers’ raptures and declamations, but only murmured lest the ears of listeners should be busy.

At length, on a sudden, she raised her hand, as if to prevent my stirring, her eyes fixed on me and her ear toward the door of the room in which the coffin was placed, and remained breathless in that attitude for a few moments. Then, with a little nod towards me, she moved on tip-toe to the door, and listened, extending her hand backward as if to warn me against advancing; and, after a little time, she returned, still on tip-toe, and whispered to me, “They are removing the coffin – come with me.”

I accompanied her into the room from which her maid, as she told me, had spoken to her. Coffee and some old china cups, which appeared to me quite beautiful, stood on a silver tray; and some liqueur glasses, with a flask, which turned out to be noyau, on a salver beside it.

“I shall attend you. I’m to be your servant here; I am to have my own way; I shall not think myself forgiven by my darling if he refuses to indulge me in anything.”

She filled a cup with coffee and handed it to me with her left hand; her right arm she fondly passed over my shoulder, and with her fingers through my curls, caressingly, she whispered, “Take this, I shall take some just now.”

It was excellent; and when I had done she handed me the liqueur, which I also drank.

“Come back, dearest, to the next room,” she said. “By this time those terrible people must have gone away, and we shall be safer there, for the present, than here.”

“You shall direct, and I obey; you shall command me, not only now, but always, and in all things, my beautiful queen!” I murmured.

My heroics were unconsciously, I daresay, founded upon my ideal of the French school of lovemaking. I am, even now, ashamed as I recall the bombast to which I treated the Countess de St Alyre.

“There, you shall have another miniature glass – a fairy glass – of noyau,” she said gaily. In this volatile creature, the funereal gloom of the moment before, and the suspense of an adventure on which all her future was staked, disappeared in a moment. She ran and returned with another tiny glass, which, with an eloquent or tender little speech, I placed to my lips and sipped.

I kissed her hand, I kissed her lips, I gazed in her beautiful eyes, and kissed her again unresisting.

“You call me Richard, by what name am I to call my beautiful divinity?” I asked.

“You call me Eugenie, it is my name. Let us be quite real; that is, if you love as entirely as I do.”

“Eugenie!” I exclaimed, and broke into a new rapture upon the name.

It ended by my telling her how impatient I was to set out upon our journey; and, as I spoke, suddenly an odd sensation overcame me. It was not in the slightest degree like faintness. I can find no phrase to describe it, but a sudden constraint of the brain; it was as if the membrane in which it lies, if there be such a thing, contracted, and became inflexible.

“Dear Richard! what is the matter?” she exclaimed, with terror in her looks. “Good Heavens! are you ill? I conjure you, sit down; sit in this chair.” She almost forced me into one; I was in no condition to offer the least resistance. I recognized but too truly the sensations that supervened. I was lying back in the chair in which I sat, without the power, by this time, of uttering a syllable, of closing my eyelids, of moving my eyes, of stirring a muscle. I had in a few seconds glided into precisely the state in which I had passed so many appalling hours when approaching Paris, in my night-drive with the Marquis d’Harmonville.

Great and loud was the lady’s agony. She seemed to have lost all sense of fear. She called me by my name, shook me by the shoulder, raised my arm and let it fall, all the time imploring of me, in distracting sentences, to make the slightest sign of life, and vowing that if I did not, she would make away with herself.

These ejaculations, after a minute or two, suddenly subsided. The lady was perfectly silent and cool. In a very businesslike way she took a candle and stood before me, pale indeed, very pale, but with an expression only of intense scrutiny with a dash of horror in it. She moved the candle before my eyes slowly, evidently watching the effect. She then set it down, and rang a handbell two or three times sharply. She placed the two cases(I mean hers containing the jewels and my strong box) side by side on the table; and I saw her carefully lock the door that gave access to the room in which I had just now sipped my coffee.

CHAPTER XXIV

Hope

She had scarcely set down my heavy box, which she seemed to have considerable difficulty in raising on the table, when the door of the room in which I had seen the coffin, opened, and a sinister and unexpected apparition entered.

It was the Count de St Alyre, who had been, as I have told you, reported to me to be, for some considerable time, on his way to Pèe la Chaise. He stood before me for a moment, with the frame of the doorway and a background of darkness enclosing him like a portrait. His slight, mean figure was draped in the deepest mourning. He had a pair of black gloves in his hand, and his hat with crape round it.

When he was not speaking his face showed signs of agitation; his mouth was puckering and working. He looked damnably wicked and frightened.

“Well, my dear Eugenie? Well, child – eh? Well, it all goes admirably?”

“Yes,” she answered, in a low, hard tone. “But you and Planard should not have left that door open.”

This she said sternly. “He went in there and looked about wherever he liked; it was fortunate he did not move aside the lid of the coffin.”

“Planard should have seen to that,” said the Count, sharply. “Ma foi! I can’t be everywhere!” He advanced half-a-dozen short quick steps into the room toward me, and placed his glasses to his eyes.

“Monsieur Beckett,” he cried sharply, two or three times, “Hi! don’t you know me?”

He approached and peered more closely in my face; raised my hand and shook it, calling me again, then let it drop, and said: “It has set in admirably, my pretty mignonne. When did it commence?”

The Countess came and stood beside him, and looked at me steadily for some seconds. You can’t conceive the effect of the silent gaze of those two pairs of evil eyes.

The lady glanced to where, I recollected, the mantelpiece stood, and upon it a clock, the regular click of which I sharply heard. “Four – five – six minutes and a half,” she said slowly, in a cold hard way.

“Brava! Bravissima! my beautiful queen! my little Venus! my Joan of Arc! my heroine! my paragon of women!”

He was gloating on me with an odious curiosity, smiling, as he groped backward with his thin brown fingers to find the lady’s hand; but she, not (I dare say) caring for his caresses, drew back a little.

“Come, ma chère, let us count these things. What is it? Pocketbook? Or – or – what?”

“It is that!” said the lady, pointing with a look of disgust to the box, which lay in its leather case on the table.

“Oh! Let us see – let us count – let us see,” he said, as he was unbuckling the straps with his tremulous fingers. “We must count them – we must see to it. I have pencil and pocketbook – but – where’s the key? See this cursed lock! My – ! What is it? Where’s the key?”

He was standing before the Countess, shuffling his feet, with his hands extended and all his fingers quivering.

“I have not got it; how could I? It is in his pocket, of course,” said the lady.

In another instant the fingers of the old miscreant were in my pockets; he plucked out everything they contained, and some keys among the rest.

I lay in precisely the state in which I had been during my drive with the Marquis to Paris. This wretch, I knew, was about to rob me. The whole drama, and the Countess’s rôle in it, I could not yet comprehend. I could not be sure – so much more presence of mind and histrionic resource have women than fall to the lot of our clumsy sex – whether the return of the Count was not, in truth, a surprise to her; and this scrutiny of the contents of my strong box, an extempore undertaking of the Count’s. But it was clearing more and more every moment: and I was destined, very soon, to comprehend minutely my appalling situation.

I had not the power of turning my eyes this way or that, the smallest fraction of a hair’s breadth. But let anyone, placed as I was at the end of a room, ascertain for himself by experiment how wide is the field of sight, without the slightest alteration in the line of vision, he will find that it takes in the entire breadth of a large room, and that up to a very short distance before him; and imperfectly, by a refraction, I believe, in the eye itself, to a point very near indeed. Next to nothing that passed in the room, therefore, was hidden from me.

The old man had, by this time, found the key. The leather case was open. The box cramped round with iron was next unlocked. He turned out its contents upon the table.

“Rouleaux of a hundred Napoleons each. One, two, three. Yes, quick. Write down a thousand Napoleons. One, two; yes, right. Another thousand, write!” And so on and on till the gold was rapidly counted. Then came the notes.

“Ten thousand francs. Write. Then thousand francs again. Is it written? Another ten thousand francs: is it down? Smaller notes would have been better. They should have been smaller. These are horribly embarrassing. Bolt that door again; Planard would become unreasonable if he knew the amount. Why did you not tell him to get it in smaller notes? No matter now – go on – it can’t be helped – write – another ten thousand francs – another – another.” And so on, till my treasure was counted out before my face, while I saw and heard all that passed with the sharpest distinctness, and my mental perceptions were horribly vivid. But in all other respects I was dead.

He had replaced in the box every note and rouleau as he counted it, and now, having ascertained the sum total, he locked it, replaced it very methodically in its cover, opened a buffet in the wainscoting, and, having placed the Countess’ jewel-case and my strong box in it, he locked it; and immediately on completing these arrangements he began to complain, with fresh acrimony and maledictions of Planard’s delay.

He unbolted the door, looked in the dark room beyond, and listened. He closed the door again and returned. The old man was in a fever of suspense.

“I have kept ten thousand francs for Planard,” said the Count, touching his waistcoat pocket.

“Will that satisfy him?” asked the lady.

“Why – curse him!” screamed the Count. “Has he no conscience? I’ll swear to him it’s half the entire thing.”

He and the lady again came and looked at me anxiously for a while, in silence; and then the old Count began to grumble again about Planard, and to compare his watch with the clock. The lady seemed less impatient; she sat no longer looking at me, but across the room, so that her profile was toward me – and strangely changed, dark and witch-like it looked. My last hope died as I beheld that jaded face from which the mask had dropped. I was certain that they intended to crown their robbery by murder. Why did they not despatch me at once? What object could there be in postponing the catastrophe which would expedite their own safety. I cannot recall, even to myself, adequately the horrors unutterable that I underwent. You must suppose a real nightmare – I mean a nightmare in which the objects and the danger are real, and the spell of corporal death appears to be protractable at the pleasure of the persons who preside at your unearthly torments. I could have no doubt as to the cause of the state in which I was.

In this agony, to which I could not give the slightest expression, I saw the door of the room where the coffin had been, open slowly, and the Marquis d’Harmonville entered the room.

CHAPTER XXV

Despair

A moment’s hope, hope violent and fluctuating, hope that was nearly torture, and then came a dialogue, and with it the terrors of despair.

“Thank Heaven, Planard, you have come at last,” said the Count, taking him with both hands by the arm, and clinging to it and drawing him toward me. “See, look at him. It has all gone sweetly, sweetly, sweetly up to this. Shall I hold the candle for you?”

My friend d’Harmonville, Planard, whatever he was, came to me, pulling of his gloves, which he popped into his pocket.

“The candle, a little this way,” he said, and stooping over me he looked earnestly in my face. He touched my forehead, drew his hand across it, and then looked in my eyes for a time.

“Well, doctor, what do you think?” whispered the Count.

“How much did you give him?” said the Marquis, thus suddenly stunted down to a doctor.

“Seventy drops,” said the lady.

“In the hot coffee?”

“Yes; sixty in a hot cup of coffee and ten in the liqueur.”

Her voice, low and hard, seemed to me to tremble a little. It takes a long course of guilt to subjugate nature completely, and prevent those exterior signs of agitation that outlive all good.

The doctor, however, was treating me as coolly as he might a subject which he was about to place on the dissecting-table for a lecture.

He looked into my eyes again for awhile, took my wrist, and applied his fingers to the pulse.

“That action suspended,” he said to himself.

Then again he placed something, that for the moment I saw it looked like a piece of gold-beater’s leaf, to my lips, holding his head so far that his own breathing could not affect it.

“Yes,” he said in soliloquy, very low.

Then he plucked my shirt-breast open and applied the stethoscope, shifted it from point to point, listened with his ear to its end, as if for a very far-off sound, raised his head, and said, in like manner, softly to himself, “All appreciable action of the lungs has subsided.”

Then turning from the sound, as I conjectured, he said:

“Seventy drops, allowing ten for waste, ought to hold him fast for six hours and a half – that is ample. The experiment I tried in the carriage was only thirty drops, and showed a highly sensitive brain. It would not do to kill him, you know. You are certain you did not exceed seventy?”

“Perfectly,” said the lady.

“If he were to die the evaporation would be arrested, and foreign matter, some of it poisonous, would be found in the stomach, don’t you see? If you are doubtful, it would be well to use the stomach-pump.”

“Dearest Eugenie, be frank, be frank, do be frank,” urged the Count.

“I am not doubtful, I am certain,” she answered.

“How long ago, exactly? I told you to observe the time.”

“I did; the minute-hand was exactly there, under the point of that Cupid’s foot.”

“It will last, then, probably for seven hours. He will recover then; the evaporation will be complete, and not one particle of the fluid will remain in the stomach.”

It was reassuring, at all events, to hear that there was no intention to murder me. No one who has not tried it knows the terror of the approach of death, when the mind is clear, the instincts of life unimpaired, and no excitement to disturb the appreciation of that entirely new horror.

The nature and purpose of this tenderness was very, very peculiar, and as yet I had not a suspicion of it.

“You leave France, I suppose?” said the ex-Marquis.

“Yes, certainly, tomorrow,” answered the Count.

“And where do you mean to go?”

“That I have not yet settled,” he answered quickly.

“You won’t tell a friend, eh?”

“I can’t till I know. This has turned out an unprofitable affair.”

“We shall settle that by-and-by.”

“It is time we should get him lying down, eh,” said the Count, indicating me with one finger.

“Yes, we must proceed rapidly now. Are his nightshirt and nightcap – you understand – here?”

“All ready,” said the Count.

“Now, Madame,” said the doctor, turning to the lady, and making her, in spite of the emergency, a bow, “it is time you should retire.”

The lady passed into the room in which I had taken my cup of treacherous coffee, and I saw her no more. The Count took a candle and passed through the door at the further end of the room, returning with a roll of linen in his hand. He bolted first one door then the other.

They now, in silence, proceeded to undress me rapidly. They were not many minutes in accomplishing this.

What the doctor had termed my nightshirt, a long garment which reached below my feet, was now on, and a cap, that resembled a female nightcap more than anything I had ever seen upon a male head, was fitted upon mine, and tied under my chin.

And now, I thought, I shall be laid in a bed to recover how I can, and, in the meantime, the conspirators will have escaped with their booty, and pursuit be in vain.

This was my best hope at the time; but it was soon clear that their plans were very different. The Count and Planard now went, together, into the room that lay straight before me. I heard them talking low, and a sound of shuffling feet; then a long rumble; it suddenly stopped; it recommenced; it continued; side by side they came in at the door, their backs toward me. They were dragging something along the floor that made a continued boom and rumble, but they interposed between me and it, so that I could not see it until they had dragged it almost beside me; and then, merciful heaven! I saw it plainly enough. It was the coffin I had seen in the next room. It lay now flat on the floor, its edge against the chair in which I sat. Planard removed the lid. The coffin was empty.

CHAPTER XXVI

Catastrophe

“those seem to be good horses, and we change on the way,” said Planard. “You give the men a Napoleon or two; we must do it within three hours and a quarter. Now, come; I’ll lift him upright, so as to place his feet in their proper berth, and you must keep them together and draw the white shirt well down over them.”

In another moment I was placed, as he described, sustained in Planard’s arms, standing at the foot of the coffin, and so lowered backward, gradually, till I lay my length in it. Then the man, whom he called Planard, stretched my arms by my sides, and carefully arranged the frills at my breast and the folds of the shroud, and after that, taking his stand at the foot of the coffin made a survey which seemed to satisfy him.

The Count, who was very methodical, took my clothes, which had just been removed, folded them rapidly together and locked them up, as I afterwards heard, in one of the three presses which opened by doors in the panel.

I now understood their frightful plan. This coffin had been prepared for me; the funeral of St Amand was a sham to mislead inquiry; I had myself given the order at Père la Chaise, signed it, and paid the fees for the interment of the fictitious Pierre de St Amand, whose place I was to take, to lie in his coffin with his name on the plate above my breast, and with a ton of clay packed down upon me; to waken from this catalepsy, after I had been for hours in the grave, there to perish by a death the most horrible that imagination can conceive.

If, hereafter, by any caprice of curiosity or suspicion, the coffin should be exhumed, and the body it enclosed examined, no chemistry could detect a trace of poison, nor the most cautious examination the slightest mark of violence.

I had myself been at the utmost pains to mystify inquiry, should my disappearance excite surmises, and had even written to my few correspondents in England to tell them that they were not to look for a letter from me for three weeks at least.

In the moment of my guilty elation death had caught me, and there was no escape. I tried to pray to God in my unearthly panic, but only thoughts of terror, judgment, and eternal anguish crossed the distraction of my immediate doom.

I must not try to recall what is indeed indescribable – the multiform horrors of my own thoughts. I will relate, simply, what befell, every detail of which remains sharp in my memory as if cut in steel.

“The undertaker’s men are in the hall,” said the Count.

“They must not come till this is fixed,” answered Planard. “Be good enough to take hold of the lower part while I take this end.” I was not left long to conjecture what was coming, for in a few seconds more something slid across, a few inches above my face, and entirely excluded the light, and muffled sound, so that nothing that was not very distinct reached my ears henceforward; but very distinctly came the working of a turnscrew, and the crunching home of screws in succession. Than these vulgar sounds, no doom spoken in thunder could have been more tremendous.

The rest I must relate, not as it then reached my ears, which was too imperfectly and interruptedly to supply a connected narrative, but as it was afterwards told me by other people.

The coffin-lid being screwed down, the two gentlemen arranged the room and adjusted the coffin so that it lay perfectly straight along the boards, the Count being specially anxious that there should be no appearance of hurry or disorder in the room, which might have suggested remark and conjecture.

When this was done, Doctor Planard said he would go to the hall to summon the men who were to carry the coffin out and place it in the hearse. The Count pulled on his black gloves, and held his white handkerchief in his hand, a very impressive chief-mourner. He stood a little behind the head of the coffin, awaiting the arrival of the persons who accompanied Planard, and whose fast steps he soon heard approaching.

Planard came first. He entered the room through the apartment in which the coffin had been originally placed. His manner was changed; there was something of a swagger in it.

“Monsieur le Comte,” he said, as he strode through the door, followed by half-a-dozen persons, “I am sorry to have to announce to you a most unseasonable interruption. Here is Monsieur Carmaignac, a gentleman holding an office in the police department, who says that information to the effect that large quantities of smuggled English and other goods have been distributed in this neighbourhood, and that a portion of them is concealed in your house. I have ventured to assure him, of my own knowledge, that nothing can be more false than that information, and that you would be only too happy to throw open for his inspection, at a moment’s notice, every room, closet, and cupboard in your house.”

“Most assuredly,” exclaimed the Count, with a stout voice, but a very white face. “Thank you, my good friend, for having anticipated me. I will place my house and keys at his disposal, for the purpose of his scrutiny, so soon as he is good enough to inform me of what specific contraband goods he comes in search.”

“The Count de St Alyre will pardon me,” answered Carmaignac, a little drily. “I am forbidden by my instructions to make that disclosure; and that I am instructed to make a general search, this warrant will sufficiently apprise Monsieur le Comte.”

“Monsieur Carmaignac, may I hope,” interposed Planard, “that you will permit the Count de St Alyre to attend the funeral of his kinsman, who lies here, as you see—” (he pointed to the plate upon the coffin) – “and to convey whom to Père la Chaise, a hearse waits at this moment at the door.”

“That, I regret to say, I cannot permit. My instructions are precise; but the delay, I trust, will be but trifling. Monsieur le Comte will not suppose for a moment that I suspect him; but we have a duty to perform, and I must act as if I did. When I am ordered to search, I search; things are sometimes hid in such bizarre places. I can’t say, for instance, what that coffin may contain.”

“The body of my kinsman, Monsieur Pierre de St Amand,” answered the Count, loftily.

“Oh! then you’ve seen him?”

“Seen him? Often, too often.” The Count was evidently a good deal moved.

“I mean the body?”

The Count stole a quick glance at Planard.

“N – no, Monsieur – that is, I mean only for a moment.”

Another quick glance at Planard.

“But quite long enough, I fancy, to recognize him?” insinuated that gentleman.

“Of course – of course; instantly – perfectly. What! Pierre de St Amand? Not know him at a glance? No, no, poor fellow, I know him too well for that.”

“The things I am in search of,” said Monsieur Carmaignac, “would fit in a narrow compass – servants are so ingenious sometimes. Let us raise the lid.”

“Pardon me, Monsieur,” said the Count, peremptorily, advancing to the side of the coffin and extending his arm across it, “I cannot permit that indignity – that desecration.”

“There shall be none, sir – simply the raising of the lid; you shall remain in the room. If it should prove as we all hope, you shall have the pleasure of one other look, really the last, upon your beloved kinsman.”

“But, sir, I can’t.”

“But, Monsieur, I must.”

“But, besides, the thing, the turnscrew, broke when the last screw was turned; and I give you my sacred honour there is nothing but the body in this coffin.”

“Of course, Monsieur le Comte believes all that; but he does not know so well as I the legerdemain in use among servants, who are accustomed to smuggling. Here, Philippe, you must take off the lid of that coffin.”

The Count protested; but Philippe – a man with a bald head and a smirched face, looking like a working blacksmith – placed on the floor a leather bag of tools, from which, having looked at the coffin, and picked with his nail at the screw-heads, he selected a turnscrew and, with a few deft twirls at each of the screws, they stood up like little rows of mushrooms, and the lid was raised. I saw the light, of which I thought I had seen my last, once more; but the axis of vision remained fixed. As I was reduced to the cataleptic state in a position nearly perpendicular, I continued looking straight before me, and thus my gaze was now fixed upon the ceiling. I saw the face of Carmaignac leaning over me with a curious frown. It seemed to me that there was no recognition in his eyes. Oh, Heaven! that I could have uttered were it but one cry! I saw the dark, mean mask of the little Count staring down at me from the other side; the face of the pseudo-Marquis also peering at me, but not so full in the line of vision; there were other faces also.

“I see, I see,” said Carmaignac, withdrawing. “Nothing of the kind there.”

“You will be good enough to direct your man to re-adjust the lid of the coffin, and to fix the screws,” said the Count, taking courage; “and – and – really the funeral must proceed. It is not fair to the people, who have but moderate fees for night-work, to keep them hour after hour beyond the time.”

“Count de St Alyre, you shall go in a very few minutes. I will direct, just now, all about the coffin.”

The Count looked toward the door, and there saw a gendarme; and two or three more grave and stalwart specimens of the same force were also in the room. The Count was very uncomfortably excited; it was growing insupportable.

“As this gentleman makes a difficulty about my attending the obsequies of my kinsman, I will ask you, Planard, to accompany the funeral in my stead.”

“In a few minutes;” answered the incorrigible Carmaignac. “I must first trouble you for the key that opens that press.”

He pointed direct at the press in which the clothes had just been locked up.

“I – I have no objection,” said the Count – “none, of course; only they have not been used for an age. I’ll direct someone to look for the key.”

“If you have not got it about you, it is quite unnecessary. Philippe, try your skeleton-keys with that press. I want it opened. Whose clothes are these?” inquired Carmaignac, when, the press having been opened, he took out the suit that had been placed there scarcely two minutes since.

“I can’t say,” answered the Count. “I know nothing of the contents of that press. A roguish servant, named Lablais, whom I dismissed about a year ago, had the key. I have not seen it open for ten years or more. The clothes are probably his.”

“Here are visiting cards, see, and here a marked pocket-handkerchief – ‘R.B.’ upon it. He must have stolen them from a person named Beckett – R. Beckett. ‘Mr Beckett, Berkeley Square,’ the card says; and, my faith! here’s a watch and a bunch of seals; one of them with the initials ‘R.B.’ upon it. That servant, Lablais, must have been a consummate rogue!”

“So he was; you are right, Sir.”

“It strikes me that he possibly stole these clothes,” continued Carmaignac, “from the man in the coffin, who, in that case, would be Monsieur Beckett, and not Monsieur de St Amand. For wonderful to relate, Monsieur, the watch is still going! The man in the coffin, I believe, is not dead, but simply drugged. And for having robbed and intended to murder him, I arrest you, Nicolas de la Marque, Count de St Alyre.”

In another moment the old villain was a prisoner. I heard his discordant voice break quaveringly into sudden vehemence and volubility; now croaking – now shrieking as he oscillated between protests, threats, and impious appeals to the God who will “judge the secrets of men!” And thus lying and raving, he was removed from the room, and placed in the same coach with his beautiful and abandoned accomplice, already arrested; and, with two gendarmes sitting beside them, they were immediate driving at a rapid pace towards the Conciergerie.

There were now added to the general chorus two voices, very different in quality; one was that of the gasconading Colonel Gaillarde, who had with difficulty been kept in the background up to this; the other was that of my jolly friend Whistlewick, who had come to identify me.

I shall tell you, just now, how this project against my property and life, so ingenious and monstrous, was exploded. I must first say a word about myself. I was placed in a hot bath, under the direction of Planard, as consummate a villain as any of the gang, but now thoroughly in the interests of the prosecution. Thence I was laid in a warm bed, the window of the room being open. These simple measures restored me in about three hours; I should otherwise, probably, have continued under the spell for nearly seven.

The practices of these nefarious conspirators had been carried on with consummate skill and secrecy. Their dupes were led, as I was, to be themselves auxiliary to the mystery which made their own destruction both safe and certain.

A search was, of course, instituted. Graves were opened in Père la Chaise. The bodies exhumed had lain there too long, and were too much decomposed to be recognized. One only was identified. The notice for the burial, in this particular case, had been signed, the order given, and the fees paid, by Gabriel Gaillarde, who was known to the official clerk, who had to transact with him this little funereal business. The very trick that had been arranged for me, had been successfully practised in his case. The person for whom the grave had been ordered, was purely fictitious; and Gabriel Gaillarde himself filled the coffin, on the cover of which that false name was inscribed as well as upon a tombstone over the grave. Possibly the same honour, under my pseudonym, may have been intended for me.

The identification was curious. This Gabriel Gaillarde had had a bad fall from a runaway horse about five years before his mysterious disappearance. He had lost an eye and some teeth in this accident, beside sustaining a fracture of the right leg, immediately above the ankle. He had kept the injuries to his face as profound a secret as he could. The result was, that the glass eye which had done duty for the one he had lost remained in the socket, slightly displaced, of course, but recognizable by the “artist” who had supplied it.

More pointedly recognizable were the teeth, peculiar in workmanship, which one of the ablest dentists in Paris had himself adapted to the chasms, the cast of which, owing to peculiarities in the accident, he happened to have preserved. This cast precisely fitted the gold plate found in the mouth of the skull. The mark, also, above the ankle, in the bone, where it had re-united, corresponded exactly with the place where the fracture had knit in the limb of Gabriel Gaillarde.

The Colonel, his younger brother, had been furious about the disappearance of Gabriel, and still more so about that of his money, which he had long regarded as his proper keepsake, whenever death should remove his brother from the vexations of living. He had suspected for a long time, for certain adroitly discovered reasons, that the Count de St Alyre and the beautiful lady, his companion, countess, or whatever else she was, had pigeoned him. To this suspicion were added some others of a still darker kind; but in their first shape, rather the exaggerated reflections of his fury, ready to believe anything, than well-defined conjectures.

At length an accident had placed the Colonel very nearly upon the right scent; a chance, possibly lucky, for himself, had apprised the scoundrel Planard that the conspirators – himself among the number – were in danger. The result was that he made terms for himself, became an informer, and concerted with the police this visit made to the Château de la Carque at the critical moment when every measure had been completed that was necessary to construct a perfect case against his guilty accomplices.

I need not describe the minute industry or forethought with which the police agents collected all the details necessary to support the case. They had brought an able physician, who, even had Planard failed, would have supplied the necessary medical evidence.

My trip to Paris, you will believe, had not turned out quite so agreeably as I had anticipated. I was the principal witness for the prosecution in this cause célèbre, with all the agrémens that attend that enviable position. Having had an escape, as my friend Whistlewick said, “with a squeak” for my life, I innocently fancied that I should have been an object of considerable interest to Parisian society; but, a good deal to my mortification, I discovered that I was the object of a good-natured but contemptuous merriment. I was a balourd, a benêt, un âne, and figured even in caricatures. I became a sort of public character, a dignity,

“Unto which I was not born,”

and from which I fled as soon as I conveniently could, without even paying my friend, the Marquis d’Harmonville, a visit at his hospitable château.

The Marquis escaped scot-free. His accomplice, the Count, was executed. The fair Eugenie, under extenuating circumstances – consisting, so far as I could discover of her good looks – got off for six years’ imprisonment.

Colonel Gaillarde recovered some of his brother’s money, out of the not very affluent estate of the Count and soi-disant Countess. This, and the execution of the Count, put him in high good humour. So far from insisting on a hostile meeting, he shook me very graciously by the hand, told me that he looked upon the wound on his head, inflicted by the knob of my stick, as having been received in an honourable though irregular duel, in which he had no disadvantage or unfairness to complain of.

I think I have only two additional details to mention. The bricks discovered in the room with the coffin, had been packed in it, in straw, to supply the weight of a dead body, and to prevent the suspicions and contradictions that might have been excited by the arrival of an empty coffin at the château.

Secondly, the Countess’s magnificent brilliants were examined by a lapidary, and pronounced to be worth about five pounds to a tragedy queen who happened to be in want of a suite of paste.

The Countess had figured some years before as one of the cleverest actresses on the minor stage of Paris, where she had been picked up by the Count and used as his principal accomplice.

She it was who, admirably disguised, had rifled my papers in the carriage on my memorable night-journey to Paris. She also had figured as the interpreting magician of the palanquin at the ball at Versailles. So far as I was affected by that elaborate mystification it was intended to re-animate my interest, which, they feared, might flag in the beautiful Countess. It had its design and action upon other intended victims also; but of them there is, at present, no need to speak. The introduction of a real corpse – procured from a person who supplied the Parisian anatomists – involved no real danger, while it heightened the mystery and kept the prophet alive in the gossip of the town and in the thoughts of the noodles with whom he had conferred.

I divided the remainder of the summer and autumn between Switzerland and Italy.

As the well-worn phrase goes, I was a sadder if not a wiser man. A great deal of the horrible impression left upon my mind was due, of course, to the mere action of nerves and brain. But serious feelings of another and deeper kind remained. My afterlife was ultimately formed by the shock I had then received. Those impressions led me – but not till after many years – to happier though not less serious thoughts; and I have deep reason to be thankful to the all-merciful Ruler of events for an early and terrible lesson in the ways of sin.

“London Society” magazine, Feb.-June 1872

In a Glass Darkly (1872)

CARMILLA

(1872)

PROLOGUE

Upon a paper attached to the Narrative which follows, Doctor Hesselius has written a rather elaborate note, which he accompanies with a reference to his Essay on the strange subject which the MS. illuminates.

This mysterious subject he treats, in that Essay, with his usual learning and acumen, and with remarkable directness and condensation. It will form but one volume of the series of that extraordinary man’s collected papers.

As I publish the case, in this volume, simply to interest the “laity,” I shall forestall the intelligent lady, who relates it, in nothing; and after due consideration, I have determined, therefore, to abstain from presenting any précis of the learned Doctor’s reasoning, or extract from his statement on a subject which he describes as “involving, not improbably, some of the profoundest arcana of our dual existence, and its intermediates.”

I was anxious on discovering this paper, to reopen the correspondence commenced by Doctor Hesselius, so many years before, with a person so clever and careful as his informant seems to have been. Much to my regret, however, I found that she had died in the interval.

She, probably, could have added little to the Narrative which she communicates in the following pages, with, so far as I can pronounce, such conscientious particularity.

CHAPTER I

An Early Fright

In Styria, we, though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a castle, or schloss. A small income, in that part of the world, goes a great way. Eight or nine hundred a year does wonders. Scantily enough ours would have answered among wealthy people at home. My father is English, and I bear an English name, although I never saw England. But here, in this lonely and primitive place, where everything is so marvellously cheap, I really don’t see how ever so much more money would at all materially add to our comforts, or even luxuries.

My father was in the Austrian service, and retired upon a pension and his patrimony, and purchased this feudal residence, and the small estate on which it stands, a bargain.

Nothing can be more picturesque or solitary. It stands on a slight eminence in a forest. The road, very old and narrow, passes in front of its drawbridge, never raised in my time, and its moat, stocked with perch, and sailed over by many swans, and floating on its surface white fleets of water lilies.

Over all this the schloss shows its many-windowed front; its towers, and its Gothic chapel.

The forest opens in an irregular and very picturesque glade before its gate, and at the right a steep Gothic bridge carries the road over a stream that winds in deep shadow through the wood. I have said that this is a very lonely place. Judge whether I say truth. Looking from the hall door towards the road, the forest in which our castle stands extends fifteen miles to the right, and twelve to the left. The nearest inhabited village is about seven of your English miles to the left. The nearest inhabited schloss of any historic associations, is that of old General Spielsdorf, nearly twenty miles away to the right.

I have said “the nearest inhabited village,” because there is, only three miles westward, that is to say in the direction of General Spielsdorf’s schloss, a ruined village, with its quaint little church, now roofless, in the aisle of which are the mouldering tombs of the proud family of Karnstein, now extinct, who once owned the equally desolate château which, in the thick of the forest, overlooks the silent ruins of the town.

Respecting the cause of the desertion of this striking and melancholy spot, there is a legend which I shall relate to you another time.

I must tell you now, how very small is the party who constitute the inhabitants of our castle. I don’t include servants, or those dependents who occupy rooms in the buildings attached to the schloss. Listen, and wonder! My father, who is the kindest man on earth, but growing old; and I, at the date of my story, only nineteen. Eight years have passed since then.

I and my father constituted the family at the schloss. My mother, a Styrian lady, died in my infancy, but I had a good-natured governess, who had been with me from, I might almost say, my infancy. I could not remember the time when her fat, benignant face was not a familiar picture in my memory.

This was Madame Perrodon, a native of Berne, whose care and good nature now in part supplied to me the loss of my mother, whom I do not even remember, so early I lost her. She made a third at our little dinner party. There was a fourth, Mademoiselle De Lafontaine, a lady such as you term, I believe, a “finishing governess.” She spoke French and German, Madame Perrodon French and broken English, to which my father and I added English, which, partly to prevent its becoming a lost language among us, and partly from patriotic motives, we spoke every day. The consequence was a Babel, at which strangers used to laugh, and which I shall make no attempt to reproduce in this narrative. And there were two or three young lady friends besides, pretty nearly of my own age, who were occasional visitors, for longer or shorter terms; and these visits I sometimes returned.

These were our regular social resources; but of course there were chance visits from “neighbours” of only five or six leagues distance. My life was, notwithstanding, rather a solitary one, I can assure you.

My gouvernantes had just so much control over me as you might conjecture such sage persons would have in the case of a rather spoiled girl, whose only parent allowed her pretty nearly her own way in everything.

The first occurrence in my existence, which produced a terrible impression upon my mind, which, in fact, never has been effaced, was one of the very earliest incidents of my life which I can recollect. Some people will think it so trifling that it should not be recorded here. You will see, however, by-and-by, why I mention it. The nursery, as it was called, though I had it all to myself, was a large room in the upper story of the castle, with a steep oak roof. I can’t have been more than six years old, when one night I awoke, and looking round the room from my bed, failed to see the nursery maid. Neither was my nurse there; and I thought myself alone. I was not frightened, for I was one of those happy children who are studiously kept in ignorance of ghost stories, of fairy tales, and of all such lore as makes us cover up our heads when the door cracks suddenly, or the flicker of an expiring candle makes the shadow of a bedpost dance upon the wall, nearer to our faces. I was vexed and insulted at finding myself, as I conceived, neglected, and I began to whimper, preparatory to a hearty bout of roaring; when to my surprise, I saw a solemn, but very pretty face looking at me from the side of the bed. It was that of a young lady who was kneeling, with her hands under the coverlet. I looked at her with a kind of pleased wonder, and ceased whimpering. She caressed me with her hands, and lay down beside me on the bed, and drew me towards her, smiling; I felt immediately delightfully soothed, and fell asleep again. I was wakened by a sensation as if two needles ran into my breast very deep at the same moment, and I cried loudly. The lady started back, with her eyes fixed on me, and then slipped down upon the floor, and, as I thought, hid herself under the bed.

I was now for the first time frightened, and I yelled with all my might and main. Nurse, nursery maid, housekeeper, all came running in, and hearing my story, they made light of it, soothing me all they could meanwhile. But, child as I was, I could perceive that their faces were pale with an unwonted look of anxiety, and I saw them look under the bed, and about the room, and peep under tables and pluck open cupboards; and the housekeeper whispered to the nurse: “Lay your hand along that hollow in the bed; someone did lie there, so sure as you did not; the place is still warm.”

I remember the nursery maid petting me, and all three examining my chest, where I told them I felt the puncture, and pronouncing that there was no sign visible that any such thing had happened to me.

The housekeeper and the two other servants who were in charge of the nursery, remained sitting up all night; and from that time a servant always sat up in the nursery until I was about fourteen.

I was very nervous for a long time after this. A doctor was called in, he was pallid and elderly. How well I remember his long saturnine face, slightly pitted with smallpox, and his chestnut wig. For a good while, every second day, he came and gave me medicine, which of course I hated.

The morning after I saw this apparition I was in a state of terror, and could not bear to be left alone, daylight though it was, for a moment.

I remember my father coming up and standing at the bedside, and talking cheerfully, and asking the nurse a number of questions, and laughing very heartily at one of the answers; and patting me on the shoulder, and kissing me, and telling me not to be frightened, that it was nothing but a dream and could not hurt me.

But I was not comforted, for I knew the visit of the strange woman was not a dream; and I was awfully frightened.

I was a little consoled by the nursery maid’s assuring me that it was she who had come and looked at me, and lain down beside me in the bed, and that I must have been half-dreaming not to have known her face. But this, though supported by the nurse, did not quite satisfy me.

I remembered, in the course of that day, a venerable old man, in a black cassock, coming into the room with the nurse and housekeeper, and talking a little to them, and very kindly to me; his face was very sweet and gentle, and he told me they were going to pray, and joined my hands together, and desired me to say, softly, while they were praying, “Lord hear all good prayers for us, for Jesus’ sake.” I think these were the very words, for I often repeated them to myself, and my nurse used for years to make me say them in my prayers.

I remembered so well the thoughtful sweet face of that white-haired old man, in his black cassock, as he stood in that rude, lofty, brown room, with the clumsy furniture of a fashion three hundred years old about him, and the scanty light entering its shadowy atmosphere through the small lattice. He kneeled, and the three women with him, and he prayed aloud with an earnest quavering voice for, what appeared to me, a long time. I forget all my life preceding that event, and for some time after it is all obscure also, but the scenes I have just described stand out vivid as the isolated pictures of the phantasmagoria surrounded by darkness.

CHAPTER II

A Guest

I am now going to tell you something so strange that it will require all your faith in my veracity to believe my story. It is not only true, nevertheless, but truth of which I have been an eyewitness.

It was a sweet summer evening, and my father asked me, as he sometimes did, to take a little ramble with him along that beautiful forest vista which I have mentioned as lying in front of the schloss.

“General Spielsdorf cannot come to us so soon as I had hoped,” said my father, as we pursued our walk.

He was to have paid us a visit of some weeks, and we had expected his arrival next day. He was to have brought with him a young lady, his niece and ward, Mademoiselle Rheinfeldt, whom I had never seen, but whom I had heard described as a very charming girl, and in whose society I had promised myself many happy days. I was more disappointed than a young lady living in a town, or a bustling neighbourhood can possibly imagine. This visit, and the new acquaintance it promised, had furnished my day dream for many weeks.

“And how soon does he come?” I asked.

“Not till autumn. Not for two months, I dare say,” he answered. “And I am very glad now, dear, that you never knew Mademoiselle Rheinfeldt.”

“And why?” I asked, both mortified and curious.

“Because the poor young lady is dead,” he replied. “I quite forgot I had not told you, but you were not in the room when I received the General’s letter this evening.”

I was very much shocked. General Spielsdorf had mentioned in his first letter, six or seven weeks before, that she was not so well as he would wish her, but there was nothing to suggest the remotest suspicion of danger.

“Here is the General’s letter,” he said, handing it to me. “I am afraid he is in great affliction; the letter appears to me to have been written very nearly in distraction.”

We sat down on a rude bench, under a group of magnificent lime trees. The sun was setting with all its melancholy splendour behind the sylvan horizon, and the stream that flows beside our home, and passes under the steep old bridge I have mentioned, wound through many a group of noble trees, almost at our feet, reflecting in its current the fading crimson of the sky. General Spielsdorf’s letter was so extraordinary, so vehement, and in some places so self-contradictory, that I read it twice over – the second time aloud to my father – and was still unable to account for it, except by supposing that grief had unsettled his mind.

It said “I have lost my darling daughter, for as such I loved her. During the last days of dear Bertha’s illness I was not able to write to you.

“Before then I had no idea of her danger. I have lost her, and now learn all, too late. She died in the peace of innocence, and in the glorious hope of a blessed futurity. The fiend who betrayed our infatuated hospitality has done it all. I thought I was receiving into my house innocence, gaiety, a charming companion for my lost Bertha. Heavens! what a fool have I been!

“I thank God my child died without a suspicion of the cause of her sufferings. She is gone without so much as conjecturing the nature of her illness, and the accursed passion of the agent of all this misery. I devote my remaining days to tracking and extinguishing a monster. I am told I may hope to accomplish my righteous and merciful purpose. At present there is scarcely a gleam of light to guide me. I curse my conceited incredulity, my despicable affectation of superiority, my blindness, my obstinacy – all – too late. I cannot write or talk collectedly now. I am distracted. So soon as I shall have a little recovered, I mean to devote myself for a time to enquiry, which may possibly lead me as far as Vienna. Sometime in the autumn, two months hence, or earlier if I live, I will see you – that is, if you permit me; I will then tell you all that I scarce dare put upon paper now. Farewell. Pray for me, dear friend.”

In these terms ended this strange letter. Though I had never seen Bertha Rheinfeldt my eyes filled with tears at the sudden intelligence; I was startled, as well as profoundly disappointed.

The sun had now set, and it was twilight by the time I had returned the General’s letter to my father.

It was a soft clear evening, and we loitered, speculating upon the possible meanings of the violent and incoherent sentences which I had just been reading. We had nearly a mile to walk before reaching the road that passes the schloss in front, and by that time the moon was shining brilliantly. At the drawbridge we met Madame Perrodon and Mademoiselle De Lafontaine, who had come out, without their bonnets, to enjoy the exquisite moonlight.

We heard their voices gabbling in animated dialogue as we approached. We joined them at the drawbridge, and turned about to admire with them the beautiful scene.

The glade through which we had just walked lay before us. At our left the narrow road wound away under clumps of lordly trees, and was lost to sight amid the thickening forest. At the right the same road crosses the steep and picturesque bridge, near which stands a ruined tower which once guarded that pass; and beyond the bridge an abrupt eminence rises, covered with trees, and showing in the shadows some grey ivy-clustered rocks.

Over the sward and low grounds a thin film of mist was stealing like smoke, marking the distances with a transparent veil; and here and there we could see the river faintly flashing in the moonlight.

No softer, sweeter scene could be imagined. The news I had just heard made it melancholy; but nothing could disturb its character of profound serenity, and the enchanted glory and vagueness of the prospect.

My father, who enjoyed the picturesque, and I, stood looking in silence over the expanse beneath us. The two good governesses, standing a little way behind us, discoursed upon the scene, and were eloquent upon the moon.

Madame Perrodon was fat, middle-aged, and romantic, and talked and sighed poetically. Mademoiselle De Lafontaine – in right of her father who was a German, assumed to be psychological, metaphysical, and something of a mystic – now declared that when the moon shone with a light so intense it was well known that it indicated a special spiritual activity. The effect of the full moon in such a state of brilliancy was manifold. It acted on dreams, it acted on lunacy, it acted on nervous people, it had marvellous physical influences connected with life. Mademoiselle related that her cousin, who was mate of a merchant ship, having taken a nap on deck on such a night, lying on his back, with his face full in the light on the moon, had wakened, after a dream of an old woman clawing him by the cheek, with his features horribly drawn to one side; and his countenance had never quite recovered its equilibrium.

“The moon, this night,” she said, “is full of idyllic and magnetic influence – and see, when you look behind you at the front of the schloss how all its windows flash and twinkle with that silvery splendour, as if unseen hands had lighted up the rooms to receive fairy guests.”

There are indolent styles of the spirits in which, indisposed to talk ourselves, the talk of others is pleasant to our listless ears; and I gazed on, pleased with the tinkle of the ladies’ conversation.

“I have got into one of my moping moods tonight,” said my father, after a silence, and quoting Shakespeare, whom, by way of keeping up our English, he used to read aloud, he said:

“‘In truth I know not why I am so sad.

It wearies me: you say it wearies you;

But how I got it – came by it.’

“I forget the rest. But I feel as if some great misfortune were hanging over us. I suppose the poor General’s afflicted letter has had something to do with it.”

At this moment the unwonted sound of carriage wheels and many hoofs upon the road, arrested our attention.

They seemed to be approaching from the high ground overlooking the bridge, and very soon the equipage emerged from that point. Two horsemen first crossed the bridge, then came a carriage drawn by four horses, and two men rode behind.

It seemed to be the travelling carriage of a person of rank; and we were all immediately absorbed in watching that very unusual spectacle. It became, in a few moments, greatly more interesting, for just as the carriage had passed the summit of the steep bridge, one of the leaders, taking fright, communicated his panic to the rest, and after a plunge or two, the whole team broke into a wild gallop together, and dashing between the horsemen who rode in front, came thundering along the road towards us with the speed of a hurricane.

The excitement of the scene was made more painful by the clear, long-drawn screams of a female voice from the carriage window.

We all advanced in curiosity and horror; me rather in silence, the rest with various ejaculations of terror.

Our suspense did not last long. Just before you reach the castle drawbridge, on the route they were coming, there stands by the roadside a magnificent lime tree, on the other stands an ancient stone cross, at sight of which the horses, now going at a pace that was perfectly frightful, swerved so as to bring the wheel over the projecting roots of the tree.

I knew what was coming. I covered my eyes, unable to see it out, and turned my head away; at the same moment I heard a cry from my lady friends, who had gone on a little.

Curiosity opened my eyes, and I saw a scene of utter confusion. Two of the horses were on the ground, the carriage lay upon its side with two wheels in the air; the men were busy removing the traces, and a lady with a commanding air and figure had got out, and stood with clasped hands, raising the handkerchief that was in them every now and then to her eyes.

Through the carriage door was now lifted a young lady, who appeared to be lifeless. My dear old father was already beside the elder lady, with his hat in his hand, evidently tendering his aid and the resources of his schloss. The lady did not appear to hear him, or to have eyes for anything but the slender girl who was being placed against the slope of the bank.

I approached; the young lady was apparently stunned, but she was certainly not dead. My father, who piqued himself on being something of a physician, had just had his fingers on her wrist and assured the lady, who declared herself her mother, that her pulse, though faint and irregular, was undoubtedly still distinguishable. The lady clasped her hands and looked upward, as if in a momentary transport of gratitude; but immediately she broke out again in that theatrical way which is, I believe, natural to some people.

She was what is called a fine looking woman for her time of life, and must have been handsome; she was tall, but not thin, and dressed in black velvet, and looked rather pale, but with a proud and commanding countenance, though now agitated strangely.

“Who was ever being so born to calamity?” I heard her say, with clasped hands, as I came up. “Here am I, on a journey of life and death, in prosecuting which to lose an hour is possibly to lose all. My child will not have recovered sufficiently to resume her route for who can say how long. I must leave her: I cannot, dare not, delay. How far on, sir, can you tell, is the nearest village? I must leave her there; and shall not see my darling, or even hear of her till my return, three months hence.”

I plucked my father by the coat, and whispered earnestly in his ear: “Oh! papa, pray ask her to let her stay with us – it would be so delightful. Do, pray.”

“If Madame will entrust her child to the care of my daughter, and of her good gouvernante, Madame Perrodon, and permit her to remain as our guest, under my charge, until her return, it will confer a distinction and an obligation upon us, and we shall treat her with all the care and devotion which so sacred a trust deserves.”

“I cannot do that, sir, it would be to task your kindness and chivalry too cruelly,” said the lady, distractedly.

“It would, on the contrary, be to confer on us a very great kindness at the moment when we most need it. My daughter has just been disappointed by a cruel misfortune, in a visit from which she had long anticipated a great deal of happiness. If you confide this young lady to our care it will be her best consolation. The nearest village on your route is distant, and affords no such inn as you could think of placing your daughter at; you cannot allow her to continue her journey for any considerable distance without danger. If, as you say, you cannot suspend your journey, you must part with her tonight, and nowhere could you do so with more honest assurances of care and tenderness than here.”

There was something in this lady’s air and appearance so distinguished and even imposing, and in her manner so engaging, as to impress one, quite apart from the dignity of her equipage, with a conviction that she was a person of consequence.

By this time the carriage was replaced in its upright position, and the horses, quite tractable, in the traces again.

The lady threw on her daughter a glance which I fancied was not quite so affectionate as one might have anticipated from the beginning of the scene; then she beckoned slightly to my father, and withdrew two or three steps with him out of hearing; and talked to him with a fixed and stern countenance, not at all like that with which she had hitherto spoken.

I was filled with wonder that my father did not seem to perceive the change, and also unspeakably curious to learn what it could be that she was speaking, almost in his ear, with so much earnestness and rapidity.

Two or three minutes at most I think she remained thus employed, then she turned, and a few steps brought her to where her daughter lay, supported by Madame Perrodon. She kneeled beside her for a moment and whispered, as Madame supposed, a little benediction in her ear; then hastily kissing her she stepped into her carriage, the door was closed, the footmen in stately liveries jumped up behind, the outriders spurred on, the postilions cracked their whips, the horses plunged and broke suddenly into a furious canter that threatened soon again to become a gallop, and the carriage whirled away, followed at the same rapid pace by the two horsemen in the rear.

CHAPTER III

We Compare Notes

We followed the cortège with our eyes until it was swiftly lost to sight in the misty wood; and the very sound of the hoofs and the wheels died away in the silent night air.

Nothing remained to assure us that the adventure had not been an illusion of a moment but the young lady, who just at that moment opened her eyes. I could not see, for her face was turned from me, but she raised her head, evidently looking about her, and I heard a very sweet voice ask complainingly, “Where is mamma?”

Our good Madame Perrodon answered tenderly, and added some comfortable assurances.

I then heard her ask:

“Where am I? What is this place?” and after that she said, “I don’t see the carriage; and Matska, where is she?”

Madame answered all her questions in so far as she understood them; and gradually the young lady remembered how the misadventure came about, and was glad to hear that no one in, or in attendance on, the carriage was hurt; and on learning that her mamma had left her here, till her return in about three months, she wept.

I was going to add my consolations to those of Madame Perrodon when Mademoiselle De Lafontaine placed her hand upon my arm, saying:

“Don’t approach, one at a time is as much as she can at present converse with; a very little excitement would possibly overpower her now.”

As soon as she is comfortably in bed, I thought, I will run up to her room and see her.

My father in the meantime had sent a servant on horseback for the physician, who lived about two leagues away; and a bedroom was being prepared for the young lady’s reception.

The stranger now rose, and leaning on Madame’s arm, walked slowly over the drawbridge and into the castle gate.

In the hall, servants waited to receive her, and she was conducted forthwith to her room. The room we usually sat in as our drawing room is long, having four windows, that looked over the moat and drawbridge, upon the forest scene I have just described.

It is furnished in old carved oak, with large carved cabinets, and the chairs are cushioned with crimson Utrecht velvet. The walls are covered with tapestry, and surrounded with great gold frames, the figures being as large as life, in ancient and very curious costume, and the subjects represented are hunting, hawking, and generally festive. It is not too stately to be extremely comfortable; and here we had our tea, for with his usual patriotic leanings he insisted that the national beverage should make its appearance regularly with our coffee and chocolate.

We sat here this night, and with candles lighted, were talking over the adventure of the evening.

Madame Perrodon and Mademoiselle De Lafontaine were both of our party. The young stranger had hardly lain down in her bed when she sank into a deep sleep; and those ladies had left her in the care of a servant.

“How do you like our guest?” I asked, as soon as Madame entered. “Tell me all about her?”

“I like her extremely,” answered Madame, “she is, I almost think, the prettiest creature I ever saw; about your age, and so gentle and nice.”

“She is absolutely beautiful,” threw in Mademoiselle, who had peeped for a moment into the stranger’s room.

“And such a sweet voice!” added Madame Perrodon.

“Did you remark a woman in the carriage, after it was set up again, who did not get out,” inquired Mademoiselle, “but only looked from the window?”

“No, we had not seen her.”

Then she described a hideous black woman, with a sort of coloured turban on her head, and who was gazing all the time from the carriage window, nodding and grinning derisively towards the ladies, with gleaming eyes and large white eyeballs, and her teeth set as if in fury.

“Did you remark what an ill-looking pack of men the servants were?” asked Madame.

“Yes,” said my father, who had just come in, “ugly, hangdog looking fellows as ever I beheld in my life. I hope they mayn’t rob the poor lady in the forest. They are clever rogues, however; they got everything to rights in a minute.”

“I dare say they are worn out with too long travelling,” said Madame.

“Besides looking wicked, their faces were so strangely lean, and dark, and sullen. I am very curious, I own; but I dare say the young lady will tell you all about it tomorrow, if she is sufficiently recovered.”

“I don’t think she will,” said my father, with a mysterious smile, and a little nod of his head, as if he knew more about it than he cared to tell us.

This made us all the more inquisitive as to what had passed between him and the lady in the black velvet, in the brief but earnest interview that had immediately preceded her departure.

We were scarcely alone, when I entreated him to tell me. He did not need much pressing.

“There is no particular reason why I should not tell you. She expressed a reluctance to trouble us with the care of her daughter, saying she was in delicate health, and nervous, but not subject to any kind of seizure – she volunteered that – nor to any illusion; being, in fact, perfectly sane.”

“How very odd to say all that!” I interpolated. “It was so unnecessary.”

“At all events it was said,” he laughed, “and as you wish to know all that passed, which was indeed very little, I tell you. She then said, ‘I am making a long journey of vital importance – she emphasized the word – rapid and secret; I shall return for my child in three months; in the meantime, she will be silent as to who we are, whence we come, and whither we are travelling.’ That is all she said. She spoke very pure French. When she said the word ‘secret,’ she paused for a few seconds, looking sternly, her eyes fixed on mine. I fancy she makes a great point of that. You saw how quickly she was gone. I hope I have not done a very foolish thing, in taking charge of the young lady.”

For my part, I was delighted. I was longing to see and talk to her; and only waiting till the doctor should give me leave. You, who live in towns, can have no idea how great an event the introduction of a new friend is, in such a solitude as surrounded us.

The doctor did not arrive till nearly one o’clock; but I could no more have gone to my bed and slept, than I could have overtaken, on foot, the carriage in which the princess in black velvet had driven away.

When the physician came down to the drawing room, it was to report very favourably upon his patient. She was now sitting up, her pulse quite regular, apparently perfectly well. She had sustained no injury, and the little shock to her nerves had passed away quite harmlessly. There could be no harm certainly in my seeing her, if we both wished it; and, with this permission I sent, forthwith, to know whether she would allow me to visit her for a few minutes in her room.

The servant returned immediately to say that she desired nothing more.

You may be sure I was not long in availing myself of this permission.

Our visitor lay in one of the handsomest rooms in the schloss. It was, perhaps, a little stately. There was a sombre piece of tapestry opposite the foot of the bed, representing Cleopatra with the asps to her bosom; and other solemn classic scenes were displayed, a little faded, upon the other walls. But there was gold carving, and rich and varied colour enough in the other decorations of the room, to more than redeem the gloom of the old tapestry.

There were candles at the bedside. She was sitting up; her slender pretty figure enveloped in the soft silk dressing gown, embroidered with flowers, and lined with thick quilted silk, which her mother had thrown over her feet as she lay upon the ground.

What was it that, as I reached the bedside and had just begun my little greeting, struck me dumb in a moment, and made me recoil a step or two from before her? I will tell you.

I saw the very face which had visited me in my childhood at night, which remained so fixed in my memory, and on which I had for so many years so often ruminated with horror, when no one suspected of what I was thinking.

It was pretty, even beautiful; and when I first beheld it, wore the same melancholy expression.

But this almost instantly lighted into a strange fixed smile of recognition.

There was a silence of fully a minute, and then at length she spoke; I could not.

“How wonderful!” she exclaimed. “Twelve years ago, I saw your face in a dream, and it has haunted me ever since.”

“Wonderful indeed!” I repeated, overcoming with an effort the horror that had for a time suspended my utterances. “Twelve years ago, in vision or reality, I certainly saw you. I could not forget your face. It has remained before my eyes ever since.”

Her smile had softened. Whatever I had fancied strange in it, was gone, and it and her dimpling cheeks were now delightfully pretty and intelligent.

I felt reassured, and continued more in the vein which hospitality indicated, to bid her welcome, and to tell her how much pleasure her accidental arrival had given us all, and especially what a happiness it was to me.

I took her hand as I spoke. I was a little shy, as lonely people are, but the situation made me eloquent, and even bold. She pressed my hand, she laid hers upon it, and her eyes glowed, as, looking hastily into mine, she smiled again, and blushed.

She answered my welcome very prettily. I sat down beside her, still wondering; and she said:

“I must tell you my vision about you; it is so very strange that you and I should have had, each of the other so vivid a dream, that each should have seen, I you and you me, looking as we do now, when of course we both were mere children. I was a child, about six years old, and I awoke from a confused and troubled dream, and found myself in a room, unlike my nursery, wainscoted clumsily in some dark wood, and with cupboards and bedsteads, and chairs, and benches placed about it. The beds were, I thought, all empty, and the room itself without anyone but myself in it; and I, after looking about me for some time, and admiring especially an iron candlestick with two branches, which I should certainly know again, crept under one of the beds to reach the window; but as I got from under the bed, I heard someone crying; and looking up, while I was still upon my knees, I saw you – most assuredly you – as I see you now; a beautiful young lady, with golden hair and large blue eyes, and lips – your lips – you as you are here.

“Your looks won me; I climbed on the bed and put my arms about you, and I think we both fell asleep. I was aroused by a scream; you were sitting up screaming. I was frightened, and slipped down upon the ground, and, it seemed to me, lost consciousness for a moment; and when I came to myself, I was again in my nursery at home. Your face I have never forgotten since. I could not be misled by mere resemblance. You are the lady whom I saw then.”

It was now my turn to relate my corresponding vision, which I did, to the undisguised wonder of my new acquaintance.

“I don’t know which should be most afraid of the other,” she said, again smiling – “If you were less pretty I think I should be very much afraid of you, but being as you are, and you and I both so young, I feel only that I have made your acquaintance twelve years ago, and have already a right to your intimacy; at all events it does seem as if we were destined, from our earliest childhood, to be friends. I wonder whether you feel as strangely drawn towards me as I do to you; I have never had a friend – shall I find one now?” She sighed, and her fine dark eyes gazed passionately on me.

Now the truth is, I felt rather unaccountably towards the beautiful stranger. I did feel, as she said, “drawn towards her,” but there was also something of repulsion. In this ambiguous feeling, however, the sense of attraction immensely prevailed. She interested and won me; she was so beautiful and so indescribably engaging.

I perceived now something of languor and exhaustion stealing over her, and hastened to bid her good night.

“The doctor thinks,” I added, “that you ought to have a maid to sit up with you tonight; one of ours is waiting, and you will find her a very useful and quiet creature.”

“How kind of you, but I could not sleep, I never could with an attendant in the room. I shan’t require any assistance – and, shall I confess my weakness, I am haunted with a terror of robbers. Our house was robbed once, and two servants murdered, so I always lock my door. It has become a habit – and you look so kind I know you will forgive me. I see there is a key in the lock.”

She held me close in her pretty arms for a moment and whispered in my ear, “Good night, darling, it is very hard to part with you, but good night; tomorrow, but not early, I shall see you again.”

She sank back on the pillow with a sigh, and her fine eyes followed me with a fond and melancholy gaze, and she murmured again “Good night, dear friend.”

Young people like, and even love, on impulse. I was flattered by the evident, though as yet undeserved, fondness she showed me. I liked the confidence with which she at once received me. She was determined that we should be very near friends.

Next day came and we met again. I was delighted with my companion; that is to say, in many respects.

Her looks lost nothing in daylight – she was certainly the most beautiful creature I had ever seen, and the unpleasant remembrance of the face presented in my early dream, had lost the effect of the first unexpected recognition.

She confessed that she had experienced a similar shock on seeing me, and precisely the same faint antipathy that had mingled with my admiration of her. We now laughed together over our momentary horrors.

CHAPTER IV

Her Habits – A Saunter

I told you that I was charmed with her in most particulars.

There were some that did not please me so well.

She was above the middle height of women. I shall begin by describing her.

She was slender, and wonderfully graceful. Except that her movements were languid – very languid – indeed, there was nothing in her appearance to indicate an invalid. Her complexion was rich and brilliant; her features were small and beautifully formed; her eyes large, dark, and lustrous; her hair was quite wonderful, I never saw hair so magnificently thick and long when it was down about her shoulders; I have often placed my hands under it, and laughed with wonder at its weight. It was exquisitely fine and soft, and in colour a rich very dark brown, with something of gold. I loved to let it down, tumbling with its own weight, as, in her room, she lay back in her chair talking in her sweet low voice, I used to fold and braid it, and spread it out and play with it. Heavens! If I had but known all!

I said there were particulars which did not please me. I have told you that her confidence won me the first night I saw her; but I found that she exercised with respect to herself, her mother, her history, everything in fact connected with her life, plans, and people, an ever wakeful reserve. I dare say I was unreasonable, perhaps I was wrong; I dare say I ought to have respected the solemn injunction laid upon my father by the stately lady in black velvet. But curiosity is a restless and unscrupulous passion, and no one girl can endure, with patience, that hers should be baffled by another. What harm could it do anyone to tell me what I so ardently desired to know? Had she no trust in my good sense or honour? Why would she not believe me when I assured her, so solemnly, that I would not divulge one syllable of what she told me to any mortal breathing.

There was a coldness, it seemed to me, beyond her years, in her smiling melancholy persistent refusal to afford me the least ray of light.

I cannot say we quarrelled upon this point, for she would not quarrel upon any. It was, of course, very unfair of me to press her, very ill-bred, but I really could not help it; and I might just as well have let it alone.

What she did tell me amounted, in my unconscionable estimation – to nothing.

It was all summed up in three very vague disclosures:

First – Her name was Carmilla.

Second – Her family was very ancient and noble.

Third – Her home lay in the direction of the west.

She would not tell me the name of her family, nor their armorial bearings, nor the name of their estate, nor even that of the country they lived in.

You are not to suppose that I worried her incessantly on these subjects. I watched opportunity, and rather insinuated than urged my inquiries. Once or twice, indeed, I did attack her more directly. But no matter what my tactics, utter failure was invariably the result. Reproaches and caresses were all lost upon her. But I must add this, that her evasion was conducted with so pretty a melancholy and deprecation, with so many, and even passionate declarations of her liking for me, and trust in my honour, and with so many promises that I should at last know all, that I could not find it in my heart long to be offended with her.

She used to place her pretty arms about my neck, draw me to her, and laying her cheek to mine, murmur with her lips near my ear, “Dearest, your little heart is wounded; think me not cruel because I obey the irresistible law of my strength and weakness; if your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours. In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die – die, sweetly die – into mine. I cannot help it; as I draw near to you, you, in your turn, will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love; so, for a while, seek to know no more of me and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit.”

And when she had spoken such a rhapsody, she would press me more closely in her trembling embrace, and her lips in soft kisses gently glow upon my cheek.

Her agitations and her language were unintelligible to me.

From these foolish embraces, which were not of very frequent occurrence, I must allow, I used to wish to extricate myself; but my energies seemed to fail me. Her murmured words sounded like a lullaby in my ear, and soothed my resistance into a trance, from which I only seemed to recover myself when she withdrew her arms.

In these mysterious moods I did not like her. I experienced a strange tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust. I had no distinct thoughts about her while such scenes lasted, but I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrence. This I know is paradox, but I can make no other attempt to explain the feeling.

I now write, after an interval of more than ten years, with a trembling hand, with a confused and horrible recollection of certain occurrences and situations, in the ordeal through which I was unconsciously passing; though with a vivid and very sharp remembrance of the main current of my story.

But, I suspect, in all lives there are certain emotional scenes, those in which our passions have been most wildly and terribly roused, that are of all others the most vaguely and dimly remembered.

Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, “You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one forever.” Then she had thrown herself back in her chair, with her small hands over her eyes, leaving me trembling.

“Are we related,” I used to ask; “what can you mean by all this? I remind you perhaps of someone whom you love; but you must not, I hate it; I don’t know you – I don’t know myself when you look so and talk so.”

She used to sigh at my vehemence, then turn away and drop my hand.

Respecting these very extraordinary manifestations I strove in vain to form any satisfactory theory – I could not refer them to affectation or trick. It was unmistakably the momentary breaking out of suppressed instinct and emotion. Was she, notwithstanding her mother’s volunteered denial, subject to brief visitations of insanity; or was there here a disguise and a romance? I had read in old storybooks of such things. What if a boyish lover had found his way into the house, and sought to prosecute his suit in masquerade, with the assistance of a clever old adventuress. But there were many things against this hypothesis, highly interesting as it was to my vanity.

I could boast of no little attentions such as masculine gallantry delights to offer. Between these passionate moments there were long intervals of commonplace, of gaiety, of brooding melancholy, during which, except that I detected her eyes so full of melancholy fire, following me, at times I might have been as nothing to her. Except in these brief periods of mysterious excitement her ways were girlish; and there was always a languor about her, quite incompatible with a masculine system in a state of health.

In some respects her habits were odd. Perhaps not so singular in the opinion of a town lady like you, as they appeared to us rustic people. She used to come down very late, generally not till one o’clock, she would then take a cup of chocolate, but eat nothing; we then went out for a walk, which was a mere saunter, and she seemed, almost immediately, exhausted, and either returned to the schloss or sat on one of the benches that were placed, here and there, among the trees. This was a bodily languor in which her mind did not sympathize. She was always an animated talker, and very intelligent.

She sometimes alluded for a moment to her own home, or mentioned an adventure or situation, or an early recollection, which indicated a people of strange manners, and described customs of which we knew nothing. I gathered from these chance hints that her native country was much more remote than I had at first fancied.

As we sat thus one afternoon under the trees a funeral passed us by. It was that of a pretty young girl, whom I had often seen, the daughter of one of the rangers of the forest. The poor man was walking behind the coffin of his darling; she was his only child, and he looked quite heartbroken.

Peasants walking two-and-two came behind, they were singing a funeral hymn.

I rose to mark my respect as they passed, and joined in the hymn they were very sweetly singing.

My companion shook me a little roughly, and I turned surprised.

She said brusquely, “Don’t you perceive how discordant that is?”

“I think it very sweet, on the contrary,” I answered, vexed at the interruption, and very uncomfortable, lest the people who composed the little procession should observe and resent what was passing.

I resumed, therefore, instantly, and was again interrupted. “You pierce my ears,” said Carmilla, almost angrily, and stopping her ears with her tiny fingers. “Besides, how can you tell that your religion and mine are the same; your forms wound me, and I hate funerals. What a fuss! Why, you must die – everyone must die; and all are happier when they do. Come home.”

“My father has gone on with the clergyman to the churchyard. I thought you knew she was to be buried today.”

“She? I don’t trouble my head about peasants. I don’t know who she is,” answered Carmilla, with a flash from her fine eyes.

“She is the poor girl who fancied she saw a ghost a fortnight ago, and has been dying ever since, till yesterday, when she expired.”

“Tell me nothing about ghosts. I shan’t sleep tonight if you do.”

“I hope there is no plague or fever coming; all this looks very like it,” I continued. “The swineherd’s young wife died only a week ago, and she thought something seized her by the throat as she lay in her bed, and nearly strangled her. Papa says such horrible fancies do accompany some forms of fever. She was quite well the day before. She sank afterwards, and died before a week.”

“Well, her funeral is over, I hope, and her hymn sung; and our ears shan’t be tortured with that discord and jargon. It has made me nervous. Sit down here, beside me; sit close; hold my hand; press it hard – hard – harder.”

We had moved a little back, and had come to another seat.

She sat down. Her face underwent a change that alarmed and even terrified me for a moment. It darkened, and became horribly livid; her teeth and hands were clenched, and she frowned and compressed her lips, while she stared down upon the ground at her feet, and trembled all over with a continued shudder as irrepressible as ague. All her energies seemed strained to suppress a fit, with which she was then breathlessly tugging; and at length a low convulsive cry of suffering broke from her, and gradually the hysteria subsided. “There! That comes of strangling people with hymns!” she said at last. “Hold me, hold me still. It is passing away.”

And so gradually it did; and perhaps to dissipate the sombre impression which the spectacle had left upon me, she became unusually animated and chatty; and so we got home.

This was the first time I had seen her exhibit any definable symptoms of that delicacy of health which her mother had spoken of. It was the first time, also, I had seen her exhibit anything like temper.

Both passed away like a summer cloud; and never but once afterwards did I witness on her part a momentary sign of anger. I will tell you how it happened.

She and I were looking out of one of the long drawing room windows, when there entered the courtyard, over the drawbridge, a figure of a wanderer whom I knew very well. He used to visit the schloss generally twice a year.

It was the figure of a hunchback, with the sharp lean features that generally accompany deformity. He wore a pointed black beard, and he was smiling from ear to ear, showing his white fangs. He was dressed in buff, black, and scarlet, and crossed with more straps and belts than I could count, from which hung all manner of things. Behind, he carried a magic lantern, and two boxes, which I well knew, in one of which was a salamander, and in the other a mandrake. These monsters used to make my father laugh. They were compounded of parts of monkeys, parrots, squirrels, fish, and hedgehogs, dried and stitched together with great neatness and startling effect. He had a fiddle, a box of conjuring apparatus, a pair of foils and masks attached to his belt, several other mysterious cases dangling about him, and a black staff with copper ferrules in his hand. His companion was a rough spare dog, that followed at his heels, but stopped short, suspiciously at the drawbridge, and in a little while began to howl dismally.

In the meantime, the mountebank, standing in the midst of the courtyard, raised his grotesque hat, and made us a very ceremonious bow, paying his compliments very volubly in execrable French, and German not much better.

Then, disengaging his fiddle, he began to scrape a lively air to which he sang with a merry discord, dancing with ludicrous airs and activity, that made me laugh, in spite of the dog’s howling.

Then he advanced to the window with many smiles and salutations, and his hat in his left hand, his fiddle under his arm, and with a fluency that never took breath, he gabbled a long advertisement of all his accomplishments, and the resources of the various arts which he placed at our service, and the curiosities and entertainments which it was in his power, at our bidding, to display.

“Will your ladyships be pleased to buy an amulet against the oupire, which is going like the wolf, I hear, through these woods,” he said dropping his hat on the pavement. “They are dying of it right and left and here is a charm that never fails; only pinned to the pillow, and you may laugh in his face.”

These charms consisted of oblong slips of vellum, with cabalistic ciphers and diagrams upon them.

Carmilla instantly purchased one, and so did I.

He was looking up, and we were smiling down upon him, amused; at least, I can answer for myself. His piercing black eye, as he looked up in our faces, seemed to detect something that fixed for a moment his curiosity. In an instant he unrolled a leather case, full of all manner of odd little steel instruments.

“See here, my lady,” he said, displaying it, and addressing me, “I profess, among other things less useful, the art of dentistry. Plague take the dog!” he interpolated. “Silence, beast! He howls so that your ladyships can scarcely hear a word. Your noble friend, the young lady at your right, has the sharpest tooth, – long, thin, pointed, like an awl, like a needle; ha, ha! With my sharp and long sight, as I look up, I have seen it distinctly; now if it happens to hurt the young lady, and I think it must, here am I, here are my file, my punch, my nippers; I will make it round and blunt, if her ladyship pleases; no longer the tooth of a fish, but of a beautiful young lady as she is. Hey? Is the young lady displeased? Have I been too bold? Have I offended her?”

The young lady, indeed, looked very angry as she drew back from the window.

“How dares that mountebank insult us so? Where is your father? I shall demand redress from him. My father would have had the wretch tied up to the pump, and flogged with a cart whip, and burnt to the bones with the cattle brand!”

She retired from the window a step or two, and sat down, and had hardly lost sight of the offender, when her wrath subsided as suddenly as it had risen, and she gradually recovered her usual tone, and seemed to forget the little hunchback and his follies.

My father was out of spirits that evening. On coming in he told us that there had been another case very similar to the two fatal ones which had lately occurred. The sister of a young peasant on his estate, only a mile away, was very ill, had been, as she described it, attacked very nearly in the same way, and was now slowly but steadily sinking.

“All this,” said my father, “is strictly referable to natural causes. These poor people infect one another with their superstitions, and so repeat in imagination the images of terror that have infested their neighbours.”

“But that very circumstance frightens one horribly,” said Carmilla.

“How so?” inquired my father.

“I am so afraid of fancying I see such things; I think it would be as bad as reality.”

“We are in God’s hands: nothing can happen without his permission, and all will end well for those who love him. He is our faithful creator; He has made us all, and will take care of us.”

“Creator! Nature!” said the young lady in answer to my gentle father. “And this disease that invades the country is natural. Nature. All things proceed from Nature – don’t they? All things in the heaven, in the earth, and under the earth, act and live as Nature ordains? I think so.”

“The doctor said he would come here today,” said my father, after a silence. “I want to know what he thinks about it, and what he thinks we had better do.”

“Doctors never did me any good,” said Carmilla.

“Then you have been ill?” I asked.

“More ill than ever you were,” she answered.

“Long ago?”

“Yes, a long time. I suffered from this very illness; but I forget all but my pain and weakness, and they were not so bad as are suffered in other diseases.”

“You were very young then?”

“I dare say, let us talk no more of it. You would not wound a friend?”

She looked languidly in my eyes, and passed her arm round my waist lovingly, and led me out of the room. My father was busy over some papers near the window.

“Why does your papa like to frighten us?” said the pretty girl with a sigh and a little shudder.

“He doesn’t, dear Carmilla, it is the very furthest thing from his mind.”

“Are you afraid, dearest?”

“I should be very much if I fancied there was any real danger of my being attacked as those poor people were.”

“You are afraid to die?”

“Yes, everyone is.”

“But to die as lovers may – to die together, so that they may live together.

“Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don’t you see – each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structure. So says Monsieur Buffon, in his big book, in the next room.”

Later in the day the doctor came, and was closeted with papa for some time.

He was a skilful man, of sixty and upwards, he wore powder, and shaved his pale face as smooth as a pumpkin. He and papa emerged from the room together, and I heard papa laugh, and say as they came out:

“Well, I do wonder at a wise man like you. What do you say to hippogriffs and dragons?”

The doctor was smiling, and made answer, shaking his head—

“Nevertheless life and death are mysterious states, and we know little of the resources of either.”

And so they walked on, and I heard no more. I did not then know what the doctor had been broaching, but I think I guess it now.

CHAPTER V

A Wonderful Likeness

This evening there arrived from Gratz the grave, dark-faced son of the picture cleaner, with a horse and cart laden with two large packing cases, having many pictures in each. It was a journey of ten leagues, and whenever a messenger arrived at the schloss from our little capital of Gratz, we used to crowd about him in the hall, to hear the news.

This arrival created in our secluded quarters quite a sensation. The cases remained in the hall, and the messenger was taken charge of by the servants till he had eaten his supper. Then with assistants, and armed with hammer, ripping chisel, and turnscrew, he met us in the hall, where we had assembled to witness the unpacking of the cases.

Carmilla sat looking listlessly on, while one after the other the old pictures, nearly all portraits, which had undergone the process of renovation, were brought to light. My mother was of an old Hungarian family, and most of these pictures, which were about to be restored to their places, had come to us through her.

My father had a list in his hand, from which he read, as the artist rummaged out the corresponding numbers. I don’t know that the pictures were very good, but they were, undoubtedly, very old, and some of them very curious also. They had, for the most part, the merit of being now seen by me, I may say, for the first time; for the smoke and dust of time had all but obliterated them.

“There is a picture that I have not seen yet,” said my father. “In one corner, at the top of it, is the name, as well as I could read, ‘Marcia Karnstein,’ and the date ‘1698’; and I am curious to see how it has turned out.”

I remembered it; it was a small picture, about a foot and a half high, and nearly square, without a frame; but it was so blackened by age that I could not make it out.

The artist now produced it, with evident pride. It was quite beautiful; it was startling; it seemed to live. It was the effigy of Carmilla!

“Carmilla, dear, here is an absolute miracle. Here you are, living, smiling, ready to speak, in this picture. Isn’t it beautiful, Papa? And see, even the little mole on her throat.”

My father laughed, and said “Certainly it is a wonderful likeness,” but he looked away, and to my surprise seemed but little struck by it, and went on talking to the picture cleaner, who was also something of an artist, and discoursed with intelligence about the portraits or other works, which his art had just brought into light and colour, while I was more and more lost in wonder the more I looked at the picture.

“Will you let me hang this picture in my room, papa?” I asked.

“Certainly, dear,” said he, smiling, “I’m very glad you think it so like. It must be prettier even than I thought it, if it is.”

The young lady did not acknowledge this pretty speech, did not seem to hear it. She was leaning back in her seat, her fine eyes under their long lashes gazing on me in contemplation, and she smiled in a kind of rapture.

“And now you can read quite plainly the name that is written in the corner. It is not Marcia; it looks as if it was done in gold. The name is Mircalla, Countess Karnstein, and this is a little coronet over and underneath A.D. 1698. I am descended from the Karnsteins; that is, mamma was.”

“Ah!” said the lady, languidly, “so am I, I think, a very long descent, very ancient. Are there any Karnsteins living now?”

“None who bear the name, I believe. The family were ruined, I believe, in some civil wars, long ago, but the ruins of the castle are only about three miles away.”

“How interesting!” she said, languidly. “But see what beautiful moonlight!” She glanced through the hall door, which stood a little open. “Suppose you take a little ramble round the court, and look down at the road and river.”

“It is so like the night you came to us,” I said.

She sighed; smiling.

She rose, and each with her arm about the other’s waist, we walked out upon the pavement.

In silence, slowly we walked down to the drawbridge, where the beautiful landscape opened before us.

“And so you were thinking of the night I came here?” she almost whispered.

“Are you glad I came?”

“Delighted, dear Carmilla,” I answered.

“And you asked for the picture you think like me, to hang in your room,” she murmured with a sigh, as she drew her arm closer about my waist, and let her pretty head sink upon my shoulder. “How romantic you are, Carmilla,” I said. “Whenever you tell me your story, it will be made up chiefly of some one great romance.”

She kissed me silently.

“I am sure, Carmilla, you have been in love; that there is, at this moment, an affair of the heart going on.”

“I have been in love with no one, and never shall,” she whispered, “unless it should be with you.”

How beautiful she looked in the moonlight!

Shy and strange was the look with which she quickly hid her face in my neck and hair, with tumultuous sighs, that seemed almost to sob, and pressed in mine a hand that trembled.

Her soft cheek was glowing against mine. “Darling, darling,” she murmured, “I live in you; and you would die for me, I love you so.”

I started from her.

She was gazing on me with eyes from which all fire, all meaning had flown, and a face colourless and apathetic.

“Is there a chill in the air, dear?” she said drowsily. “I almost shiver; have I been dreaming? Let us come in. Come; come; come in.”

“You look ill, Carmilla; a little faint. You certainly must take some wine,” I said.

“Yes. I will. I’m better now. I shall be quite well in a few minutes. Yes, do give me a little wine,” answered Carmilla, as we approached the door.

“Let us look again for a moment; it is the last time, perhaps, I shall see the moonlight with you.”

“How do you feel now, dear Carmilla? Are you really better?” I asked.

I was beginning to take alarm, lest she should have been stricken with the strange epidemic that they said had invaded the country about us.

“Papa would be grieved beyond measure,” I added, “if he thought you were ever so little ill, without immediately letting us know. We have a very skilful doctor near us, the physician who was with papa today.”

“I’m sure he is. I know how kind you all are; but, dear child, I am quite well again. There is nothing ever wrong with me, but a little weakness.

“People say I am languid; I am incapable of exertion; I can scarcely walk as far as a child of three years old: and every now and then the little strength I have falters, and I become as you have just seen me. But after all I am very easily set up again; in a moment I am perfectly myself. See how I have recovered.”

So, indeed, she had; and she and I talked a great deal, and very animated she was; and the remainder of that evening passed without any recurrence of what I called her infatuations. I mean her crazy talk and looks, which embarrassed, and even frightened me.

But there occurred that night an event which gave my thoughts quite a new turn, and seemed to startle even Carmilla’s languid nature into momentary energy.

CHAPTER VI

A Very Strange Agony

When we got into the drawing room, and had sat down to our coffee and chocolate, although Carmilla did not take any, she seemed quite herself again, and Madame, and Mademoiselle De Lafontaine, joined us, and made a little card party, in the course of which papa came in for what he called his “dish of tea.”

When the game was over he sat down beside Carmilla on the sofa, and asked her, a little anxiously, whether she had heard from her mother since her arrival.

She answered “No.”

He then asked whether she knew where a letter would reach her at present.

“I cannot tell,” she answered ambiguously, “but I have been thinking of leaving you; you have been already too hospitable and too kind to me. I have given you an infinity of trouble, and I should wish to take a carriage tomorrow, and post in pursuit of her; I know where I shall ultimately find her, although I dare not yet tell you.”

“But you must not dream of any such thing,” exclaimed my father, to my great relief. “We can’t afford to lose you so, and I won’t consent to your leaving us, except under the care of your mother, who was so good as to consent to your remaining with us till she should herself return. I should be quite happy if I knew that you heard from her: but this evening the accounts of the progress of the mysterious disease that has invaded our neighbourhood, grow even more alarming; and my beautiful guest, I do feel the responsibility, unaided by advice from your mother, very much. But I shall do my best; and one thing is certain, that you must not think of leaving us without her distinct direction to that effect. We should suffer too much in parting from you to consent to it easily.”

“Thank you, sir, a thousand times for your hospitality,” she answered, smiling bashfully. “You have all been too kind to me; I have seldom been so happy in all my life before, as in your beautiful château, under your care, and in the society of your dear daughter.”

So he gallantly, in his old-fashioned way, kissed her hand, smiling and pleased at her little speech.

I accompanied Carmilla as usual to her room, and sat and chatted with her while she was preparing for bed.

“Do you think,” I said at length, “that you will ever confide fully in me?”

She turned round smiling, but made no answer, only continued to smile on me.

“You won’t answer that?” I said. “You can’t answer pleasantly; I ought not to have asked you.”

“You were quite right to ask me that, or anything. You do not know how dear you are to me, or you could not think any confidence too great to look for. But I am under vows, no nun half so awfully, and I dare not tell my story yet, even to you. The time is very near when you shall know everything. You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me, and hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature.”

“Now, Carmilla, you are going to talk your wild nonsense again,” I said hastily.

“Not I, silly little fool as I am, and full of whims and fancies; for your sake I’ll talk like a sage. Were you ever at a ball?”

“No; how you do run on. What is it like? How charming it must be.”

“I almost forget, it is years ago.”

I laughed.

“You are not so old. Your first ball can hardly be forgotten yet.”

“I remember everything about it – with an effort. I see it all, as divers see what is going on above them, through a medium, dense, rippling, but transparent. There occurred that night what has confused the picture, and made its colours faint. I was all but assassinated in my bed, wounded here,” she touched her breast, “and never was the same since.”

“Were you near dying?”

“Yes, very – a cruel love – strange love, that would have taken my life. Love will have its sacrifices. No sacrifice without blood. Let us go to sleep now; I feel so lazy. How can I get up just now and lock my door?”

She was lying with her tiny hands buried in her rich wavy hair, under her cheek, her little head upon the pillow, and her glittering eyes followed me wherever I moved, with a kind of shy smile that I could not decipher.

I bid her good night, and crept from the room with an uncomfortable sensation.

I often wondered whether our pretty guest ever said her prayers. I certainly had never seen her upon her knees. In the morning she never came down until long after our family prayers were over, and at night she never left the drawing room to attend our brief evening prayers in the hall.

If it had not been that it had casually come out in one of our careless talks that she had been baptised, I should have doubted her being a Christian. Religion was a subject on which I had never heard her speak a word. If I had known the world better, this particular neglect or antipathy would not have so much surprised me.

The precautions of nervous people are infectious, and persons of a like temperament are pretty sure, after a time, to imitate them. I had adopted Carmilla’s habit of locking her bedroom door, having taken into my head all her whimsical alarms about midnight invaders and prowling assassins. I had also adopted her precaution of making a brief search through her room, to satisfy herself that no lurking assassin or robber was “ensconced.”

These wise measures taken, I got into my bed and fell asleep. A light was burning in my room. This was an old habit, of very early date, and which nothing could have tempted me to dispense with.

Thus fortified I might take my rest in peace. But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exits and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.

I had a dream that night that was the beginning of a very strange agony.

I cannot call it a nightmare, for I was quite conscious of being asleep.

But I was equally conscious of being in my room, and lying in bed, precisely as I actually was. I saw, or fancied I saw, the room and its furniture just as I had seen it last, except that it was very dark, and I saw something moving round the foot of the bed, which at first I could not accurately distinguish. But I soon saw that it was a sooty-black animal that resembled a monstrous cat. It appeared to me about four or five feet long for it measured fully the length of the hearthrug as it passed over it; and it continued to-ing and fro-ing with the lithe, sinister restlessness of a beast in a cage. I could not cry out, although as you may suppose, I was terrified. Its pace was growing faster, and the room rapidly darker and darker, and at length so dark that I could no longer see anything of it but its eyes. I felt it spring lightly on the bed. The two broad eyes approached my face, and suddenly I felt a stinging pain as if two large needles darted, an inch or two apart, deep into my breast. I waked with a scream. The room was lighted by the candle that burnt there all through the night, and I saw a female figure standing at the foot of the bed, a little at the right side. It was in a dark loose dress, and its hair was down and covered its shoulders. A block of stone could not have been more still. There was not the slightest stir of respiration. As I stared at it, the figure appeared to have changed its place, and was now nearer the door; then, close to it, the door opened, and it passed out.

I was now relieved, and able to breathe and move. My first thought was that Carmilla had been playing me a trick, and that I had forgotten to secure my door. I hastened to it, and found it locked as usual on the inside. I was afraid to open it – I was horrified. I sprang into my bed and covered my head up in the bedclothes, and lay there more dead than alive till morning.

CHAPTER VII

Descending

It would be vain my attempting to tell you the horror with which, even now, I recall the occurrence of that night. It was no such transitory terror as a dream leaves behind it. It seemed to deepen by time, and communicated itself to the room and the very furniture that had encompassed the apparition.

I could not bear next day to be alone for a moment. I should have told papa, but for two opposite reasons. At one time I thought he would laugh at my story, and I could not bear its being treated as a jest; and at another I thought he might fancy that I had been attacked by the mysterious complaint which had invaded our neighbourhood. I had myself no misgiving of the kind, and as he had been rather an invalid for some time, I was afraid of alarming him.

I was comfortable enough with my good-natured companions, Madame Perrodon, and the vivacious Mademoiselle Lafontaine. They both perceived that I was out of spirits and nervous, and at length I told them what lay so heavy at my heart.

Mademoiselle laughed, but I fancied that Madame Perrodon looked anxious.

“By-the-by,” said Mademoiselle, laughing, “the long lime tree walk, behind Carmilla’s bedroom window, is haunted!”

“Nonsense!” exclaimed Madame, who probably thought the theme rather inopportune, “and who tells that story, my dear?”

“Martin says that he came up twice, when the old yard gate was being repaired, before sunrise, and twice saw the same female figure walking down the lime tree avenue.”

“So he well might, as long as there are cows to milk in the river fields,” said Madame.

“I daresay; but Martin chooses to be frightened, and never did I see fool more frightened.”

“You must not say a word about it to Carmilla, because she can see down that walk from her room window,” I interposed, “and she is, if possible, a greater coward than I.”

Carmilla came down rather later than usual that day.

“I was so frightened last night,” she said, so soon as were together, “and I am sure I should have seen something dreadful if it had not been for that charm I bought from the poor little hunchback whom I called such hard names. I had a dream of something black coming round my bed, and I awoke in a perfect horror, and I really thought, for some seconds, I saw a dark figure near the chimney-piece, but I felt under my pillow for my charm, and the moment my fingers touched it, the figure disappeared, and I felt quite certain, only that I had it by me, that something frightful would have made its appearance, and, perhaps, throttled me, as it did those poor people we heard of.

“Well, listen to me,” I began, and recounted my adventure, at the recital of which she appeared horrified.

“And had you the charm near you?” she asked, earnestly.

“No, I had dropped it into a china vase in the drawing room, but I shall certainly take it with me tonight, as you have so much faith in it.”

At this distance of time I cannot tell you, or even understand, how I overcame my horror so effectually as to lie alone in my room that night. I remember distinctly that I pinned the charm to my pillow. I fell asleep almost immediately, and slept even more soundly than usual all night.

Next night I passed as well. My sleep was delightfully deep and dreamless.

But I wakened with a sense of lassitude and melancholy, which, however, did not exceed a degree that was almost luxurious.

“Well, I told you so,” said Carmilla, when I described my quiet sleep, “I had such delightful sleep myself last night; I pinned the charm to the breast of my nightdress. It was too far away the night before. I am quite sure it was all fancy, except the dreams. I used to think that evil spirits made dreams, but our doctor told me it is no such thing. Only a fever passing by, or some other malady, as they often do, he said, knocks at the door, and not being able to get in, passes on, with that alarm.”

“And what do you think the charm is?” said I.

“It has been fumigated or immersed in some drug, and is an antidote against the malaria,” she answered.

“Then it acts only on the body?”

“Certainly; you don’t suppose that evil spirits are frightened by bits of ribbon, or the perfumes of a druggist’s shop? No, these complaints, wandering in the air, begin by trying the nerves, and so infect the brain, but before they can seize upon you, the antidote repels them. That I am sure is what the charm has done for us. It is nothing magical, it is simply natural.”

I should have been happier if I could have quite agreed with Carmilla, but I did my best, and the impression was a little losing its force.

For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome, possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet.

Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it.

I would not admit that I was ill, I would not consent to tell my papa, or to have the doctor sent for.

Carmilla became more devoted to me than ever, and her strange paroxysms of languid adoration more frequent. She used to gloat on me with increasing ardour the more my strength and spirits waned. This always shocked me like a momentary glare of insanity.

Without knowing it, I was now in a pretty advanced stage of the strangest illness under which mortal ever suffered. There was an unaccountable fascination in its earlier symptoms that more than reconciled me to the incapacitating effect of that stage of the malady. This fascination increased for a time, until it reached a certain point, when gradually a sense of the horrible mingled itself with it, deepening, as you shall hear, until it discoloured and perverted the whole state of my life.

The first change I experienced was rather agreeable. It was very near the turning point from which began the descent of Avernus.

Certain vague and strange sensations visited me in my sleep. The prevailing one was of that pleasant, peculiar cold thrill which we feel in bathing, when we move against the current of a river. This was soon accompanied by dreams that seemed interminable, and were so vague that I could never recollect their scenery and persons, or any one connected portion of their action. But they left an awful impression, and a sense of exhaustion, as if I had passed through a long period of great mental exertion and danger.

After all these dreams there remained on waking a remembrance of having been in a place very nearly dark, and of having spoken to people whom I could not see; and especially of one clear voice, of a female’s, very deep, that spoke as if at a distance, slowly, and producing always the same sensation of indescribable solemnity and fear. Sometimes there came a sensation as if a hand was drawn softly along my cheek and neck. Sometimes it was as if warm lips kissed me, and longer and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat, but there the caress fixed itself. My heart beat faster, my breathing rose and fell rapidly and full drawn; a sobbing, that rose into a sense of strangulation, supervened, and turned into a dreadful convulsion, in which my senses left me and I became unconscious.

It was now three weeks since the commencement of this unaccountable state.

My sufferings had, during the last week, told upon my appearance. I had grown pale, my eyes were dilated and darkened underneath, and the languor which I had long felt began to display itself in my countenance.

My father asked me often whether I was ill; but, with an obstinacy which now seems to me unaccountable, I persisted in assuring him that I was quite well.

In a sense this was true. I had no pain, I could complain of no bodily derangement. My complaint seemed to be one of the imagination, or the nerves, and, horrible as my sufferings were, I kept them, with a morbid reserve, very nearly to myself.

It could not be that terrible complaint which the peasants called the oupire, for I had now been suffering for three weeks, and they were seldom ill for much more than three days, when death put an end to their miseries.

Carmilla complained of dreams and feverish sensations, but by no means of so alarming a kind as mine. I say that mine were extremely alarming. Had I been capable of comprehending my condition, I would have invoked aid and advice on my knees. The narcotic of an unsuspected influence was acting upon me, and my perceptions were benumbed.

I am going to tell you now of a dream that led immediately to an odd discovery.

One night, instead of the voice I was accustomed to hear in the dark, I heard one, sweet and tender, and at the same time terrible, which said, “Your mother warns you to beware of the assassin.” At the same time a light unexpectedly sprang up, and I saw Carmilla, standing, near the foot of my bed, in her white nightdress, bathed, from her chin to her feet, in one great stain of blood.

I wakened with a shriek, possessed with the one idea that Carmilla was being murdered. I remember springing from my bed, and my next recollection is that of standing on the lobby, crying for help.

Madame and Mademoiselle came scurrying out of their rooms in alarm; a lamp burned always on the lobby, and seeing me, they soon learned the cause of my terror.

I insisted on our knocking at Carmilla’s door. Our knocking was unanswered.

It soon became a pounding and an uproar. We shrieked her name, but all was vain.

We all grew frightened, for the door was locked. We hurried back, in panic, to my room. There we rang the bell long and furiously. If my father’s room had been at that side of the house, we would have called him up at once to our aid. But, alas! he was quite out of hearing, and to reach him involved an excursion for which we none of us had courage.

Servants, however, soon came running up the stairs; I had got on my dressing gown and slippers meanwhile, and my companions were already similarly furnished. Recognizing the voices of the servants on the lobby, we sallied out together; and having renewed, as fruitlessly, our summons at Carmilla’s door, I ordered the men to force the lock. They did so, and we stood, holding our lights aloft, in the doorway, and so stared into the room.

We called her by name; but there was still no reply. We looked round the room. Everything was undisturbed. It was exactly in the state in which I had left it on bidding her good night. But Carmilla was gone.

CHAPTER VIII

Search

At sight of the room, perfectly undisturbed except for our violent entrance, we began to cool a little, and soon recovered our senses sufficiently to dismiss the men. It had struck Mademoiselle that possibly Carmilla had been wakened by the uproar at her door, and in her first panic had jumped from her bed, and hid herself in a press, or behind a curtain, from which she could not, of course, emerge until the majordomo and his myrmidons had withdrawn. We now recommenced our search, and began to call her name again.

It was all to no purpose. Our perplexity and agitation increased. We examined the windows, but they were secured. I implored of Carmilla, if she had concealed herself, to play this cruel trick no longer – to come out and to end our anxieties. It was all useless. I was by this time convinced that she was not in the room, nor in the dressing room, the door of which was still locked on this side. She could not have passed it. I was utterly puzzled. Had Carmilla discovered one of those secret passages which the old housekeeper said were known to exist in the schloss, although the tradition of their exact situation had been lost? A little time would, no doubt, explain all – utterly perplexed as, for the present, we were.

It was past four o’clock, and I preferred passing the remaining hours of darkness in Madame’s room. Daylight brought no solution of the difficulty.

The whole household, with my father at its head, was in a state of agitation next morning. Every part of the château was searched. The grounds were explored. No trace of the missing lady could be discovered. The stream was about to be dragged; my father was in distraction; what a tale to have to tell the poor girl’s mother on her return. I, too, was almost beside myself, though my grief was quite of a different kind.

The morning was passed in alarm and excitement. It was now one o’clock, and still no tidings. I ran up to Carmilla’s room, and found her standing at her dressing table. I was astounded. I could not believe my eyes. She beckoned me to her with her pretty finger, in silence. Her face expressed extreme fear.

I ran to her in an ecstasy of joy; I kissed and embraced her again and again. I ran to the bell and rang it vehemently, to bring others to the spot who might at once relieve my father’s anxiety.

“Dear Carmilla, what has become of you all this time? We have been in agonies of anxiety about you,” I exclaimed. “Where have you been? How did you come back?”

“Last night has been a night of wonders,” she said.

“For mercy’s sake, explain all you can.”

“It was past two last night,” she said, “when I went to sleep as usual in my bed, with my doors locked, that of the dressing room, and that opening upon the gallery. My sleep was uninterrupted, and, so far as I know, dreamless; but I woke just now on the sofa in the dressing room there, and I found the door between the rooms open, and the other door forced. How could all this have happened without my being wakened? It must have been accompanied with a great deal of noise, and I am particularly easily wakened; and how could I have been carried out of my bed without my sleep having been interrupted, I whom the slightest stir startles?”

By this time, Madame, Mademoiselle, my father, and a number of the servants were in the room. Carmilla was, of course, overwhelmed with inquiries, congratulations, and welcomes. She had but one story to tell, and seemed the least able of all the party to suggest any way of accounting for what had happened.

My father took a turn up and down the room, thinking. I saw Carmilla’s eye follow him for a moment with a sly, dark glance.

When my father had sent the servants away, Mademoiselle having gone in search of a little bottle of valerian and sal-volatile, and there being no one now in the room with Carmilla, except my father, Madame, and myself, he came to her thoughtfully, took her hand very kindly, led her to the sofa, and sat down beside her.

“Will you forgive me, my dear, if I risk a conjecture, and ask a question?”

“Who can have a better right?” she said. “Ask what you please, and I will tell you everything. But my story is simply one of bewilderment and darkness. I know absolutely nothing. Put any question you please, but you know, of course, the limitations mamma has placed me under.”

“Perfectly, my dear child. I need not approach the topics on which she desires our silence. Now, the marvel of last night consists in your having been removed from your bed and your room, without being wakened, and this removal having occurred apparently while the windows were still secured, and the two doors locked upon the inside. I will tell you my theory and ask you a question.”

Carmilla was leaning on her hand dejectedly; Madame and I were listening breathlessly.

“Now, my question is this. Have you ever been suspected of walking in your sleep?”

“Never, since I was very young indeed.”

“But you did walk in your sleep when you were young?”

“Yes; I know I did. I have been told so often by my old nurse.”

My father smiled and nodded.

“Well, what has happened is this. You got up in your sleep, unlocked the door, not leaving the key, as usual, in the lock, but taking it out and locking it on the outside; you again took the key out, and carried it away with you to some one of the five-and-twenty rooms on this floor, or perhaps upstairs or downstairs. There are so many rooms and closets, so much heavy furniture, and such accumulations of lumber, that it would require a week to search this old house thoroughly. Do you see, now, what I mean?”

“I do, but not all,” she answered.

“And how, papa, do you account for her finding herself on the sofa in the dressing room, which we had searched so carefully?”

“She came there after you had searched it, still in her sleep, and at last awoke spontaneously, and was as much surprised to find herself where she was as anyone else. I wish all mysteries were as easily and innocently explained as yours, Carmilla,” he said, laughing. “And so we may congratulate ourselves on the certainty that the most natural explanation of the occurrence is one that involves no drugging, no tampering with locks, no burglars, or poisoners, or witches – nothing that need alarm Carmilla, or anyone else, for our safety.”

Carmilla was looking charmingly. Nothing could be more beautiful than her tints. Her beauty was, I think, enhanced by that graceful languor that was peculiar to her. I think my father was silently contrasting her looks with mine, for he said:

“I wish my poor Laura was looking more like herself”; and he sighed.

So our alarms were happily ended, and Carmilla restored to her friends.

CHAPTER IX

The Doctor

As Carmilla would not hear of an attendant sleeping in her room, my father arranged that a servant should sleep outside her door, so that she would not attempt to make another such excursion without being arrested at her own door.

That night passed quietly; and next morning early, the doctor, whom my father had sent for without telling me a word about it, arrived to see me.

Madame accompanied me to the library; and there the grave little doctor, with white hair and spectacles, whom I mentioned before, was waiting to receive me.

I told him my story, and as I proceeded he grew graver and graver.

We were standing, he and I, in the recess of one of the windows, facing one another. When my statement was over, he leaned with his shoulders against the wall, and with his eyes fixed on me earnestly, with an interest in which was a dash of horror.

After a minute’s reflection, he asked Madame if he could see my father.

He was sent for accordingly, and as he entered, smiling, he said:

“I dare say, doctor, you are going to tell me that I am an old fool for having brought you here; I hope I am.”

But his smile faded into shadow as the doctor, with a very grave face, beckoned him to him.

He and the doctor talked for some time in the same recess where I had just conferred with the physician. It seemed an earnest and argumentative conversation. The room is very large, and I and Madame stood together, burning with curiosity, at the farther end. Not a word could we hear, however, for they spoke in a very low tone, and the deep recess of the window quite concealed the doctor from view, and very nearly my father, whose foot, arm, and shoulder only could we see; and the voices were, I suppose, all the less audible for the sort of closet which the thick wall and window formed.

After a time my father’s face looked into the room; it was pale, thoughtful, and, I fancied, agitated.

“Laura, dear, come here for a moment. Madame, we shan’t trouble you, the doctor says, at present.”

Accordingly I approached, for the first time a little alarmed; for, although I felt very weak, I did not feel ill; and strength, one always fancies, is a thing that may be picked up when we please.

My father held out his hand to me, as I drew near, but he was looking at the doctor, and he said:

“It certainly is very odd; I don’t understand it quite. Laura, come here, dear; now attend to Doctor Spielsberg, and recollect yourself.”

“You mentioned a sensation like that of two needles piercing the skin, somewhere about your neck, on the night when you experienced your first horrible dream. Is there still any soreness?”

“None at all,” I answered.

“Can you indicate with your finger about the point at which you think this occurred?”

“Very little below my throat – here,” I answered.

I wore a morning dress, which covered the place I pointed to.

“Now you can satisfy yourself,” said the doctor. “You won’t mind your papa’s lowering your dress a very little. It is necessary, to detect a symptom of the complaint under which you have been suffering.”

I acquiesced. It was only an inch or two below the edge of my collar.

“God bless me! – so it is,” exclaimed my father, growing pale.

“You see it now with your own eyes,” said the doctor, with a gloomy triumph.

“What is it?” I exclaimed, beginning to be frightened.

“Nothing, my dear young lady, but a small blue spot, about the size of the tip of your little finger; and now,” he continued, turning to papa, “the question is what is best to be done?”

“Is there any danger?” I urged, in great trepidation.

“I trust not, my dear,” answered the doctor. “I don’t see why you should not recover. I don’t see why you should not begin immediately to get better. That is the point at which the sense of strangulation begins?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“And – recollect as well as you can – the same point was a kind of centre of that thrill which you described just now, like the current of a cold stream running against you?”

“It may have been; I think it was.”

“Aye, you see?” he added, turning to my father. “Shall I say a word to Madame?”

“Certainly,” said my father.

He called Madame to him, and said:

“I find my young friend here far from well. It won’t be of any great consequence, I hope; but it will be necessary that some steps be taken, which I will explain by-and-by; but in the meantime, Madame, you will be so good as not to let Miss Laura be alone for one moment. That is the only direction I need give for the present. It is indispensable.”

“We may rely upon your kindness, Madame, I know,” added my father.

Madame satisfied him eagerly.

“And you, dear Laura, I know you will observe the doctor’s direction.”

“I shall have to ask your opinion upon another patient, whose symptoms slightly resemble those of my daughter, that have just been detailed to you – very much milder in degree, but I believe quite of the same sort. She is a young lady – our guest; but as you say you will be passing this way again this evening, you can’t do better than take your supper here, and you can then see her. She does not come down till the afternoon.”

“I thank you,” said the doctor. “I shall be with you, then, at about seven this evening.”

And then they repeated their directions to me and to Madame, and with this parting charge my father left us, and walked out with the doctor; and I saw them pacing together up and down between the road and the moat, on the grassy platform in front of the castle, evidently absorbed in earnest conversation.

The doctor did not return. I saw him mount his horse there, take his leave, and ride away eastward through the forest.

Nearly at the same time I saw the man arrive from Dranfield with the letters, and dismount and hand the bag to my father.

In the meantime, Madame and I were both busy, lost in conjecture as to the reasons of the singular and earnest direction which the doctor and my father had concurred in imposing. Madame, as she afterwards told me, was afraid the doctor apprehended a sudden seizure, and that, without prompt assistance, I might either lose my life in a fit, or at least be seriously hurt.

The interpretation did not strike me; and I fancied, perhaps luckily for my nerves, that the arrangement was prescribed simply to secure a companion, who would prevent my taking too much exercise, or eating unripe fruit, or doing any of the fifty foolish things to which young people are supposed to be prone.

About half an hour after my father came in – he had a letter in his hand – and said:

“This letter had been delayed; it is from General Spielsdorf. He might have been here yesterday, he may not come till tomorrow or he may be here today.”

He put the open letter into my hand; but he did not look pleased, as he used when a guest, especially one so much loved as the General, was coming.

On the contrary, he looked as if he wished him at the bottom of the Red Sea. There was plainly something on his mind which he did not choose to divulge.

“Papa, darling, will you tell me this?” said I, suddenly laying my hand on his arm, and looking, I am sure, imploringly in his face.

“Perhaps,” he answered, smoothing my hair caressingly over my eyes.

“Does the doctor think me very ill?”

“No, dear; he thinks, if right steps are taken, you will be quite well again, at least, on the high road to a complete recovery, in a day or two,” he answered, a little dryly. “I wish our good friend, the General, had chosen any other time; that is, I wish you had been perfectly well to receive him.”

“But do tell me, papa,” I insisted, “what does he think is the matter with me?”

“Nothing; you must not plague me with questions,” he answered, with more irritation than I ever remember him to have displayed before; and seeing that I looked wounded, I suppose, he kissed me, and added, “You shall know all about it in a day or two; that is, all that I know. In the meantime you are not to trouble your head about it.”

He turned and left the room, but came back before I had done wondering and puzzling over the oddity of all this; it was merely to say that he was going to Karnstein, and had ordered the carriage to be ready at twelve, and that I and Madame should accompany him; he was going to see the priest who lived near those picturesque grounds, upon business, and as Carmilla had never seen them, she could follow, when she came down, with Mademoiselle, who would bring materials for what you call a picnic, which might be laid for us in the ruined castle.

At twelve o’clock, accordingly, I was ready, and not long after, my father, Madame and I set out upon our projected drive.

Passing the drawbridge we turn to the right, and follow the road over the steep Gothic bridge, westward, to reach the deserted village and ruined castle of Karnstein.

No sylvan drive can be fancied prettier. The ground breaks into gentle hills and hollows, all clothed with beautiful wood, totally destitute of the comparative formality which artificial planting and early culture and pruning impart.

The irregularities of the ground often lead the road out of its course, and cause it to wind beautifully round the sides of broken hollows and the steeper sides of the hills, among varieties of ground almost inexhaustible.

Turning one of these points, we suddenly encountered our old friend, the General, riding towards us, attended by a mounted servant. His portmanteaus were following in a hired wagon, such as we term a cart.

The General dismounted as we pulled up, and, after the usual greetings, was easily persuaded to accept the vacant seat in the carriage and send his horse on with his servant to the schloss.

CHAPTER X

Bereaved

It was about ten months since we had last seen him: but that time had sufficed to make an alteration of years in his appearance. He had grown thinner; something of gloom and anxiety had taken the place of that cordial serenity which used to characterize his features. His dark blue eyes, always penetrating, now gleamed with a sterner light from under his shaggy grey eyebrows. It was not such a change as grief alone usually induces, and angrier passions seemed to have had their share in bringing it about.

We had not long resumed our drive, when the General began to talk, with his usual soldierly directness, of the bereavement, as he termed it, which he had sustained in the death of his beloved niece and ward; and he then broke out in a tone of intense bitterness and fury, inveighing against the “hellish arts” to which she had fallen a victim, and expressing, with more exasperation than piety, his wonder that Heaven should tolerate so monstrous an indulgence of the lusts and malignity of hell.

My father, who saw at once that something very extraordinary had befallen, asked him, if not too painful to him, to detail the circumstances which he thought justified the strong terms in which he expressed himself.

“I should tell you all with pleasure,” said the General, “but you would not believe me.”

“Why should I not?” he asked.

“Because,” he answered testily, “you believe in nothing but what consists with your own prejudices and illusions. I remember when I was like you, but I have learned better.”

“Try me,” said my father; “I am not such a dogmatist as you suppose. Besides which, I very well know that you generally require proof for what you believe, and am, therefore, very strongly predisposed to respect your conclusions.”

“You are right in supposing that I have not been led lightly into a belief in the marvellous – for what I have experienced is marvellous – and I have been forced by extraordinary evidence to credit that which ran counter, diametrically, to all my theories. I have been made the dupe of a preternatural conspiracy.”

Notwithstanding his professions of confidence in the General’s penetration, I saw my father, at this point, glance at the General, with, as I thought, a marked suspicion of his sanity.

The General did not see it, luckily. He was looking gloomily and curiously into the glades and vistas of the woods that were opening before us.

“You are going to the Ruins of Karnstein?” he said. “Yes, it is a lucky coincidence; do you know I was going to ask you to bring me there to inspect them. I have a special object in exploring. There is a ruined chapel, ain’t there, with a great many tombs of that extinct family?”

“So there are – highly interesting,” said my father. “I hope you are thinking of claiming the title and estates?”

My father said this gaily, but the General did not recollect the laugh, or even the smile, which courtesy exacts for a friend’s joke; on the contrary, he looked grave and even fierce, ruminating on a matter that stirred his anger and horror.

“Something very different,” he said, gruffly. “I mean to unearth some of those fine people. I hope, by God’s blessing, to accomplish a pious sacrilege here, which will relieve our earth of certain monsters, and enable honest people to sleep in their beds without being assailed by murderers. I have strange things to tell you, my dear friend, such as I myself would have scouted as incredible a few months since.”

My father looked at him again, but this time not with a glance of suspicion – with an eye, rather, of keen intelligence and alarm.

“The house of Karnstein,” he said, “has been long extinct: a hundred years at least. My dear wife was maternally descended from the Karnsteins. But the name and title have long ceased to exist. The castle is a ruin; the very village is deserted; it is fifty years since the smoke of a chimney was seen there; not a roof left.”

“Quite true. I have heard a great deal about that since I last saw you; a great deal that will astonish you. But I had better relate everything in the order in which it occurred,” said the General. “You saw my dear ward – my child, I may call her. No creature could have been more beautiful, and only three months ago none more blooming.”

“Yes, poor thing! when I saw her last she certainly was quite lovely,” said my father. “I was grieved and shocked more than I can tell you, my dear friend; I knew what a blow it was to you.”

He took the General’s hand, and they exchanged a kind pressure. Tears gathered in the old soldier’s eyes. He did not seek to conceal them. He said:

“We have been very old friends; I knew you would feel for me, childless as I am. She had become an object of very near interest to me, and repaid my care by an affection that cheered my home and made my life happy. That is all gone. The years that remain to me on earth may not be very long; but by God’s mercy I hope to accomplish a service to mankind before I die, and to subserve the vengeance of Heaven upon the fiends who have murdered my poor child in the spring of her hopes and beauty!”

“You said, just now, that you intended relating everything as it occurred,” said my father. “Pray do; I assure you that it is not mere curiosity that prompts me.”

By this time we had reached the point at which the Drunstall road, by which the General had come, diverges from the road which we were travelling to Karnstein.

“How far is it to the ruins?” inquired the General, looking anxiously forward.

“About half a league,” answered my father. “Pray let us hear the story you were so good as to promise.”

CHAPTER XI

The Story

“With all my heart,” said the General, with an effort; and after a short pause in which to arrange his subject, he commenced one of the strangest narratives I ever heard.

“My dear child was looking forward with great pleasure to the visit you had been so good as to arrange for her to your charming daughter.” Here he made me a gallant but melancholy bow. “In the meantime we had an invitation to my old friend the Count Carlsfeld, whose schloss is about six leagues to the other side of Karnstein. It was to attend the series of fêtes which, you remember, were given by him in honour of his illustrious visitor, the Grand Duke Charles.”

“Yes; and very splendid, I believe, they were,” said my father.

“Princely! But then his hospitalities are quite regal. He has Aladdin’s lamp. The night from which my sorrow dates was devoted to a magnificent masquerade. The grounds were thrown open, the trees hung with coloured lamps. There was such a display of fireworks as Paris itself had never witnessed. And such music – music, you know, is my weakness – such ravishing music! The finest instrumental band, perhaps, in the world, and the finest singers who could be collected from all the great operas in Europe. As you wandered through these fantastically illuminated grounds, the moonlighted château throwing a rosy light from its long rows of windows, you would suddenly hear these ravishing voices stealing from the silence of some grove, or rising from boats upon the lake. I felt myself, as I looked and listened, carried back into the romance and poetry of my early youth.

“When the fireworks were ended, and the ball beginning, we returned to the noble suite of rooms that were thrown open to the dancers. A masked ball, you know, is a beautiful sight; but so brilliant a spectacle of the kind I never saw before.

“It was a very aristocratic assembly. I was myself almost the only ‘nobody’ present.

“My dear child was looking quite beautiful. She wore no mask. Her excitement and delight added an unspeakable charm to her features, always lovely. I remarked a young lady, dressed magnificently, but wearing a mask, who appeared to me to be observing my ward with extraordinary interest. I had seen her, earlier in the evening, in the great hall, and again, for a few minutes, walking near us, on the terrace under the castle windows, similarly employed. A lady, also masked, richly and gravely dressed, and with a stately air, like a person of rank, accompanied her as a chaperon.

“Had the young lady not worn a mask, I could, of course, have been much more certain upon the question whether she was really watching my poor darling.

“I am now well assured that she was.

“We were now in one of the salons. My poor dear child had been dancing, and was resting a little in one of the chairs near the door; I was standing near. The two ladies I have mentioned had approached and the younger took the chair next my ward; while her companion stood beside me, and for a little time addressed herself, in a low tone, to her charge.

“Availing herself of the privilege of her mask, she turned to me, and in the tone of an old friend, and calling me by my name, opened a conversation with me, which piqued my curiosity a good deal. She referred to many scenes where she had met me – at Court, and at distinguished houses. She alluded to little incidents which I had long ceased to think of, but which, I found, had only lain in abeyance in my memory, for they instantly started into life at her touch.

“I became more and more curious to ascertain who she was, every moment. She parried my attempts to discover very adroitly and pleasantly. The knowledge she showed of many passages in my life seemed to me all but unaccountable; and she appeared to take a not unnatural pleasure in foiling my curiosity, and in seeing me flounder in my eager perplexity, from one conjecture to another.

“In the meantime the young lady, whom her mother called by the odd name of Millarca, when she once or twice addressed her, had, with the same ease and grace, got into conversation with my ward.

“She introduced herself by saying that her mother was a very old acquaintance of mine. She spoke of the agreeable audacity which a mask rendered practicable; she talked like a friend; she admired her dress, and insinuated very prettily her admiration of her beauty. She amused her with laughing criticisms upon the people who crowded the ballroom, and laughed at my poor child’s fun. She was very witty and lively when she pleased, and after a time they had grown very good friends, and the young stranger lowered her mask, displaying a remarkably beautiful face. I had never seen it before, neither had my dear child. But though it was new to us, the features were so engaging, as well as lovely, that it was impossible not to feel the attraction powerfully. My poor girl did so. I never saw anyone more taken with another at first sight, unless, indeed, it was the stranger herself, who seemed quite to have lost her heart to her.

“In the meantime, availing myself of the license of a masquerade, I put not a few questions to the elder lady.

“‘You have puzzled me utterly,’ I said, laughing. ‘Is that not enough? Won’t you, now, consent to stand on equal terms, and do me the kindness to remove your mask?’

“‘Can any request be more unreasonable?’ she replied. ‘Ask a lady to yield an advantage! Beside, how do you know you should recognize me? Years make changes.’

“‘As you see,’ I said, with a bow, and, I suppose, a rather melancholy little laugh.

“‘As philosophers tell us,’ she said; ‘and how do you know that a sight of my face would help you?’

“‘I should take chance for that,’ I answered. ‘It is vain trying to make yourself out an old woman; your figure betrays you.’

“‘Years, nevertheless, have passed since I saw you, rather since you saw me, for that is what I am considering. Millarca, there, is my daughter; I cannot then be young, even in the opinion of people whom time has taught to be indulgent, and I may not like to be compared with what you remember me. You have no mask to remove. You can offer me nothing in exchange.’

“‘My petition is to your pity, to remove it.’

“‘And mine to yours, to let it stay where it is,’ she replied.

“‘Well, then, at least you will tell me whether you are French or German; you speak both languages so perfectly.’

“‘I don’t think I shall tell you that, General; you intend a surprise, and are meditating the particular point of attack.’

“‘At all events, you won’t deny this,’ I said, ‘that being honoured by your permission to converse, I ought to know how to address you. Shall I say Madame la Comtesse?’

“She laughed, and she would, no doubt, have met me with another evasion – if, indeed, I can treat any occurrence in an interview every circumstance of which was prearranged, as I now believe, with the profoundest cunning, as liable to be modified by accident.

“‘As to that,’ she began; but she was interrupted, almost as she opened her lips, by a gentleman, dressed in black, who looked particularly elegant and distinguished, with this drawback, that his face was the most deadly pale I ever saw, except in death. He was in no masquerade – in the plain evening dress of a gentleman; and he said, without a smile, but with a courtly and unusually low bow:

“‘Will Madame la Comtesse permit me to say a very few words which may interest her?’

“The lady turned quickly to him, and touched her lip in token of silence; she then said to me, ‘Keep my place for me, General; I shall return when I have said a few words.’

“And with this injunction, playfully given, she walked a little aside with the gentleman in black, and talked for some minutes, apparently very earnestly. They then walked away slowly together in the crowd, and I lost them for some minutes.

“I spent the interval in cudgeling my brains for a conjecture as to the identity of the lady who seemed to remember me so kindly, and I was thinking of turning about and joining in the conversation between my pretty ward and the Countess’s daughter, and trying whether, by the time she returned, I might not have a surprise in store for her, by having her name, title, château, and estates at my fingers’ ends. But at this moment she returned, accompanied by the pale man in black, who said:

“‘I shall return and inform Madame la Comtesse when her carriage is at the door.’

“He withdrew with a bow.”

CHAPTER XII

A Petition

“‘Then we are to lose Madame la Comtesse, but I hope only for a few hours,’ I said, with a low bow.

“‘It may be that only, or it may be a few weeks. It was very unlucky his speaking to me just now as he did. Do you now know me?’

“I assured her I did not.

“‘You shall know me,’ she said, ‘but not at present. We are older and better friends than, perhaps, you suspect. I cannot yet declare myself. I shall in three weeks pass your beautiful schloss, about which I have been making enquiries. I shall then look in upon you for an hour or two, and renew a friendship which I never think of without a thousand pleasant recollections. This moment a piece of news has reached me like a thunderbolt. I must set out now, and travel by a devious route, nearly a hundred miles, with all the dispatch I can possibly make. My perplexities multiply. I am only deterred by the compulsory reserve I practice as to my name from making a very singular request of you. My poor child has not quite recovered her strength. Her horse fell with her, at a hunt which she had ridden out to witness, her nerves have not yet recovered the shock, and our physician says that she must on no account exert herself for some time to come. We came here, in consequence, by very easy stages – hardly six leagues a day. I must now travel day and night, on a mission of life and death – a mission the critical and momentous nature of which I shall be able to explain to you when we meet, as I hope we shall, in a few weeks, without the necessity of any concealment.’

“She went on to make her petition, and it was in the tone of a person from whom such a request amounted to conferring, rather than seeking a favour.

“This was only in manner, and, as it seemed, quite unconsciously. Than the terms in which it was expressed, nothing could be more deprecatory. It was simply that I would consent to take charge of her daughter during her absence.

“This was, all things considered, a strange, not to say, an audacious request. She in some sort disarmed me, by stating and admitting everything that could be urged against it, and throwing herself entirely upon my chivalry. At the same moment, by a fatality that seems to have predetermined all that happened, my poor child came to my side, and, in an undertone, besought me to invite her new friend, Millarca, to pay us a visit. She had just been sounding her, and thought, if her mamma would allow her, she would like it extremely.

“At another time I should have told her to wait a little, until, at least, we knew who they were. But I had not a moment to think in. The two ladies assailed me together, and I must confess the refined and beautiful face of the young lady, about which there was something extremely engaging, as well as the elegance and fire of high birth, determined me; and, quite overpowered, I submitted, and undertook, too easily, the care of the young lady, whom her mother called Millarca.

“The Countess beckoned to her daughter, who listened with grave attention while she told her, in general terms, how suddenly and peremptorily she had been summoned, and also of the arrangement she had made for her under my care, adding that I was one of her earliest and most valued friends.

“I made, of course, such speeches as the case seemed to call for, and found myself, on reflection, in a position which I did not half like.

“The gentleman in black returned, and very ceremoniously conducted the lady from the room.

“The demeanour of this gentleman was such as to impress me with the conviction that the Countess was a lady of very much more importance than her modest title alone might have led me to assume.

“Her last charge to me was that no attempt was to be made to learn more about her than I might have already guessed, until her return. Our distinguished host, whose guest she was, knew her reasons.

“‘But here,’ she said, ‘neither I nor my daughter could safely remain for more than a day. I removed my mask imprudently for a moment, about an hour ago, and, too late, I fancied you saw me. So I resolved to seek an opportunity of talking a little to you. Had I found that you had seen me, I would have thrown myself on your high sense of honour to keep my secret some weeks. As it is, I am satisfied that you did not see me; but if you now suspect, or, on reflection, should suspect, who I am, I commit myself, in like manner, entirely to your honour. My daughter will observe the same secrecy, and I well know that you will, from time to time, remind her, lest she should thoughtlessly disclose it.’

“She whispered a few words to her daughter, kissed her hurriedly twice, and went away, accompanied by the pale gentleman in black, and disappeared in the crowd.

“‘In the next room,’ said Millarca, ‘there is a window that looks upon the hall door. I should like to see the last of mamma, and to kiss my hand to her.’

“We assented, of course, and accompanied her to the window. We looked out, and saw a handsome old-fashioned carriage, with a troop of couriers and footmen. We saw the slim figure of the pale gentleman in black, as he held a thick velvet cloak, and placed it about her shoulders and threw the hood over her head. She nodded to him, and just touched his hand with hers. He bowed low repeatedly as the door closed, and the carriage began to move.

“‘She is gone,’ said Millarca, with a sigh.

“‘She is gone,’ I repeated to myself, for the first time – in the hurried moments that had elapsed since my consent – reflecting upon the folly of my act.

“‘She did not look up,’ said the young lady, plaintively.

“‘The Countess had taken off her mask, perhaps, and did not care to show her face,’ I said; ‘and she could not know that you were in the window.’

“She sighed, and looked in my face. She was so beautiful that I relented. I was sorry I had for a moment repented of my hospitality, and I determined to make her amends for the unavowed churlishness of my reception.

“The young lady, replacing her mask, joined my ward in persuading me to return to the grounds, where the concert was soon to be renewed. We did so, and walked up and down the terrace that lies under the castle windows.

“Millarca became very intimate with us, and amused us with lively descriptions and stories of most of the great people whom we saw upon the terrace. I liked her more and more every minute. Her gossip without being ill-natured, was extremely diverting to me, who had been so long out of the great world. I thought what life she would give to our sometimes lonely evenings at home.

“This ball was not over until the morning sun had almost reached the horizon. It pleased the Grand Duke to dance till then, so loyal people could not go away, or think of bed.

“We had just got through a crowded saloon, when my ward asked me what had become of Millarca. I thought she had been by her side, and she fancied she was by mine. The fact was, we had lost her.

“All my efforts to find her were vain. I feared that she had mistaken, in the confusion of a momentary separation from us, other people for her new friends, and had, possibly, pursued and lost them in the extensive grounds which were thrown open to us.

“Now, in its full force, I recognized a new folly in my having undertaken the charge of a young lady without so much as knowing her name; and fettered as I was by promises, of the reasons for imposing which I knew nothing, I could not even point my inquiries by saying that the missing young lady was the daughter of the Countess who had taken her departure a few hours before.

“Morning broke. It was clear daylight before I gave up my search. It was not till near two o’clock next day that we heard anything of my missing charge.

“At about that time a servant knocked at my niece’s door, to say that he had been earnestly requested by a young lady, who appeared to be in great distress, to make out where she could find the General Baron Spielsdorf and the young lady his daughter, in whose charge she had been left by her mother.

“There could be no doubt, notwithstanding the slight inaccuracy, that our young friend had turned up; and so she had. Would to heaven we had lost her!

“She told my poor child a story to account for her having failed to recover us for so long. Very late, she said, she had got to the housekeeper’s bedroom in despair of finding us, and had then fallen into a deep sleep which, long as it was, had hardly sufficed to recruit her strength after the fatigues of the ball.

“That day Millarca came home with us. I was only too happy, after all, to have secured so charming a companion for my dear girl.”

CHAPTER XIII

The Woodman

“There soon, however, appeared some drawbacks. In the first place, Millarca complained of extreme languor – the weakness that remained after her late illness – and she never emerged from her room till the afternoon was pretty far advanced. In the next place, it was accidentally discovered, although she always locked her door on the inside, and never disturbed the key from its place till she admitted the maid to assist at her toilet, that she was undoubtedly sometimes absent from her room in the very early morning, and at various times later in the day, before she wished it to be understood that she was stirring. She was repeatedly seen from the windows of the schloss, in the first faint grey of the morning, walking through the trees, in an easterly direction, and looking like a person in a trance. This convinced me that she walked in her sleep. But this hypothesis did not solve the puzzle. How did she pass out from her room, leaving the door locked on the inside? How did she escape from the house without unbarring door or window?

“In the midst of my perplexities, an anxiety of a far more urgent kind presented itself.

“My dear child began to lose her looks and health, and that in a manner so mysterious, and even horrible, that I became thoroughly frightened.

“She was at first visited by appalling dreams; then, as she fancied, by a spectre, sometimes resembling Millarca, sometimes in the shape of a beast, indistinctly seen, walking round the foot of her bed, from side to side.

“Lastly came sensations. One, not unpleasant, but very peculiar, she said, resembled the flow of an icy stream against her breast. At a later time, she felt something like a pair of large needles pierce her, a little below the throat, with a very sharp pain. A few nights after, followed a gradual and convulsive sense of strangulation; then came unconsciousness.”

I could hear distinctly every word the kind old General was saying, because by this time we were driving upon the short grass that spreads on either side of the road as you approach the roofless village which had not shown the smoke of a chimney for more than half a century.

You may guess how strangely I felt as I heard my own symptoms so exactly described in those which had been experienced by the poor girl who, but for the catastrophe which followed, would have been at that moment a visitor at my father’s château. You may suppose, also, how I felt as I heard him detail habits and mysterious peculiarities which were, in fact, those of our beautiful guest, Carmilla!

A vista opened in the forest; we were on a sudden under the chimneys and gables of the ruined village, and the towers and battlements of the dismantled castle, round which gigantic trees are grouped, overhung us from a slight eminence.

In a frightened dream I got down from the carriage, and in silence, for we had each abundant matter for thinking; we soon mounted the ascent, and were among the spacious chambers, winding stairs, and dark corridors of the castle.

“And this was once the palatial residence of the Karnsteins!” said the old General at length, as from a great window he looked out across the village, and saw the wide, undulating expanse of forest. “It was a bad family, and here its bloodstained annals were written,” he continued. “It is hard that they should, after death, continue to plague the human race with their atrocious lusts. That is the chapel of the Karnsteins, down there.”

He pointed down to the grey walls of the Gothic building partly visible through the foliage, a little way down the steep. “And I hear the axe of a woodman,” he added, “busy among the trees that surround it; he possibly may give us the information of which I am in search, and point out the grave of Mircalla, Countess of Karnstein. These rustics preserve the local traditions of great families, whose stories die out among the rich and titled so soon as the families themselves become extinct.”

“We have a portrait, at home, of Mircalla, the Countess Karnstein; should you like to see it?” asked my father.

“Time enough, dear friend,” replied the General. “I believe that I have seen the original; and one motive which has led me to you earlier than I at first intended, was to explore the chapel which we are now approaching.”

“What! see the Countess Mircalla,” exclaimed my father; “why, she has been dead more than a century!”

“Not so dead as you fancy, I am told,” answered the General.

“I confess, General, you puzzle me utterly,” replied my father, looking at him, I fancied, for a moment with a return of the suspicion I detected before. But although there was anger and detestation, at times, in the old General’s manner, there was nothing flighty.

“There remains to me,” he said, as we passed under the heavy arch of the Gothic church – for its dimensions would have justified its being so styled – “but one object which can interest me during the few years that remain to me on earth, and that is to wreak on her the vengeance which, I thank God, may still be accomplished by a mortal arm.”

“What vengeance can you mean?” asked my father, in increasing amazement.

“I mean, to decapitate the monster,” he answered, with a fierce flush, and a stamp that echoed mournfully through the hollow ruin, and his clenched hand was at the same moment raised, as if it grasped the handle of an axe, while he shook it ferociously in the air.

“What?” exclaimed my father, more than ever bewildered.

“To strike her head off.”

“Cut her head off!”

“Aye, with a hatchet, with a spade, or with anything that can cleave through her murderous throat. You shall hear,” he answered, trembling with rage. And hurrying forward he said:

“That beam will answer for a seat; your dear child is fatigued; let her be seated, and I will, in a few sentences, close my dreadful story.”

The squared block of wood, which lay on the grass-grown pavement of the chapel, formed a bench on which I was very glad to seat myself, and in the meantime the General called to the woodman, who had been removing some boughs which leaned upon the old walls; and, axe in hand, the hardy old fellow stood before us.

He could not tell us anything of these monuments; but there was an old man, he said, a ranger of this forest, at present sojourning in the house of the priest, about two miles away, who could point out every monument of the old Karnstein family; and, for a trifle, he undertook to bring him back with him, if we would lend him one of our horses, in little more than half an hour.

“Have you been long employed about this forest?” asked my father of the old man.

“I have been a woodman here,” he answered in his patois, “under the forester, all my days; so has my father before me, and so on, as many generations as I can count up. I could show you the very house in the village here, in which my ancestors lived.”

“How came the village to be deserted?” asked the General.

“It was troubled by revenants, sir; several were tracked to their graves, there detected by the usual tests, and extinguished in the usual way, by decapitation, by the stake, and by burning; but not until many of the villagers were killed.

“But after all these proceedings according to law,” he continued – “so many graves opened, and so many vampires deprived of their horrible animation – the village was not relieved. But a Moravian nobleman, who happened to be travelling this way, heard how matters were, and being skilled – as many people are in his country – in such affairs, he offered to deliver the village from its tormentor. He did so thus: There being a bright moon that night, he ascended, shortly after sunset, the towers of the chapel here, from whence he could distinctly see the churchyard beneath him; you can see it from that window. From this point he watched until he saw the vampire come out of his grave, and place near it the linen clothes in which he had been folded, and then glide away towards the village to plague its inhabitants.

“The stranger, having seen all this, came down from the steeple, took the linen wrappings of the vampire, and carried them up to the top of the tower, which he again mounted. When the vampire returned from his prowlings and missed his clothes, he cried furiously to the Moravian, whom he saw at the summit of the tower, and who, in reply, beckoned him to ascend and take them. Whereupon the vampire, accepting his invitation, began to climb the steeple, and so soon as he had reached the battlements, the Moravian, with a stroke of his sword, clove his skull in twain, hurling him down to the churchyard, whither, descending by the winding stairs, the stranger followed and cut his head off, and next day delivered it and the body to the villagers, who duly impaled and burnt them.

“This Moravian nobleman had authority from the then head of the family to remove the tomb of Mircalla, Countess Karnstein, which he did effectually, so that in a little while its site was quite forgotten.”

“Can you point out where it stood?” asked the General, eagerly.

The forester shook his head, and smiled.

“Not a soul living could tell you that now,” he said; “besides, they say her body was removed; but no one is sure of that either.”

Having thus spoken, as time pressed, he dropped his axe and departed, leaving us to hear the remainder of the General’s strange story.

CHAPTER XIV

The Meeting

“My beloved child,” he resumed, “was now growing rapidly worse. The physician who attended her had failed to produce the slightest impression on her disease, for such I then supposed it to be. He saw my alarm, and suggested a consultation. I called in an abler physician, from Gratz.

“Several days elapsed before he arrived. He was a good and pious, as well as a learned man. Having seen my poor ward together, they withdrew to my library to confer and discuss. I, from the adjoining room, where I awaited their summons, heard these two gentlemen’s voices raised in something sharper than a strictly philosophical discussion. I knocked at the door and entered. I found the old physician from Gratz maintaining his theory. His rival was combating it with undisguised ridicule, accompanied with bursts of laughter. This unseemly manifestation subsided and the altercation ended on my entrance.

“‘Sir,’ said my first physician, ‘my learned brother seems to think that you want a conjuror, and not a doctor.’

“‘Pardon me,’ said the old physician from Gratz, looking displeased, ‘I shall state my own view of the case in my own way another time. I grieve, Monsieur le General, that by my skill and science I can be of no use. Before I go I shall do myself the honour to suggest something to you.’

“He seemed thoughtful, and sat down at a table and began to write.

“Profoundly disappointed, I made my bow, and as I turned to go, the other doctor pointed over his shoulder to his companion who was writing, and then, with a shrug, significantly touched his forehead.

“This consultation, then, left me precisely where I was. I walked out into the grounds, all but distracted. The doctor from Gratz, in ten or fifteen minutes, overtook me. He apologized for having followed me, but said that he could not conscientiously take his leave without a few words more. He told me that he could not be mistaken; no natural disease exhibited the same symptoms; and that death was already very near. There remained, however, a day, or possibly two, of life. If the fatal seizure were at once arrested, with great care and skill her strength might possibly return. But all hung now upon the confines of the irrevocable. One more assault might extinguish the last spark of vitality which is, every moment, ready to die.

“‘And what is the nature of the seizure you speak of?’ I entreated.

“‘I have stated all fully in this note, which I place in your hands upon the distinct condition that you send for the nearest clergyman, and open my letter in his presence, and on no account read it till he is with you; you would despise it else, and it is a matter of life and death. Should the priest fail you, then, indeed, you may read it.’

“He asked me, before taking his leave finally, whether I would wish to see a man curiously learned upon the very subject, which, after I had read his letter, would probably interest me above all others, and he urged me earnestly to invite him to visit him there; and so took his leave.

“The ecclesiastic was absent, and I read the letter by myself. At another time, or in another case, it might have excited my ridicule. But into what quackeries will not people rush for a last chance, where all accustomed means have failed, and the life of a beloved object is at stake?

“Nothing, you will say, could be more absurd than the learned man’s letter.

“It was monstrous enough to have consigned him to a madhouse. He said that the patient was suffering from the visits of a vampire! The punctures which she described as having occurred near the throat, were, he insisted, the insertion of those two long, thin, and sharp teeth which, it is well known, are peculiar to vampires; and there could be no doubt, he added, as to the well-defined presence of the small livid mark which all concurred in describing as that induced by the demon’s lips, and every symptom described by the sufferer was in exact conformity with those recorded in every case of a similar visitation.

“Being myself wholly skeptical as to the existence of any such portent as the vampire, the supernatural theory of the good doctor furnished, in my opinion, but another instance of learning and intelligence oddly associated with some one hallucination. I was so miserable, however, that, rather than try nothing, I acted upon the instructions of the letter.

“I concealed myself in the dark dressing room, that opened upon the poor patient’s room, in which a candle was burning, and watched there till she was fast asleep. I stood at the door, peeping through the small crevice, my sword laid on the table beside me, as my directions prescribed, until, a little after one, I saw a large black object, very ill-defined, crawl, as it seemed to me, over the foot of the bed, and swiftly spread itself up to the poor girl’s throat, where it swelled, in a moment, into a great, palpitating mass.

“For a few moments I had stood petrified. I now sprang forward, with my sword in my hand. The black creature suddenly contracted towards the foot of the bed, glided over it, and, standing on the floor about a yard below the foot of the bed, with a glare of skulking ferocity and horror fixed on me, I saw Millarca. Speculating I know not what, I struck at her instantly with my sword; but I saw her standing near the door, unscathed. Horrified, I pursued, and struck again. She was gone; and my sword flew to shivers against the door.

“I can’t describe to you all that passed on that horrible night. The whole house was up and stirring. The spectre Millarca was gone. But her victim was sinking fast, and before the morning dawned, she died.”

The old General was agitated. We did not speak to him. My father walked to some little distance, and began reading the inscriptions on the tombstones; and thus occupied, he strolled into the door of a side chapel to prosecute his researches. The General leaned against the wall, dried his eyes, and sighed heavily. I was relieved on hearing the voices of Carmilla and Madame, who were at that moment approaching. The voices died away.

In this solitude, having just listened to so strange a story, connected, as it was, with the great and titled dead, whose monuments were mouldering among the dust and ivy round us, and every incident of which bore so awfully upon my own mysterious case – in this haunted spot, darkened by the towering foliage that rose on every side, dense and high above its noiseless walls – a horror began to steal over me, and my heart sank as I thought that my friends were, after all, not about to enter and disturb this triste and ominous scene.

The old General’s eyes were fixed on the ground, as he leaned with his hand upon the basement of a shattered monument.

Under a narrow, arched doorway, surmounted by one of those demoniacal grotesques in which the cynical and ghastly fancy of old Gothic carving delights, I saw very gladly the beautiful face and figure of Carmilla enter the shadowy chapel.

I was just about to rise and speak, and nodded smiling, in answer to her peculiarly engaging smile; when with a cry, the old man by my side caught up the woodman’s hatchet, and started forward. On seeing him a brutalized change came over her features. It was an instantaneous and horrible transformation, as she made a crouching step backwards. Before I could utter a scream, he struck at her with all his force, but she dived under his blow, and unscathed, caught him in her tiny grasp by the wrist. He struggled for a moment to release his arm, but his hand opened, the axe fell to the ground, and the girl was gone.

He staggered against the wall. His grey hair stood upon his head, and a moisture shone over his face, as if he were at the point of death.

The frightful scene had passed in a moment. The first thing I recollect after, is Madame standing before me, and impatiently repeating again and again, the question, “Where is Mademoiselle Carmilla?”

I answered at length, “I don’t know – I can’t tell – she went there,” and I pointed to the door through which Madame had just entered; “only a minute or two since.”

“But I have been standing there, in the passage, ever since Mademoiselle Carmilla entered; and she did not return.”

She then began to call “Carmilla,” through every door and passage and from the windows, but no answer came.

“She called herself Carmilla?” asked the General, still agitated.

“Carmilla, yes,” I answered.

“Aye,” he said; “that is Millarca. That is the same person who long ago was called Mircalla, Countess Karnstein. Depart from this accursed ground, my poor child, as quickly as you can. Drive to the clergyman’s house, and stay there till we come. Begone! May you never behold Carmilla more; you will not find her here.”

CHAPTER XV

Ordeal and Execution

As he spoke one of the strangest looking men I ever beheld entered the chapel at the door through which Carmilla had made her entrance and her exit. He was tall, narrow-chested, stooping, with high shoulders, and dressed in black. His face was brown and dried in with deep furrows; he wore an oddly-shaped hat with a broad leaf. His hair, long and grizzled, hung on his shoulders. He wore a pair of gold spectacles, and walked slowly, with an odd shambling gait, with his face sometimes turned up to the sky, and sometimes bowed down towards the ground, seemed to wear a perpetual smile; his long thin arms were swinging, and his lank hands, in old black gloves ever so much too wide for them, waving and gesticulating in utter abstraction.

“The very man!” exclaimed the General, advancing with manifest delight. “My dear Baron, how happy I am to see you, I had no hope of meeting you so soon.” He signed to my father, who had by this time returned, and leading the fantastic old gentleman, whom he called the Baron to meet him. He introduced him formally, and they at once entered into earnest conversation. The stranger took a roll of paper from his pocket, and spread it on the worn surface of a tomb that stood by. He had a pencil case in his fingers, with which he traced imaginary lines from point to point on the paper, which from their often glancing from it, together, at certain points of the building, I concluded to be a plan of the chapel. He accompanied, what I may term, his lecture, with occasional readings from a dirty little book, whose yellow leaves were closely written over.

They sauntered together down the side aisle, opposite to the spot where I was standing, conversing as they went; then they began measuring distances by paces, and finally they all stood together, facing a piece of the sidewall, which they began to examine with great minuteness; pulling off the ivy that clung over it, and rapping the plaster with the ends of their sticks, scraping here, and knocking there. At length they ascertained the existence of a broad marble tablet, with letters carved in relief upon it.

With the assistance of the woodman, who soon returned, a monumental inscription, and carved escutcheon, were disclosed. They proved to be those of the long lost monument of Mircalla, Countess Karnstein.

The old General, though not I fear given to the praying mood, raised his hands and eyes to heaven, in mute thanksgiving for some moments.

“Tomorrow,” I heard him say; “the commissioner will be here, and the Inquisition will be held according to law.”

Then turning to the old man with the gold spectacles, whom I have described, he shook him warmly by both hands and said:

“Baron, how can I thank you? How can we all thank you? You will have delivered this region from a plague that has scourged its inhabitants for more than a century. The horrible enemy, thank God, is at last tracked.”

My father led the stranger aside, and the General followed. I know that he had led them out of hearing, that he might relate my case, and I saw them glance often quickly at me, as the discussion proceeded.

My father came to me, kissed me again and again, and leading me from the chapel, said:

“It is time to return, but before we go home, we must add to our party the good priest, who lives but a little way from this; and persuade him to accompany us to the schloss.”

In this quest we were successful: and I was glad, being unspeakably fatigued when we reached home. But my satisfaction was changed to dismay, on discovering that there were no tidings of Carmilla. Of the scene that had occurred in the ruined chapel, no explanation was offered to me, and it was clear that it was a secret which my father for the present determined to keep from me.

The sinister absence of Carmilla made the remembrance of the scene more horrible to me. The arrangements for the night were singular. Two servants, and Madame were to sit up in my room that night; and the ecclesiastic with my father kept watch in the adjoining dressing room.

The priest had performed certain solemn rites that night, the purport of which I did not understand any more than I comprehended the reason of this extraordinary precaution taken for my safety during sleep.

I saw all clearly a few days later.

The disappearance of Carmilla was followed by the discontinuance of my nightly sufferings.

You have heard, no doubt, of the appalling superstition that prevails in Upper and Lower Styria, in Moravia, Silesia, in Turkish Serbia, in Poland, even in Russia; the superstition, so we must call it, of the Vampire.

If human testimony, taken with every care and solemnity, judicially, before commissions innumerable, each consisting of many members, all chosen for integrity and intelligence, and constituting reports more voluminous perhaps than exist upon any one other class of cases, is worth anything, it is difficult to deny, or even to doubt the existence of such a phenomenon as the Vampire.

For my part I have heard no theory by which to explain what I myself have witnessed and experienced, other than that supplied by the ancient and well-attested belief of the country.

The next day the formal proceedings took place in the Chapel of Karnstein.

The grave of the Countess Mircalla was opened; and the General and my father recognized each his perfidious and beautiful guest, in the face now disclosed to view. The features, though a hundred and fifty years had passed since her funeral, were tinted with the warmth of life. Her eyes were open; no cadaverous smell exhaled from the coffin. The two medical men, one officially present, the other on the part of the promoter of the inquiry, attested the marvellous fact that there was a faint but appreciable respiration, and a corresponding action of the heart. The limbs were perfectly flexible, the flesh elastic; and the leaden coffin floated with blood, in which to a depth of seven inches, the body lay immersed.

Here then, were all the admitted signs and proofs of vampirism. The body, therefore, in accordance with the ancient practice, was raised, and a sharp stake driven through the heart of the vampire, who uttered a piercing shriek at the moment, in all respects such as might escape from a living person in the last agony. Then the head was struck off, and a torrent of blood flowed from the severed neck. The body and head was next placed on a pile of wood, and reduced to ashes, which were thrown upon the river and borne away, and that territory has never since been plagued by the visits of a vampire.

My father has a copy of the report of the Imperial Commission, with the signatures of all who were present at these proceedings, attached in verification of the statement. It is from this official paper that I have summarized my account of this last shocking scene.

CHAPTER XVI

Conclusion

I write all this you suppose with composure. But far from it; I cannot think of it without agitation. Nothing but your earnest desire so repeatedly expressed, could have induced me to sit down to a task that has unstrung my nerves for months to come, and re-induced a shadow of the unspeakable horror which years after my deliverance continued to make my days and nights dreadful, and solitude insupportably terrific.

Let me add a word or two about that quaint Baron Vordenburg, to whose curious lore we were indebted for the discovery of the Countess Mircalla’s grave.

He had taken up his abode in Gratz, where, living upon a mere pittance, which was all that remained to him of the once princely estates of his family, in Upper Styria, he devoted himself to the minute and laborious investigation of the marvellously authenticated tradition of Vampirism. He had at his fingers’ ends all the great and little works upon the subject.

“Magia Posthuma,” “Phlegon de Mirabilibus,” “Augustinus de cura pro Mortuis,” “Philosophicae et Christianae Cogitationes de Vampiris,” by John Christofer Herenberg; and a thousand others, among which I remember only a few of those which he lent to my father. He had a voluminous digest of all the judicial cases, from which he had extracted a system of principles that appear to govern – some always, and others occasionally only – the condition of the vampire. I may mention, in passing, that the deadly pallor attributed to that sort of revenants, is a mere melodramatic fiction. They present, in the grave, and when they show themselves in human society, the appearance of healthy life. When disclosed to light in their coffins, they exhibit all the symptoms that are enumerated as those which proved the vampire-life of the long-dead Countess Karnstein.

How they escape from their graves and return to them for certain hours every day, without displacing the clay or leaving any trace of disturbance in the state of the coffin or the cerements, has always been admitted to be utterly inexplicable. The amphibious existence of the vampire is sustained by daily renewed slumber in the grave. Its horrible lust for living blood supplies the vigour of its waking existence. The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons. In pursuit of these it will exercise inexhaustible patience and stratagem, for access to a particular object may be obstructed in a hundred ways. It will never desist until it has satiated its passion, and drained the very life of its coveted victim. But it will, in these cases, husband and protract its murderous enjoyment with the refinement of an epicure, and heighten it by the gradual approaches of an artful courtship. In these cases it seems to yearn for something like sympathy and consent. In ordinary ones it goes direct to its object, overpowers with violence, and strangles and exhausts often at a single feast.

The vampire is, apparently, subject, in certain situations, to special conditions. In the particular instance of which I have given you a relation, Mircalla seemed to be limited to a name which, if not her real one, should at least reproduce, without the omission or addition of a single letter, those, as we say, anagrammatically, which compose it.

Carmilla did this; so did Millarca.

My father related to the Baron Vordenburg, who remained with us for two or three weeks after the expulsion of Carmilla, the story about the Moravian nobleman and the vampire at Karnstein churchyard, and then he asked the Baron how he had discovered the exact position of the long-concealed tomb of the Countess Mircalla? The Baron’s grotesque features puckered up into a mysterious smile; he looked down, still smiling on his worn spectacle case and fumbled with it. Then looking up, he said:

“I have many journals, and other papers, written by that remarkable man; the most curious among them is one treating of the visit of which you speak, to Karnstein. The tradition, of course, discolours and distorts a little. He might have been termed a Moravian nobleman, for he had changed his abode to that territory, and was, beside, a noble. But he was, in truth, a native of Upper Styria. It is enough to say that in very early youth he had been a passionate and favoured lover of the beautiful Mircalla, Countess Karnstein. Her early death plunged him into inconsolable grief. It is the nature of vampires to increase and multiply, but according to an ascertained and ghostly law.

“Assume, at starting, a territory perfectly free from that pest. How does it begin, and how does it multiply itself? I will tell you. A person, more or less wicked, puts an end to himself. A suicide, under certain circumstances, becomes a vampire. That spectre visits living people in their slumbers; they die, and almost invariably, in the grave, develop into vampires. This happened in the case of the beautiful Mircalla, who was haunted by one of those demons. My ancestor, Vordenburg, whose title I still bear, soon discovered this, and in the course of the studies to which he devoted himself, learned a great deal more.

“Among other things, he concluded that suspicion of vampirism would probably fall, sooner or later, upon the dead Countess, who in life had been his idol. He conceived a horror, be she what she might, of her remains being profaned by the outrage of a posthumous execution. He has left a curious paper to prove that the vampire, on its expulsion from its amphibious existence, is projected into a far more horrible life; and he resolved to save his once beloved Mircalla from this.

“He adopted the stratagem of a journey here, a pretended removal of her remains, and a real obliteration of her monument. When age had stolen upon him, and from the vale of years, he looked back on the scenes he was leaving, he considered, in a different spirit, what he had done, and a horror took possession of him. He made the tracings and notes which have guided me to the very spot, and drew up a confession of the deception that he had practised. If he had intended any further action in this matter, death prevented him; and the hand of a remote descendant has, too late for many, directed the pursuit to the lair of the beast.”

We talked a little more, and among other things he said was this:

“One sign of the vampire is the power of the hand. The slender hand of Mircalla closed like a vice of steel on the General’s wrist when he raised the hatchet to strike. But its power is not confined to its grasp; it leaves a numbness in the limb it seizes, which is slowly, if ever, recovered from.”

The following Spring my father took me a tour through Italy. We remained away for more than a year. It was long before the terror of recent events subsided; and to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations – sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door.

“The Dark Blue” magazine, Dec. 1871–Mar. 1872

In a Glass Darkly (1872)

“GHOSTS” WITH A GRIN

The Humorous Touch

THE GHOST AND THE BONE SETTER

(1838)

I tell the following particulars, as nearly as I can recollect them, in the words of the narrator. It may be necessary to observe that he was what is termed a well-spoken man, having for a considerable time instructed the ingenious youth of his native parish in such of the liberal arts and sciences as he found it convenient to profess – a circumstance which may account for the occurrence of several big words in the course of this narrative, more distinguished for euphonious effect than for correctness of application. I proceed then, without further preface, to lay before you the wonderful adventures of Terry Neil.

Why, thin, ’tis a quare story, an’ as thrue as you’re sittin’ there; and I’d make bould to say there isn’t a boy in the seven parishes could tell it better nor crickther than myself, for ’twas my father himself it happened to, an’ many’s the time I heerd it out iv his own mouth; an’ I can say, an’ I’m proud av that same, my father’s word was as incredible as any squire’s oath in the counthry; and so signs an’ if a poor man got into any unlucky throuble, he was the boy id go into the court an’ prove; but that doesn’t signify – he was as honest and as sober a man, barrin’ he was a little bit too partial to the glass, as you’d find in a day’s walk; an’ there wasn’t the likes of him in the counthry round for nate labourin’ an’ baan diggin’; and he was mighty handy entirely for carpenther’s work, and mendin’ ould spudethrees, an’ the likes i’ that. An’ so he tuk up with bone-settin’, as was most nathural, for none of them could come up to him in mendin’ the leg iv a stool or a table; an’ sure, there never was a bone-setter got so much custom-man an’ child, young an’ ould – there never was such breakin’ and mendin’ of bones known in the memory of man. Well, Terry Neil – for that was my father’s name – began to feel his heart growin’ light, and his purse heavy; an’ he took a bit iv a farm in Squire Phelim’s ground, just undher the ould castle, an’ a pleasant little spot it was; an’ day an’ mornin’ poor crathurs not able to put a foot to the ground, with broken arms and broken legs, id be comin’ ramblin’ in from all quarters to have their bones spliced up. Well, yer honour, all this was as well as well could be; but it was customary when Sir Phelim id go anywhere out iv the country, for some iv the tinants to sit up to watch in the ould castle, just for a kind of compliment to the ould family – an’ a mighty unplisant compliment it was for the tinants, for there wasn’t a man of them but knew there was something quare about the ould castle. The neighbours had it, that the squire’s ould grandfather, as good a gintleman – God be with him – as I heer’d, as ever stood in shoe-leather, used to keep walkin’ about in the middle iv the night, ever sinst he bursted a blood vessel pullin’ out a cork out iv a bottle, as you or I might be doin’, and will too, plase God – but that doesn’t signify. So, as I was sayin’, the ould squire used to come down out of the frame, where his picthur was hung up, and to break the bottles and glasses – God be marciful to us all – an’ dhrink all he could come at – an’ small blame to him for that same; and then if any of the family id be comin’ in, he id be up again in his place, looking as quite an’ as innocent as if he didn’t know anything about it – the mischievous ould chap.

Well, your honour, as I was sayin’, one time the family up at the castle was stayin’ in Dublin for a week or two; and so, as usual, some of the tinants had to sit up in the castle, and the third night it kem to my father’s turn. “Oh, tare an’ ouns!” says he unto himself, “an’ must I sit up all night, and that ould vagabone of a sperit, glory be to God,” says he, “serenadin’ through the house, an’ doin’ all sorts iv mischief?” However, there was no gettin’ aff, and so he put a bould face on it, an’ he went up at nightfall with a bottle of potteen, and another of holy wather.

It was rainin’ smart enough, an’ the evenin’ was darksome and gloomy, when my father got in; and what with the rain he got, and the holy wather he sprinkled on himself, it wasn’t long till he had to swally a cup iv the potteen, to keep the cowld out iv his heart. It was the ould steward, Lawrence Connor, that opened the door – and he an’ my father wor always very great. So when he seen who it was, an’ my father tould him how it was his turn to watch in the castle, he offered to sit up along with him; and you may be sure my father wasn’t sorry for that same. So says Larry:

“We’ll have a bit iv fire in the parlour,” says he.

“An’ why not in the hall?” says my father, for he knew that the squire’s picthur was hung in the parlour.

“No fire can be lit in the hall,” says Lawrence, “for there’s an ould jackdaw’s nest in the chimney.”

“Oh thin,” says my father, “let us stop in the kitchen, for it’s very unproper for the likes iv me to be sittin’ in the parlour,” says he.

“Oh, Terry, that can’t be,” says Lawrence; “if we keep up the ould custom at all, we may as well keep it up properly,” says he.

“Divil sweep the ould custom!” says my father – to himself, do ye mind, for he didn’t like to let Lawrence see that he was more afeard himself.

“Oh, very well,” says he. “I’m agreeable, Lawrence,” says he; and so down they both wint to the kitchen, until the fire id be lit in the parlour – an’ that same wasn’t long doin’.

Well, your honour, they soon wint up again, an’ sat down mighty comfortable by the parlour fire, and they beginned to talk, an’ to smoke, an’ to dhrink a small taste iv the potteen; and, moreover, they had a good rousin’ fire o’ bogwood and turf, to warm their shins over.

Well, sir, as I was sayin’ they kep’ convarsin’ and smokin’ together most agreeable, until Lawrence beginn’d to get sleepy, as was but nathural for him, for he was an ould sarvint man, and was used to a great dale iv sleep.

“Sure it’s impossible,” says my father, “it’s gettin’ sleepy you are?”

“Oh, divil a taste,” says Larry; “I’m only shuttin’ my eyes,” says he, “to keep out the parfume o’ the tobacky smoke, that’s makin’ them wather,” says he. “So don’t you mind other people’s business,” says he, stiff enough, for he had a mighty high stomach av his own (rest his sowl), “and go on,” says he, “with your story, for I’m listenin’,” says he, shuttin’ down his eyes.

Well, when my father seen spakin’ was no use, he went on with his story. By the same token, it was the story of Jim Soolivan and his ould goat he was tellin’ – an’ a plisant story it is – an’ there was so much divarsion in it, that it was enough to waken a dormouse, let alone to pervint a Christian goin’ asleep. But, faix, the way my father tould it, I believe there never was the likes heerd sinst nor before, for he bawled out every word av it, as if the life was fairly lavin’ him, thrying to keep ould Larry awake; but, faix, it was no use, for the hoorsness came an him, an’ before he kem to the end of his story Larry O’Connor beginned to snore like a bagpipes.

“Oh, blur-an’-agres,” says my father, “isn’t this a hard case,” says he, “that ould villain, lettin’ on to be my friend, and to go asleep this way, an’ us both in the very room with a sperit,” says he. “The crass o’ Christ about us!” says he; and with that he was goin’ to shake Lawrence to waken him, but he just remimbered if he roused him, that he’d surely go off to his bed, an’ lave him complately alone, an’ that id be by far worse.

“Oh thin,” says my father, “I’ll not disturb the poor boy. It id be neither friendly nor good-nathured,” says he, “to tormint him while he is asleep,” says he; “only I wish I was the same way, myself,” says he.

An’ with that he beginned to walk up an’ down, an’ sayin’ his prayers, until he worked himself into a sweat, savin’ your presence. But it was all no good; so he dhrunk about a pint of sperits, to compose his mind.

“Oh,” says he, “I wish to the Lord I was as asy in my mind as Larry there. Maybe,” says he, “if I thried I could go asleep;” an’ with that he pulled a big armchair close beside Lawrence, an’ settled himself in it as well as he could.

But there was one quare thing I forgot to tell you. He couldn’t help, in spite av himself, lookin’ now an’ thin at the picthur, an’ he immediately obsarved that the eyes av it was follyin’ him about, an’ starin’ at him, an’ winkin’ at him, wheriver he wint. “Oh,” says he, when he seen that, “it’s a poor chance I have,” says he; “an’ bad luck was with me the day I kem into this unforthunate place,” says he. “But any way there’s no use in bein’ freckened now,” says he; “for if I am to die, I may as well parspire undaunted,” says he.

Well, your honour, he thried to keep himself quite an’ asy, an’ he thought two or three times he might have wint asleep, but for the way the storm was groanin’ and creakin’ through the great heavy branches outside, an’ whistlin’ through the ould chimleys iv the castle. Well, afther one great roarin’ blast iv the wind, you’d think the walls iv the castle was just goin’ to fall, quite an’ clane, with the shakin’ iv it. All av a suddint the storm stopt, as silent an’ as quite as if it was a July evenin’. Well, your honour, it wasn’t stopped blowin’ for three minnites, before he thought he hard a sort iv a noise over the chimley-piece; an’ with that my father just opened his eyes the smallest taste in life, an’ sure enough he seen the ould squire gettin’ out iv the picthur, for all the world as if he was throwin’ aff his ridin’ coat, until he stept out clane an’ complate, out av the chimley-piece, an’ thrun himself down an the floor. Well, the slieveen ould chap – an’ my father thought it was the dirtiest turn iv all – before he beginned to do anything out iv the way, he stopped for a while to listen wor they both asleep; an’ as soon as he thought all was quite, he put out his hand and tuk hould iv the whisky bottle, an dhrank at laste a pint iv it. Well, your honour, when he tuk his turn out iv it, he settled it back mighty cute entirely, in the very same spot it was in before. An’ he beginned to walk up an’ down the room, lookin’ as sober an’ as solid as if he never done the likes at all. An’ whinever he went apast my father, he thought he felt a great scent of brimstone, an’ it was that that freckened him entirely; for he knew it was brimstone that was burned in hell, savin’ your presence. At any rate, he often heerd it from Father Murphy, an’ he had a right to know what belonged to it – he’s dead since, God rest him. Well, your honour, my father was asy enough until the sperit kem past him; so close, God be marciful to us all, that the smell iv the sulphur tuk the breath clane out iv him; an’ with that he tuk such a fit iv coughin’, that it all-a-most shuk him out iv the chair he was sittin’ in.

“Ho, ho!” says the squire, stoppin’ short about two steps aff, and turnin’ round facin’ my father, “is it you that’s in it? – an’ how’s all with you, Terry Neil?”

“At your honour’s sarvice,” says my father (as well as the fright id let him, for he was more dead than alive), “an’ it’s proud I am to see your honour tonight,” says he.

“Terence,” says the squire, “you’re a respectable man” (an’ it was thrue for him), “an industhrious, sober man, an’ an example of inebriety to the whole parish,” says he.

“Thank your honour,” says my father, gettin’ courage, “you were always a civil spoken gintleman, God rest your honour.”

“Rest my honour?” says the sperit (fairly gettin’ red in the face with the madness), “Rest my honour?” says he. “Why, you ignorant spalpeen,” says he, “you mane, niggardly ignoramush,” says he, “where did you lave your manners?” says he. “If I am dead, it’s no fault iv mine,” says he; “an’ it’s not to be thrun in my teeth at every hand’s turn, by the likes iv you,” says he, stampin’ his foot an the flure, that you’d think the boords id smash undther him.

“Oh,” says my father, “I’m only a foolish, ignorant poor man,” says he.

“You’re nothing else,” says the squire: “but any way,” says he, “it’s not to be listenin’ to your gosther, nor convarsin’ with the likes iv you, that I came UP – down I mane,” says he – (an’ as little as the mistake was, my father tuk notice iv it). “Listen to me now, Terence Neil,” says he: “I was always a good masther to Pathrick Neil, your grandfather,” says he.

“’Tis thrue for your honour,” says my father.

“And, moreover, I think I was always a sober, riglar gintleman,” says the squire.

“That’s your name, sure enough,” says my father (though it was a big lie for him, but he could not help it).

“Well,” says the sperit, “although I was as sober as most men – at laste as most gintlemin,” says he; “an’ though I was at different pariods a most extempory Christian, and most charitable and inhuman to the poor,” says he; “for all that I’m not as asy where I am now,” says he, “as I had a right to expect,” says he.

“An’ more’s the pity,” says my father. “Maybe your honour id wish to have a word with Father Murphy?”

“Hould your tongue, you misherable bliggard,” says the squire; “it’s not iv my sowl I’m thinkin’ – an’ I wondther you’d have the impidence to talk to a gintleman consarnin’ his sowl; and when I want that fixed,” says he, slappin’ his thigh, “I’ll go to them that knows what belongs to the likes,” says he. “It’s not my sowl,” says he, sittin’ down opposite my father; “it’s not my sowl that’s annoyin’ me most – I’m unasy on my right leg,” says he, “that I bruk at Glenvarloch cover the day I killed black Barney.”

My father found out afther, it was a favourite horse that fell undher him, afther leapin’ the big fence that runs along by the glin.

“I hope,” says my father, “your honour’s not unasy about the killin’ iv him?”

“Hould your tongue, ye fool,” said the squire, “an’ I’ll tell you why I’m unasy on my leg,” says he. “In the place, where I spend most iv my time,” says he, “except the little leisure I have for lookin’ about me here,” says he, “I have to walk a great dale more than I was ever used to,” says he, “and by far more than is good for me either,” says he; “for I must tell you,” says he, “the people where I am is ancommonly fond iv cowld wather, for there is nothin’ betther to be had; an’, moreover, the weather is hotter than is altogether plisant,” says he; “and I’m appinted,” says he, “to assist in carryin’ the wather, an’ gets a mighty poor share iv it myself,” says he, “an’ a mighty throublesome, wearin’ job it is, I can tell you,” says he; “for they’re all iv them surprisinly dhry, an’ dhrinks it as fast as my legs can carry it,” says he; “but what kills me intirely,” says he, “is the wakeness in my leg,” says he, “an’ I want you to give it a pull or two to bring it to shape,” says he, “and that’s the long an’ the short iv it,” says he.

“Oh, plase your honour,” says my father (for he didn’t like to handle the sperit at all), “I wouldn’t have the impidence to do the likes to your honour,” says he; “it’s only to poor crathurs like myself I’d do it to,” says he.

“None iv your blarney,” says the squire. “Here’s my leg,” says he, cockin’ it up to him – “pull it for the bare life,” says he; “an’ if you don’t, by the immortial powers I’ll not lave a bone in your carcish I’ll not powdher,” says he.

When my father heerd that, he seen there was no use in purtendin’, so he tuk hould iv the leg, an’ he kep’ pullin’ an’ pullin’, till the sweat, God bless us, beginned to pour down his face.

“Pull, you divil!” says the squire.

“At your sarvice, your honour,” says my father.

“Pull harder,” says the squire.

My father pulled like the divil.

“I’ll take a little sup,” says the squire, rachin’ over his hand to the bottle, “to keep up my courage,” says he, lettin’ an to be very wake in himself intirely. But, as cute as he was, he was out here, for he tuk the wrong one. “Here’s to your good health, Terence,” says he; “an’ now pull like the very divil.” An’ with that he lifted the bottle of holy wather, but it was hardly to his mouth, whin he let a screech out, you’d think the room id fairly split with it, an’ made one chuck that sent the leg clane aff his body in my father’s hands. Down wint the squire over the table, an’ bang wint my father halfway across the room on his back, upon the flure. Whin he kem to himself the cheerful mornin’ sun was shinin’ through the windy shutthers, an’ he was lying flat an his back, with the leg iv one of the great ould chairs pulled clane out iv the socket an’ tight in his hand, pintin’ up to the ceilin’, an’ ould Larry fast asleep, an’ snorin’ as loud as ever. My father wint that mornin’ to Father Murphy, an’ from that to the day of his death, he never neglected confission nor mass, an’ what he tould was betther believed that he spake av it but seldom. An’, as for the squire, that is the sperit, whether it was that he did not like his liquor, or by rason iv the loss iv his leg, he was never known to walk agin.

“Dublin University Magazine”, Jan. 1838

The Purcell Papers: Volume I (1880)

JIM SULIVAN’S ADVENTURES IN THE GREAT SNOW

(1839)

Jim Sulivan was a dacent, honest boy as you’d find in the seven parishes, an’ he was a beautiful singer, an’ an illegant dancer intirely, an’ a mighty plisant boy in himself; but he had the divil’s bad luck, for he married for love, an av coorse he nivver had an asy minute afther.

Nell Gorman was the girl he fancied, an’ a beautiful slip of a girl she was, jist twinty to the minute when he married her. She was as round an’ as complate in all her shapes as a firkin, you’d think, an’ her two cheeks was as fat an’ as red, it’id open your heart to look at them.

But beauty is not the thing all through, an’ as beautiful as she was she had the divil’s tongue, an’ the divil’s timper, an’ the divil’s behaviour all out; an’ it was impossible for him to be in the house with her for while you’d count tin without havin’ an argymint, an’ as sure as she riz an argymint with him she’d hit him a wipe iv a skillet or whatever lay next to her hand.

Well, this wasn’t at all plasin’ to Jim Sulivan you may be sure, an’ there was scarce a week that his head wasn’t plasthered up, or his back bint double, or his nose swelled as big as a pittaty, with the vilence iv her timper, an’ his heart was scalded everlastin’ly with her tongue; so he had no pace or quietness in body or soul at all at all, with the way she was goin’ an.

Well, your honour, one cowld snowin’ evenin’ he kim in afther his day’s work regulatin’ the men in the farm, an’ he sat down very quite by the fire, for he had a scrimmidge with her in the mornin’, an’ all he wanted was an air iv the fire in pace; so divil a word he said but dhrew a stool an’ sat down close to the fire. Well, as soon as the woman saw him,

“Move aff,” says she, “an’ don’t be inthrudin’ an the fire,” says she.

Well, he kept never mindin’, an’ didn’t let an’ to hear a word she was sayin’, so she kim over an’ she had a spoon in her hand, an’ she took jist the smallest taste in life iv the boilin’ wather out iv the pot, an’ she dhropped it down an his shins, an’ with that he let a roar you’d think the roof’id fly aff iv the house.

“Hould your tongue, you barbarrian,” says she; “you’ll waken the child,” says she.

“An’ if I done right,” says he, for the spoonful of boilin’ wather riz him entirely, “I’d take yourself,” says he, “an’ I’d stuff you into the pot an the fire, an’ boil you.” says he, “into castor oil,” says he.

“That’s purty behavour,” says she; “it’s fine usage you’re givin’ me, isn’t it?” says she, gettin’ wickeder every minute; “but before I’m boiled,” says she, “thry how you like that,” says she; an’, sure enough, before he had time to put up his guard, she hot him a rale terrible clink iv the iron spoon acrass the jaw.

“Hould me, some iv ye, or I’ll murdher her,” says he.

“Will you?” says she, an’ with that she hot him another tin times as good as the first.

“By jabers,” says he, slappin’ himself behind, “that’s the last salute you’ll ever give me,” says he; “so take my last blessin’,” says he, “you ungovernable baste!” says he – an’ with that he pulled an his hat an’ walked out iv the door.

Well, she never minded a word he said, for he used to say the same thing all as one every time she dhrew blood; an’ she had no expectation at all but he’d come back by the time supper’id be ready; but faix the story didn’t go quite so simple this time, for while he was walkin’, lonesome enough, down the boreen, with his heart almost broke with the pain, for his shins an’ his jaw was mighty troublesome, av course, with the thratement he got, who did he see but Mick Hanlon, his uncle’s sarvint by, ridin’ down, quite an asy, an the ould black horse, with a halter as long as himself.

“Is that Mr. Soolivan?” says the boy, says he, as soon as he saw him a good bit aff.

“To be sure it is, ye spalpeen, you,” says Jim, roarin’ out; “what do you want wid me this time a-day?” says he.

“Don’t you know me?” says the gossoon, “it’s Mick Hanlon that’s in it,” says he.

“Oh, blur-an-agers, thin, it’s welcome you are, Micky asthore,” says Jim; “how is all wid the man an’ the woman beyont?” says he.

“Oh!” says Micky, “bad enough,” says he; “the ould man’s jist aff, an’ if you don’t hurry like shot,” says he, “he’ll be in glory before you get there,” says he.

“It’s jokin’ ye are,” says Jim, sorrowful enough, for he was mighty partial to his uncle intirely.

“Oh, not in the smallest taste,” says Micky; “the breath was jist out iv him,” says he, “when I left the farm. ‘An’, says he, ‘take the ould black horse,’ says he, ‘for he’s shure-footed for the road,’ says he, ‘an’ bring, Jim Soolivan here,’ says he, ‘for I think I’d die asy af I could see him onst,’ says he.”

“Well,” says Jim, “will I have time,” says he, “to go back to the house, for it would be a consolation,” says he, “to tell the bad news to the woman?” says he.

“It’s too late you are already,” says Micky, “so come up behind me, for God’s sake,” says he, “an’ don’t waste time;” an’ with that he brought the horse up beside the ditch, an’ Jim Soolivan mounted up behind Micky, an’ they rode off; an’ tin good miles it was iv a road, an’ at the other side iv Keeper intirely; an’ it was snowin’ so fast that the ould baste could hardly go an at all at all, an’ the two bys an his back was jist like a snowball all as one, an’ almost fruz an’ smothered at the same time, your honour; an’ they wor both mighty sorrowful intirely, an’ their toes almost dhroppin’ aff wid the could.

And when Jim got to the farm his uncle was gettin’ an illegantly, an’ he was sittin’ up sthrong an’ warm in the bed, an’ improvin’ every minute, an’ no signs av dyin’ an him at all at all; so he had all his throuble for nothin’.

But this wasn’t all, for the snow kem so thick that it was impassible to get along the roads at all at all; an’ faix, instead iv gettin’ betther, next mornin’ it was only tin times worse; so Jim had jist to take it asy, an’ stay wid his uncle antil such times as the snow’id melt.

Well, your honour, the evenin’ Jim Soolivan wint away, whin the dark was closin’ in, Nell Gorman, his wife, beginned to get mighty anasy in herself whin she didn’t see him comin’ back at all; an’ she was gettin’ more an’ more frightful in herself every minute till the dark kem an’, an’ divil a taste iv her husband was coming at all at all.

“Oh!” says she, “there’s no use in purtendin’, I know he’s kilt himself; he has committed infantycide an himself,” says she, “like a dissipated bliggard as he always was,” says she, “God rest his soul. Oh, thin, isn’t it me an’ not you, Jim Soolivan, that’s the unforthunate woman,” says she, “for ain’t I cryin’ here, an’ isn’t he in heaven, the bliggard,” says she. “Oh, voh, voh, it’s not at home comfortable with your wife an’ family that you are, Jim Soolivan,” says she, “but in the other world, you aumadhaun, in glory wid the saints I hope,” says she. “It’s I that’s the unforthunate famale,” says she, “an’ not yourself, Jim Soolivan,” says she.

An’ this way she kep’ an till mornin’, cryin’ and lamintin; an’ wid the first light she called up all the sarvint bys, an’ she tould them to go out an’ to sarch every inch iv ground to find the corpse, “for I’m sure,” says she, “it’s not to go hide himself he would,” says she.

Well, they went as well as they could, rummagin’ through the snow, antil, at last, what should they come to, sure enough, but the corpse of a poor thravelling man, that fell over the quarry the night before by rason of the snow and some liquor he had, maybe; but, at any rate, he was as dead as a herrin’, an’ his face was knocked all to pieces jist like an over-boiled pitatty, glory be to God; an’ divil a taste iv a nose or a chin, or a hill or a hollow from one end av his face to the other but was all as flat as a pancake. An’ he was about Jim Soolivan’s size, an’ dhressed out exactly the same, wid a ridin’ coat an’ new corderhoys; so they carried him home, an’ they were all as sure as daylight it was Jim Soolivan himself, an’ they were wondhering he’d do sich a dirty turn as to go kill himself for spite.

Well, your honour, they waked him as well as they could, with what neighbours they could git togither, but by rason iv the snow, there wasn’t enough gothered to make much divarsion; however it was a plisant wake enough, an’ the churchyard an’ the priest bein’ convanient, as soon as the youngsthers had their bit iv fun and divarsion out iv the corpse, they burried it without a great dale iv throuble; an’ about three days afther the berrin, ould Jim Mallowney, from th’other side iv the little hill, her own cousin by the mother’s side – he had a snug bit iv a farm an’ a house close by, by the same token – kem walkin’ in to see how she was in her health, an’ he dhrew a chair, an’ he sot down an’ beginned to convarse her about one thing an’ another, antil he got her quite an’ asy into middlin’ good humour, an’ as soon as he seen it was time:

“I’m wondherin’,” says he, “Nell Gorman, sich a handsome, likely girl, ’id be thinkin’ iv nothin’ but lamintin’ an’ the likes,” says he, “an’ lingerin’ away her days without any consolation, or gettin’ a husband,” says he.

“Oh,” says she, “isn’t it only three days since I burried the poor man,” says she, “an’ isn’t it rather soon to be talkin iv marryin’ agin?”

“Divil a taste,” says he, “three days is jist the time to a minute for cryin’ afther a husband, an’ there’s no occasion in life to be keepin’ it up,” says he; “an’ besides all that,” says he, “Shrovetide is almost over, an’ if you don’t be sturrin’ yourself an’ lookin’ about you, you’ll be late,” says he, “for this year at any rate, an’ that’s twelve months lost; an’ who’s to look afther the farm all that time,” says he, “an’ to keep the men to their work?” says he.

“It’s thrue for you, Jim Mallowney,” says she, “but I’m afeard the neighbours will be all talkin’ about it,” says she.

“Divil’s cure to the word,” says he.

“An’ who would you advise?” says she.

“Young Andy Curtis is the boy,” says he.

“He’s a likely boy in himself,” says she.

“An’ as handy a gossoon as is out,” says he.

“Well, thin, Jim Mallowney,” says she, “here’s my hand, an’ you may be talkin’ to Andy Curtis, an’ if he’s willin’ I’m agreeble – is that enough?” says she.

So with that he made off with himself straight to Andy Curtis; an’ before three days more was past, the weddin’ kem an’, an’ Nell Gorman an’ Andy Curtis was married as complate as possible; an’ if the wake was plisant the weddin’ was tin times as agreeble, an’ all the neighbours that could make their way to it was there, an’ there was three fiddlers an’ lots iv pipers, an’ ould Connor Shamus the piper himself was in it – by the same token it was the last weddin’ he ever played music at, for the next mornin’, whin he was goin’ home, bein’ mighty hearty an’ plisant in himself, he was smothered in the snow, undher the ould castle; an’ by my sowl he was a sore loss to the bys an’ girls twenty miles round, for he was the illegantest piper, barrin’ the liquor alone, that ever worked a bellas.

Well, a week passed over smart enough, an’ Nell an’ her new husband was mighty well continted with one another, for it was too soon for her to begin to regulate him the way she used with poor Jim Soolivan, so they wor comfortable enough; but this was too good to last, for the thaw kem an’, an’ you may be sure Jim Soolivan didn’t lose a minute’s time as soon as the heavy dhrift iv snow was melted enough between him and home to let him pass, for he didn’t hear a word iv news from home sinst he lift it, by rason that no one, good nor bad, could thravel at all, with the way the snow was dhrifted.

So one night, when Nell Gorman an’ her new husband, Andy Curtis, was snug an’ warm in bed, an’ fast asleep, an’ everything quite, who should come to the door, sure enough, but Jim Soolivan himself, an’ he beginned flakin’ the door wid a big blackthorn stick he had, an’ roarin’ out like the divil to open the door, for he had a dhrop taken.

“What the divil’s the matther?” says Andy Curtis, wakenin’ out iv his sleep.

“Who’s batin’ the door?” says Nell; “what’s all the noise for?” says she.

“Who’s in it?” says Andy.

“It’s me,” says Jim.

“Who are you?” says Andy; “what’s your name?”

“Jim Soolivan,” says he.

“By jabers, you lie,” says Andy.

“Wait till I get at you,” says Jim, hittin’ the door a lick iv the wattle you’d hear half a mile off.

“It’s him, sure enough,” says Nell; “I know his speech; it’s his wandherin’ sowl that can’t get rest, the crass o’ Christ betune us an’ harm.”

“Let me in,” says Jim, “or I’ll dhrive the door in a top iv yis.”

“Jim Soolivan – Jim Soolivan,” says Nell, sittin’ up in the bed, an’ gropin’ for a quart bottle iv holy wather she used to hang by the back iv the bed, “don’t come in, darlin’ – there’s holy wather here,” says she; “but tell me from where you are is there anything that’s throublin’ your poor sinful sowl?” says she. “An’ tell me how many masses ’ill make you asy, an’ by this crass, I’ll buy you as many as you want,” says she.

“I don’t know what the divil you mane,” says Jim.

“Go back,” says she, “go back to glory, for God’s sake,” says she.

“Divil’s cure to the bit iv me’ll go back to glory, or anywhere else,” says he, “this blessed night; so open the door at onst an’ let me in,” says he.

“The Lord forbid,” says she.

“By jabers, you’d betther,” says he, “or it ’ill be the worse for you,” says he; an’ wid that he fell to wallopin’ the door till he was fairly tired, an’ Andy an’ his wife crassin’ themselves an’ sayin’ their prayers for the bare life all the time.

“Jim Soolivan,” says she, as soon as he was done, “go back, for God’s sake, an’ don’t be freakenin’ me an’ your poor fatherless childhren,” says she.

“Why, you bosthoon, you,” says Jim, “won’t you let your husband in,” says he, “to his own house?” says he.

“You wor my husband, sure enough,” says she, “but it’s well you know, Jim Soolivan, you’re not my husband now,” says she.

“You’re as dhrunk as can be consaved,” says Jim.

“Go back, in God’s name, pacibly to your grave,” says Nell.

“By my sowl, it’s to my grave you’ll sind me, sure enough,” says he, “you hardhearted bain’, for I’m jist aff wid the cowld,” says he.

“Jim Sulivan,” says she, “it’s in your dacent coffin you should be, you unforthunate sperit,” says she; “what is it’s annoyin’ your sowl, in the wide world, at all?” says she; “hadn’t you everything complate?” says she, “the oil, an’ the wake, an’ the berrin’?” says she.

“Och, by the hoky,” says Jim, “it’s too long I’m makin’ a fool iv mysilf, gostherin’ wid you outside iv my own door,” says he, “for it’s plain to be seen,” says he, “you don’t know what you’re sayin’, an’ no one else knows what you mane, you unforthunate fool,” says he; “so, onst for all, open the door quietly,” says he, “or, by my sowkins, I’ll not lave a splinther together,” says he.

Well, whin Nell an’ Andy seen he was getting vexed, they beginned to bawl out their prayers, with the fright, as if the life was lavin’ them; an’ the more he bate the door, the louder they prayed, until at last Jim was fairly tired out.

“Bad luck to you,” says he; “for a rale divil av a woman,” says he. “I can’t get any advantage av you, any way; but wait till I get hould iv you, that’s all,” says he. An’ he turned aff from the door, an’ wint round to the cowhouse, an’ settled himself as well as he could, in the sthraw; an’ he was tired enough wid the thravellin’ he had in the daytime, an’ a good dale bothered with what liquor he had taken; so he was purty sure of sleepin’ wherever he thrun himself.

But, by my sowl, it wasn’t the same way with the man an’ the woman in the house – for divil a wink iv sleep, good or bad, could they get at all, wid the fright iv the sperit, as they supposed; an’ with the first light they sint a little gossoon, as fast as he could wag, straight off, like a shot, to the priest, an’ to desire him, for the love o’ God, to come to them an the minute, an’ to bring, if it was plasin’ to his raverence, all the little things he had for sayin’ mass, an’ savin’ sowls, an’ banishin’ sperits, an’ freakenin’ the divil, an’ the likes iv that. An’ it wasn’t long till his raverence kem down, sure enough, on the ould grey mare, wid the little mass-boy behind him, an’ the prayer-books an’ Bibles, an’ all the other mystarious articles that was wantin’, along wid him; an’ as soon as he kem in, “God save all here,” says he.

“God save ye, kindly, your raverence,” says they.

“An’ what’s gone wrong wid ye?” says he; “ye must be very bad,” says he, “entirely, to disturb my devotions,” says he, “this way, jist at breakfast-time,” says he.

“By my sowkins,” says Nell, “it’s bad enough we are, your raverence,” says she, “for it’s poor Jim’s sperit,” says she; “God rest his sowl, wherever it is,” says she, “that was wandherin’ up an’ down, opposite the door all night,” says she, “in the way it was no use at all, thryin’ to get a wink iv sleep,” says she.

“It’s to lay it, you want me, I suppose,” says the priest.

“If your raverence ’id do that same, it ’id be plasin’ to us,” says Andy.

“It’ll be rather expinsive,” says the priest.

“We’ll not differ about the price, your raverence,” says Andy.

“Did the sperit stop long?” says the priest.

“Most part iv the night,” says Nell, “the Lord be merciful to us all!” says she.

“That’ll make it more costly than I thought,” says he. “An’ did it make much noise?” says he.

“By my sowl, it’s it that did,” says Andy; “leatherin’ the door wid sticks and stones,” says he, “antil I fairly thought every minute,” says he, “the ould boords’id smash, an’ the sperit’id be in an top iv us – God bless us,” says he.

“Phiew!” says the priest; “it’ll cost a power iv money.”

“Well, your raverence,” says Andy, “take whatever you like,” says he; “only make sure it won’t annoy us any more,” says he.

“Oh! by my sowkins,” says the priest, “it’ll be the quarest ghost in the siven parishes,” says he, “if it has the courage to come back,” says he, “afther what I’ll do this mornin’, plase God,” says he; “so we’ll say twelve pounds; an’ God knows it’s chape enough,” says he, “considherin’ all the sarcumstances,” says he.

Well, there wasn’t a second word to the bargain; so they paid him the money down, an’ he sot the table doun like an althar, before the door, an’ he settled it out wid all the things he had wid him; an’ he lit a bit iv a holy candle, an’ he scathered his holy wather right an’ left; an’ he took up a big book, an’ he wint an readin’ for half an hour, good; an’ whin he kem to the end, he tuck hould iv his little bell, and he beginned to ring it for the bare life; an’, by my sowl, he rung it so well, that he wakened Jim Sulivan in the cowhouse, where he was sleepin’, an’ up he jumped, widout a minute’s delay, an’ med right for the house, where all the family, an’ the priest, an’ the little mass-boy was assimbled, layin’ the ghost; an’ as soon as his raverence seen him comin’ in at the door, wid the fair fright, he flung the bell at his head, an’ hot him sich a lick iv it in the forehead, that he sthretched him on the floor; but fain; he didn’t wait to ax any questions, but he cut round the table as if the divil was afther him, an’ out at the door, an’ didn’t stop even as much as to mount an his mare, but leathered away down the boreen as fast as his legs could carry him, though the mud was up to his knees, savin’ your presence.

Well, by the time Jim kem to himself, the family persaved the mistake, an’ Andy wint home, lavin’ Nell to make the explanation. An’ as soon as Jim heerd it all, he said he was quite contint to lave her to Andy, entirely; but the priest would not hear iv it; an’ he jist med him marry his wife over again, an’ a merry weddin’ it was, an’ a fine collection for his raverence. An’ Andy was there along wid the rest, an’ the priest put a small pinnance upon him, for bein’ in too great a hurry to marry a widdy.

An’ bad luck to the word he’d allow anyone to say an the business, ever after, at all, at all; so, av coorse, no one offinded his raverence, by spakin’ iv the twelve pounds he got for layin’ the sperit.

An’ the neighbours wor all mighty well plased, to be sure, for gettin’ all the divarsion of a wake, an’ two weddin’s for nothin’.

“Dublin University Magazine”, Jul. 1839

The Purcell Papers: Volume III (1880)

THE QUARE GANDER

(1840)

As I rode at a slow walk, one soft autumn evening, from the once noted and noticeable town of Emly, now a squalid village, towards the no less remarkable town of Tipperary, I fell into a meditative mood.

My eye wandered over a glorious landscape; a broad sea of cornfields, that might have gladdened even a golden age, was waving before me; groups of little cabins, with their poplars, osiers, and light mountain ashes, clustered shelteringly around them, were scattered over the plain; the thin blue smoke arose floating through their boughs in the still evening air. And far away with all their broad lights and shades, softened with the haze of approaching twilight, stood the bold wild Galties.

As I gazed on this scene, whose richness was deepened by the melancholy glow of the setting sun, the tears rose to my eyes, and I said:

“Alas, my country! what a mournful beauty is thine. Dressed in loveliness and laughter, there is mortal decay at thy heart: sorrow, sin, and shame have mingled thy cup of misery. Strange rulers have bruised thee, and laughed thee to scorn, and they have made all thy sweetness bitter. Thy shames and sins are the austere fruits of thy miseries, and thy miseries have been poured out upon thee by foreign hands. Alas, my stricken country! clothed with this most pity-moving smile, with this most unutterably mournful loveliness, thou sore-grieved, thou desperately-beloved! Is there for thee, my country, a resurrection?”

I know not how long I might have continued to rhapsodise in this strain, had not my wandering thoughts been suddenly recalled to my own immediate neighbourhood by the monotonous clatter of a horse’s hoofs upon the road, evidently moving, at that peculiar pace which is neither a walk nor a trot, and yet partakes of both, so much in vogue among the southern farmers.

In a moment my pursuer was up with me, and checking his steed into a walk he saluted me with much respect. The cavalier was a light-built fellow, with good-humoured sunburnt features, a shrewd and lively black eye, and a head covered with a crop of close curly black hair, and surmounted with a turf-coloured caubeen, in the packthread band of which was stuck a short pipe, which had evidently seen much service.

My companion was a dealer in all kinds of local lore, and soon took occasion to let me see that he was so.

After two or three short stories, in which the scandalous and supernatural were happily blended, we happened to arrive at a narrow road or bohereen leading to a snug-looking farmhouse.

“That’s a comfortable bit iv a farm,” observed my comrade, pointing towards the dwelling with his thumb; “a shnug spot, and belongs to the Mooneys this long time. ’Tis a noted place for what happened wid the famous gandher there in former times.”

“And what was that?” inquired I.

“What was it happened wid the gandher!” ejaculated my companion in a tone of indignant surprise; “the gandher iv Ballymacrucker, the gandher! Your raverence must be a stranger in these parts. Sure every fool knows all about the gandher, and Terence Mooney, that was, rest his sowl. Begorra, ’tis surprisin’ to me how in the world you didn’t hear iv the gandher; and may be it’s funnin me ye are, your raverence.”

I assured him to the contrary, and conjured him to narrate to me the facts, an unacquaintance with which was sufficient it appeared to stamp me as an ignoramus of the first magnitude.

It did not require much entreaty to induce my communicative friend to relate the circumstance, in nearly the following words:

~   ~   ~   ~

Terence Mooney was an honest boy and well to do; an’ he rinted the biggest farm on this side iv the Galties; an’ bein’ mighty cute an’ a sevare worker, it was small wonder he turned a good penny every harvest. But unluckily he was blessed with an illegant large family iv daughters, an’ iv coorse his heart was allamost bruk, striving to make up fortunes for the whole of them. An’ there wasn’t a conthrivance iv any soart or description for makin’ money out iv the farm, but he was up to.

Well, among the other ways he had iv gettin’ up in the world, he always kep a power iv turkeys, and all soarts iv poulthry; an’ he was out iv all rason partial to geese – an’ small blame to him for that same – for twice’t a year you can pluck them as bare as my hand – an’ get a fine price for the feathers, an’ plenty of rale sizable eggs – an’ when they are too ould to lay any more, you can kill them, an’ sell them to the gintlemen for goslings, d’ye see, let alone that a goose is the most manly bird that is out.

Well, it happened in the coorse iv time that one ould gandher tuck a wondherful likin’ to Terence, an’ divil a place he could go serenadin’ about the farm, or lookin’ afther the men, but the gandher’id be at his heels, an’ rubbin’ himself agin his legs, an’ lookin’ up in his face jist like any other Christian’id do; an’ begorra, the likes iv it was never seen – Terence Mooney an’ the gandher wor so great.

An’ at last the bird was so engagin’ that Terence would not allow it to be plucked any more, an’ kep it from that time out for love an’ affection – just all as one like one iv his childer.

But happiness in perfection never lasts long, an’ the neighbours beginn’d to suspect the nathur an’ intentions iv the gandher, an’ some iv them said it was the divil, an’ more iv them that it was a fairy.

Well, Terence could not but hear something of what was sayin’, an’ you may be sure he was not altogether asy in his mind about it, an’ from one day to another he was gettin’ more ancomfortable in himself, until he detarmined to sind for Jer Garvan, the fairy docther in Garryowen, an’ it’s he was the ilegant hand at the business, an’ divil a sperit’id say a crass word to him, no more nor a priest. An’ moreover he was very great wid ould Terence Mooney – this man’s father that was.

So without more about it he was sint for, an’ sure enough the divil a long he was about it, for he kem back that very evenin’ along wid the boy that was sint for him, an’ as soon as he was there, an’ tuck his supper, an’ was done talkin’ for a while, he beginned of coorse to look into the gandher.

Well, he turned it this away an’ that away, to the right an’ to the left, an’ straightways an’ upside-down, an’ when he was tired handlin’ it, says he to Terence Mooney:

“Terence,” says he, “you must remove the bird into the next room,” says he, “an’ put a petticoat,” says he, “or anny other convaynience round his head,” says he.

“An’ why so?” says Terence.

“Becase,” says Jer, says he.

“Becase what?” says Terence.

“Becase,” says Jer, “if it isn’t done you’ll never be asy again,” says he, “or pusilanimous in your mind,” says he; “so ax no more questions, but do my biddin’,” says he.

“Well,” says Terence, “have your own way,” says he.

An’ wid that he tuck the ould gandher, an’ giv’ it to one iv the gossoons.

“An’ take care,” says he, “don’t smother the crathur,” says he.

Well, as soon as the bird was gone, says Jer Garvan says he:

“Do you know what that ould gandher is, Terence Mooney?”

“Divil a taste,” says Terence.

“Well then,” says Jer, “the gandher is your own father,” says he.

“It’s jokin’ you are,” says Terence, turnin’ mighty pale; “how can an ould gandher be my father?” says he.

“I’m not funnin’ you at all,” says Jer; “it’s thrue what I tell you, it’s your father’s wandherin’ sowl,” says he, “that’s naturally tuck pissession iv the ould gandher’s body,” says he. “I know him many ways, and I wondher,” says he, “you do not know the cock iv his eye yourself,” says he.

“Oh blur an’ ages!” says Terence, “what the divil will I ever do at all at all,” says he; “it’s all over wid me, for I plucked him twelve times at the laste,” says he.

“That can’t be helped now,” says Jer; “it was a sevare act surely,” says he, “but it’s too late to lamint for it now,” says he; “the only way to prevint what’s past,” says he, “is to put a stop to it before it happens,” says he.

“Thrue for you,” says Terence, “but how the divil did you come to the knowledge iv my father’s sowl,” says he, “bein’ in the owld gandher,” says he.

“If I tould you,” says Jer, “you would not undherstand me,” says he, “without book-larnin’ an’ gasthronomy,” says he; “so ax me no questions,” says he, “an’ I’ll tell you no lies. But b’lieve me in this much,” says he, “it’s your father that’s in it,” says he; “an’ if I don’t make him spake tomorrow mornin’,” says he, “I’ll give you lave to call me a fool,” says he.

“Say no more,” says Terence, “that settles the business,” says he; “an’ oh! blur and ages is it not a quare thing,” says he, “for a dacent respictable man,” says he, “to be walkin’ about the counthry in the shape iv an ould gandher,” says he; “and oh, murdher, murdher! is not it often I plucked him,” says he, “an’ thundher and ouns might not I have ate him,” says he; and wid that he fell into a could parspiration, savin’ your prisince, an was on the pint iv faintin’ wid the bare notions iv it.

Well, whin he was come to himself agin, says Jerry to him quiet an’ asy:

“Terence,” says he, “don’t be aggravatin’ yourself,” says he; “for I have a plan composed that ’ill make him spake out,” says he, “an’ tell what it is in the world he’s wantin’,” says he; “an’ mind an’ don’t be comin’ in wid your gosther, an’ to say agin anything I tell you,” says he, “but jist purtind, as soon as the bird is brought back,” says he, “how that we’re goin’ to sind him tomorrow mornin’ to market,” says he. “An’ if he don’t spake tonight,” says he, “or gother himself out iv the place,” says he, “put him into the hamper airly, and sind him in the cart,” says he, “straight to Tipperary, to be sould for ating,” says he, “along wid the two gossoons,” says he, “an’ my name isn’t Jer Garvan,” says he, “if he doesn’t spake out before he’s halfway,” says he. “An’ mind,” says he, “as soon as iver he says the first word,” says he, “that very minute bring him aff to Father Crotty,” says he; “an’ if his raverence doesn’t make him ratire,” says he, “like the rest iv his parishioners, glory be to God,” says he, “into the siclusion iv the flames iv purgathory,” says he, “there’s no vartue in my charums,” says he.

Well, wid that the ould gandher was let into the room agin, an’ they all beginned to talk iv sindin’ him the nixt mornin’ to be sould for roastin’ in Tipperary, jist as if it was a thing andoubtingly settled. But divil a notice the gandher tuck, no more nor if they wor spaking iv the Lord-Liftinant; an’ Terence desired the boys to get ready the kish for the poulthry, an’ to “settle it out wid hay soft an’ shnug,” says he, “for it’s the last jauntin’ the poor ould gandher ’ill get in this world,” says he.

Well, as the night was gettin’ late, Terence was growin’ mighty sorrowful an’ downhearted in himself entirely wid the notions iv what was goin’ to happen. An’ as soon as the wife an’ the crathurs war fairly in bed, he brought out some illegant potteen, an’ himself an’ Jer Garvan sot down to it; an’ begorra, the more anasy Terence got, the more he dhrank, and himself and Jer Garvan finished a quart betune them. It wasn’t an imparial though, an’ more’s the pity, for them wasn’t anvinted antil short since; but divil a much matther it signifies any longer if a pint could hould two quarts, let alone what it does, sinst Father Mathew – the Lord purloin his raverence – begin’d to give the pledge, an’ wid the blessin’ iv timperance to deginerate Ireland.

An’ begorra, I have the meddle myself; an’ it’s proud I am iv that same, for abstamiousness is a fine thing, although it’s mighty dhry.

Well, whin Terence finished his pint, he thought he might as well stop; “for enough is as good as a faste,” says he; “an’ I pity the vagabond,” says he, “that is not able to conthroul his licquor,” says he, “an’ to keep constantly inside iv a pint measure,” said he; an’ wid that he wished Jer Garvan a goodnight, an’ walked out iv the room.

But he wint out the wrong door, bein’ a thrifle hearty in himself, an’ not rightly knowin’ whether he was standin’ on his head or his heels, or both iv them at the same time, an’ in place iv gettin’ into bed, where did he thrun himself but into the poulthry hamper, that the boys had settled out ready for the gandher in the mornin’. An’ sure enough he sunk down soft an’ complate through the hay to the bottom; an’ wid the turnin’ and roulin’ about in the night, the divil a bit iv him but was covered up as shnug as a lumper in a pittaty furrow before mornin’.

So wid the first light, up gets the two boys, that war to take the sperit, as they consaved, to Tipperary; an’ they cotched the ould gandher, an’ put him in the hamper, and clapped a good wisp iv hay an’ the top iv him, and tied it down sthrong wid a bit iv a coard, and med the sign iv the crass over him, in dhread iv any harum, an’ put the hamper up on the car, wondtherin’ all the while what in the world was makin’ the ould burd so surprisin’ heavy.

Well, they wint along quite anasy towards Tipperary, wishin’ every minute that some iv the neighbours bound the same way ’id happen to fall in with them, for they didn’t half like the notions iv havin’ no company but the bewitched gandher, an’ small blame to them for that same.

But although they wor shaking in their skhins in dhread iv the ould bird beginnin’ to convarse them every minute, they did not let an’ to one another, bud kep singin’ an’ whistlin’ like mad, to keep the dread out iv their hearts.

Well, afther they war on the road betther nor half an hour, they kem to the bad bit close by Father Crotty’s, an’ there was one divil of a rut three feet deep at the laste; an’ the car got sich a wondherful chuck goin’ through it, that it wakened Terence widin in the basket.

“Bad luck to ye,” says he, “my bones is bruk wid yer thricks; what the divil are ye doin’ wid me?”

“Did ye hear anything quare, Thady?” says the boy that was next to the car, turnin’ as white as the top iv a musharoon; “did ye hear anything quare soundin’ out iv the hamper?” says he.

“No, nor you,” says Thady, turnin’ as pale as himself, “it’s the ould gandher that’s gruntin’ wid the shakin’ he’s gettin’,” says he.

“Where the divil have ye put me into,” says Terence inside, “bad luck to your sowls,” says he, “let me out, or I’ll be smothered this minute,” says he.

“There’s no use in purtending,” says the boy, “the gandher’s spakin’, glory be to God,” says he.

“Let me out, you murdherers,” says Terence.

“In the name iv the blessed Vargin,” says Thady, “an’ iv all the holy saints, hould yer tongue, you unnatheral gandher,” says he.

“Who’s that, that dar to call me nicknames?” says Terence inside, roaring wid the fair passion, “let me out, you blasphamious infiddles,” says he, “or by this crass I’ll stretch ye,” says he.

“In the name iv all the blessed saints in heaven,” says Thady, “who the divil are ye?”

“Who the divil would I be, but Terence Mooney,” says he. “It’s myself that’s in it, you unmerciful bliggards,” says he, “let me out, or by the holy, I’ll get out in spite iv yes,” says he, “an’ by jabers, I’ll wallop yes in arnest,” says he.

“It’s ould Terence, sure enough,” says Thady, “isn’t it cute the fairy docther found him out,” says he.

“I’m an the pint iv snuffication,” says Terence, “let me out, I tell you, an’ wait till I get at ye,” says he, “for begorra, the divil a bone in your body but I’ll powdher,” says he.

An’ wid that, he beginned kickin’ and flingin’ inside in the hamper, and dhrivin his legs agin the sides iv it, that it was a wonder he did not knock it to pieces.

Well, as soon as the boys seen that, they skelped the ould horse into a gallop as hard as he could peg towards the priest’s house, through the ruts, an’ over the stones; an’ you’d see the hamper fairly flyin’ three feet up in the air with the joultin’; glory be to God.

So it was small wondher, by the time they got to his Raverence’s door, the breath was fairly knocked out of poor Terence, so that he was lyin’ speechless in the bottom iv the hamper.

Well, whin his Raverence kem down, they up an’ they tould him all that happened, an’ how they put the gandher into the hamper, an’ how he beginned to spake, an’ how he confissed that he was ould Terence Mooney; an’ they axed his honour to advise them how to get rid iv the spirit for good an’ all.

So says his Raverence, says he:

“I’ll take my booke,” says he, “an’ I’ll read some rale sthrong holy bits out iv it,” says he, “an’ do you get a rope and put it round the hamper,” says he, “an’ let it swing over the runnin’ wather at the bridge,” says he, “an’ it’s no matther if I don’t make the spirit come out iv it,” says he.

Well, wid that, the priest got his horse, and tuck his booke in undher his arum, an’ the boys follied his Raverence, ladin’ the horse down to the bridge, an’ divil a word out iv Terence all the way, for he seen it was no use spakin’, an’ he was afeard if he med any noise they might thrait him to another gallop an finish him intirely.

Well, as soon as they war all come to the bridge, the boys tuck the rope they had with them, an’ med it fast to the top iv the hamper an’ swung it fairly over the bridge, lettin’ it hang in the air about twelve feet out iv the wather.

An’ his Raverence rode down to the bank of the river, close by, an’ beginned to read mighty loud and bould intirely.

An’ when he was goin’ on about five minutes, all at onst the bottom iv the hamper kem out, an’ down wint Terence, falling splash dash into the water, an’ the ould gandher a-top iv him. Down they both went to the bottom, wid a souse you’d hear half a mile off.

An’ before they had time to rise agin, his Raverence, wid the fair astonishment, giv his horse one dig iv the spurs, an’ before he knew where he was, in he went, horse an’ all, a-top iv them, an’ down to the bottom.

Up they all kem agin together, gaspin’ and puffin’, an’ off down wid the current wid them, like shot in under the arch iv the bridge till they kem to the shallow wather.

The ould gandher was the first out, and the priest and Terence kem next, pantin’ an’ blowin’ an’ more than half dhrounded, an’ his Raverence was so freckened wid the droundin’ he got, and wid the sight iv the sperit, as he consaved, that he wasn’t the better of it for a month.

An’ as soon as Terence could spake, he swore he’d have the life of the two gossoons; but Father Crotty would not give him his will. An’ as soon as he was got quieter, they all endivoured to explain it; but Terence consaved he went raly to bed the night before, and his wife said the same to shilter him from the suspicion for havin’ th’ dhrop taken. An’ his Raverence said it was a mysthery, an’ swore if he cotched anyone laughin’ at the accident, he’d lay the horsewhip across their shouldhers.

An’ Terence grew fonder an’ fonder iv the gandher every day, until at last he died in a wondherful old age, lavin’ the gandher afther him an’ a large family iv childher.

An’ to this day the farm is rinted by one iv Terence Mooney’s lenial and legitimate postariors.

“Dublin University Magazine”, Oct. 1840

The Purcell Papers: Volume III (1880)

BILLY MALOWNEY’S TASTE OF LOVE AND GLORY

(1850)

Let the reader fancy a soft summer evening, the fresh dews falling on bush and flower. The sun has just gone down, and the thrilling vespers of thrushes and blackbirds ring with a wild joy through the saddened air; the west is piled with fantastic clouds, and clothed in tints of crimson and amber, melting away into a wan green, and so eastward into the deepest blue, through which soon the stars will begin to peep.

Let him fancy himself seated upon the low mossy wall of an ancient churchyard, where hundreds of grey stones rise above the sward, under the fantastic branches of two or three half-withered ash-trees, spreading their arms in everlasting love and sorrow over the dead.

The narrow road upon which I and my companion await the taxcart that is to carry me and my basket, with its rich fruitage of speckled trout, away, lies at his feet, and far below spreads an undulating plain, rising westward again into soft hills, and traversed (every here and there visibly) by a winding stream which, even through the mists of evening, catches and returns the funereal glories of the skies.

As the eye traces its wayward wanderings, it loses them for a moment in the heaving verdure of white-thorns and ash, from among which floats from some dozen rude chimneys, mostly unseen, the transparent blue film of turf smoke. There we know, although we cannot see it, the steep old bridge of Carrickadrum spans the river; and stretching away far to the right the valley of Lisnamoe: its steeps and hollows, its straggling hedges, its fair-green, its tall scattered trees, and old grey tower, are disappearing fast among the discoloured tints and haze of evening.

Those landmarks, as we sit listlessly expecting the arrival of our modest conveyance, suggest to our companion – a barelegged Celtic brother of the gentle craft, somewhat at the wrong side of forty, with a turf-coloured caubeen, patched frieze, a clear brown complexion, dark-grey eyes, and a right pleasant dash of roguery in his features – the tale, which, if the reader pleases, he is welcome to hear along with me just as it falls from the lips of our humble comrade.

His words I can give, but your own fancy must supply the advantages of an intelligent, expressive countenance, and, what is perhaps harder still, the harmony of his glorious brogue, that, like the melodies of our own dear country, will leave a burden of mirth or of sorrow with nearly equal propriety, tickling the diaphragm as easily as it plays with the heart-strings, and is in itself a national music that, I trust, may never, never – scouted and despised though it be – never cease, like the lost tones of our harp, to be heard in the fields of my country, in welcome or endearment, in fun or in sorrow, stirring the hearts of Irish men and Irish women.

My friend of the caubeen and naked shanks, then, commenced, and continued his relation, as nearly as possible, in the following words:

~   ~   ~   ~

Av coorse ye often heerd talk of Billy Malowney, that lived by the bridge of Carrickadrum. “Leum-a-rinka” was the name they put on him, he was sich a beautiful dancer. An’ faix, it’s he was the rale sportin’ boy, every way – killing the hares, and gaffing the salmons, an’ fightin’ the men, an’ funnin’ the women, and coortin’ the girls; an’ be the same token, there was not a colleen inside iv his jurisdiction but was breakin’ her heart wid the fair love iv him.

Well, this was all pleasant enough, to be sure, while it lasted; but inhuman beings is born to misfortune, an’ Bill’s divarshin was not to last always. A young boy can’t be continially coortin’ and kissin’ the girls (an’ more’s the pity) without exposin’ himself to the most eminent parril; an’ so what should happen to Billy Malowney himself, but to fall in love at last wid little Molly Donovan, in Coolnamoe.

I never could ondherstand why in the world it was Bill fell in love wid her, above all the girls in the country. She was not within four stone weight iv being as fat as Peg Brallaghan; and as for redness in the face, she could not hould a candle to Judy Flaherty. (Poor Judy! she was my sweetheart, the darlin’, an’ coorted me constant, ever antil she married a boy of the Butlers; an’ it’s twenty years now since she was buried under the ould white-thorn in Garbally. But that’s no matther!)

Well, at any rate, Molly Donovan tuck his fancy, an’ that’s everything! She had smooth brown hair – as smooth as silk – an’ a pair iv soft coaxin’ eyes – an’ the whitest little teeth you ever seen; an’, bedad, she was every taste as much in love wid himself as he was.

Well, now, he was raly stupid wid love: there was not a bit of fun left in him. He was good for nothin’ an airth bud sittin’ under bushes, smokin’ tobacky, and sighin’ till you’d wonder how in the world he got wind for it all.

An’, bedad, he was an illegant scholar, moreover; an’, so signs, it’s many’s the song he made about her; an’ if you’d be walkin’ in the evening, a mile away from Carrickadrum, begorra you’d hear him singing out like a bull, all across the country, in her praises.

Well, ye may be sure, ould Tim Donovan and the wife was not a bit too well plased to see Bill Malowney coortin’ their daughter Molly; for, do ye mind, she was the only child they had, and her fortune was thirty-five pounds, two cows, and five illegant pigs, three iron pots and a skillet, an’ a trifle iv poultry in hand; and no one knew how much besides, whenever the Lord’id be plased to call the ould people out of the way into glory!

So, it was not likely ould Tim Donovan’id be fallin’ in love wid poor Bill Malowney as aisy as the girls did; for, barrin’ his beauty, an’ his gun, an’ his dhudheen, an’ his janius, the divil a taste of property iv any sort or description he had in the wide world!

Well, as bad as that was, Billy would not give in that her father and mother had the smallest taste iv a right to intherfare, good or bad.

“An’ you’re welcome to rayfuse me,” says he, “whin I ax your lave,” says he; “an’ I’ll ax your lave,” says he, “whenever I want to coort yourselves,” says he; “but it’s your daughter I’m coortin’ at the present,” says he, “an that’s all I’ll say,” says he; “for I’d as soon take a doase of salts as be discoursin’ ye,” says he.

So it was a rale blazin’ battle betune himself and the ould people; an’, begorra, there was no soart iv blaguardin’ that did not pass betune them; an’ they put a solemn injection on Molly again seein’ him or meetin’ him for the future.

But it was all iv no use. You might as well be pursuadin’ the birds agin flying, or sthrivin’ to coax the stars out iv the sky into your hat, as be talking common sinse to them that’s fairly bothered and burstin’ wid love. There’s nothin’ like it. The toothache an’ cholic together’id compose you betther for an argyment than itself. It leaves you fit for nothin’ bud nansinse.

It’s stronger than whisky, for one good drop iv it will make you drunk for one year, and sick, begorra, for a dozen.

It’s stronger than the say, for it’ll carry you round the world an’ never let you sink, in sunshine or storm; an’, begorra, it’s stronger than Death himself, for it is not afeard iv him, bedad, but dares him in every shape.

But lovers has quarrels sometimes, and, begorra, when they do, you’d a’most imagine they hated one another like man and wife. An’ so, signs an’, Billy Malowney and Molly Donovan fell out one evening at ould Tom Dundon’s wake; an’ whatever came betune them, she made no more about it but just draws her cloak round her, and away wid herself and the sarvant-girl home again, as if there was not a corpse, or a fiddle, or a taste of divarsion in it.

Well, Bill Malowney follied her down the boreen, to try could he deludher her back again; but, if she was bitther before, she gave it to him in airnest when she got him alone to herself, and to that degree that he wished her safe home, short and sulky enough, an’ walked back again, as mad as the devil himself, to the wake, to pay a respect to poor Tom Dundon.

Well, my dear, it was aisy seen there was something wrong avid Billy Malowney, for he paid no attintion the rest of the evening to any soart of divarsion but the whisky alone; an’ every glass he’d drink it’s what he’d be wishing the divil had the women, an’ the worst iv bad luck to all soarts iv courting, until, at last, wid the goodness iv the sperits, an’ the badness iv his temper, an’ the constant flusthration iv cursin’, he grew all as one as you might say almost, saving your presince, bastely drunk!

Well, who should he fall in wid, in that childish condition, as he was deploying along the road almost as straight as the letter S, an’ cursin’ the girls, an’ roarin’ for more whisky, but the recruiting-sargent iv the Welsh Confusileers.

So, cute enough, the sargent begins to convarse him, an’ it was not long until he had him sitting in Murphy’s public-house, wid an elegant dandy iv punch before him, an’ the king’s money safe an’ snug in the lowest wrinkle of his breeches-pocket.

So away wid him, and the dhrums and fifes playing, an’ a dozen more unforthunate bliggards just listed along with him, an’ he shakin’ hands wid the sargent, and swearin’ agin the women every minute, until, be the time he kem to himself, begorra, he was a good ten miles on the road to Dublin, an’ Molly and all behind him.

It’id be no good tellin’ you iv the letters he wrote to her from the barracks there, nor how she was breaking her heart to go and see him just wanst before he’d go; but the father an’ mother would not allow iv it be no manes.

An’ so in less time than you’d be thinkin’ about it, the colonel had him polished off into it rale elegant soger, wid his gun exercise, and his bagnet exercise, and his small sword, and broad sword, and pistol and dagger, an’ all the rest, an’ then away wid him on boord a man-a-war to furrin parts, to fight for King George agin Bonyparty, that was great in them times.

Well, it was very soon in everyone’s mouth how Billy Malowney was batin’ all before him, astonishin’ the ginerals, an frightenin’ the inimy to that degree, there was not a Frinchman dare say parley voo outside of the rounds iv his camp.

You may be sure Molly was proud iv that same, though she never spoke a word about it; until at last the news kem home that Billy Malowney was surrounded an’ murdered by the Frinch army, under Napoleon Bonyparty himself. The news was brought by Jack Brynn Dhas, the peddlar, that said he met the corporal iv the regiment on the quay iv Limerick, an’ how he brought him into a public-house and thrated him to a naggin, and got all the news about poor Billy Malowney out iv him while they war dhrinkin’ it; an’ a sorrowful story it was.

The way it happened, accordin’ as the corporal tould him, was jist how the Jook iv Wellington detarmined to fight a rale tarin’ battle wid the Frinch, and Bonyparty at the same time was aiqually detarmined to fight the divil’s own scrimmidge wid the British foorces.

Well, as soon as the business was pretty near ready at both sides, Bonyparty and the general next undher himself gets up behind a bush, to look at their inimies through spyglasses, and thry would they know any iv them at the distance.

“Bedadad!” says the gineral, afther a divil iv a long spy, “I’d bet half a pint,” says he, “that’s Bill Malowney himself,” says he, “down there,” says he.

“Och!” says Bonypart, “do you tell me so?” says he – “I’m fairly heart-scalded with that same Billy Malowney,” says he; “an’ I think if I was wanst shut iv him I’d bate the rest iv them aisy,” says he.

“I’m thinking so myself,” says the gineral, says he; “but he’s a tough bye,” says he.

“Tough!” says Bonypart, “he’s the divil,” says he.

“Begorra, I’d be better plased.” says the gineral, says he, “to take himself than the Duke iv Willinton,” says he, “an’ Sir Edward Blakeney into the bargain,” says he.

“The Duke of Wellinton and Gineral Blakeney,” says Bonypart, “is great for planning, no doubt,” says he; “but Billy Malowney’s the boy for action,” says he – “an’ action’s everything, just now,” says he.

So wid that Bonypart pushes up his cocked hat, and begins scratching his head, and thinning and considherin’ for the bare life, and at last says he to the gineral:

“Gineral Commandher iv all the Foorces,” says he, “I’ve hot it,” says he: “ordher out the forlorn hope,” says he, “an’ give them as much powdher, both glazed and blasting,” says he, “an’ as much bullets do ye mind, an’ swan-dhrops an’ chain-shot,” says he, “an’ all soorts iv waipons an’ combustables as they can carry; an’ let them surround Bill Malowney,” says he, “an’ if they can get any soort iv an advantage,” says he, “let them knock him to smithereens,” says he, “an’ then take him presner,” says he; “an’ tell all the bandmen iv the Frinch army,” says he, “to play up ‘Garryowen,’ to keep up their sperits,” says he, “all the time they’re advancin’. An’ you may promise them anything you like in my name,” says he; for, by my sowl, I don’t think its many iv them “ill come back to throuble us,” says he, winkin’ at him.

So away with the gineral, an’ he ordhers out the forlorn hope, an tells the band to play, an’ everything else, just as Bonypart desired him. An’ sure enough, whin Billy Malowney heerd the music where he was standin’ taking a blast of the dhudheen to compose his mind for murdherin’ the Frinchmen as usual, being mighty partial to that tune intirely, he cocks his ear a one side, an’ down he stoops to listen to the music; but, begorra, who should be in his rare all the time but a Frinch grannideer behind a bush, and seeing him stooped in a convanient forum, bedad he let flies at him sthraight, and fired him right forward between the legs an’ the small iv the back, glory be to God! with what they call (saving your presence) a bum-shell.

Well, Bill Malowney let one roar out iv him, an’ away he rowled over the field iv battle like a slitther (as Bonypart and the Duke iv Wellington, that was watching the manoeuvres from a distance, both consayved) into glory.

An’ sure enough the Frinch was overjoyed beyont all bounds, an’ small blame to them – an’ the Duke of Wellington, I’m toult, was never all out the same man sinst.

At any rate, the news kem home how Billy Malowney was murdhered by the Frinch in furrin parts.

Well, all this time, you may be sure, there was no want iv boys comin’ to coort purty Molly Donovan; but one way ar another, she always kept puttin’ them off constant. An’ though her father and mother was nathurally anxious to get rid of her respickably, they did not like to marry her off in spite iv her teeth.

An’ this way, promising one while and puttin’ it off another, she conthrived to get on from one Shrove to another, until near seven years was over and gone from the time when Billy Malowney listed for furrin sarvice.

It was nigh hand a year from the time whin the news iv Leum-a-rinka bein’ killed by the Frinch came home, an’ in place iv forgettin’ him, as the saisins wint over, it’s what Molly was growin’ paler and more lonesome every day, antil the neighbours thought she was fallin’ into a decline; and this is the way it was with her whin the fair of Lisnamoe kem round.

It was a beautiful evenin’, just at the time iv the reapin’ iv the oats, and the sun was shinin’ through the red clouds far away over the hills iv Cahirmore.

Her father an’ mother, an’ the boys an’ girls, was all away down in the fair, and Molly Sittin’ all alone on the step of the stile, listening to the foolish little birds whistlin’ among the leaves – and the sound of the mountain-river flowin’ through the stones an’ bushes – an’ the crows flyin’ home high overhead to the woods iv Glinvarlogh – an’ down in the glen, far away, she could see the fair-green iv Lisnamoe in the mist, an’ sunshine among the grey rocks and threes – an’ the cows an’ the horses, an’ the blue frieze, an’ the red cloaks, an’ the tents, an’ the smoke, an’ the ould round tower – all as soft an’ as sorrowful as a dhrame iv ould times.

An’ while she was looking this way, an’ thinking iv Leum-a-rinka – poor Bill iv the dance, that was sleepin’ in his lonesome glory in the fields iv Spain – she began to sing the song he used to like so well in the ould times—

“Shule, shule, shale a-roon;”

an’ when she ended the verse, what do you think but she heard a manly voice just at the other side iv the hedge, singing the last words over again!

Well she knew it; her heart flutthered up like a little bird that’id be wounded, and then dhropped still in her breast. It was himself. In a minute he was through the hedge and standing before her.

“Leum!” says she.

“Mavourneen cuishla machree!” says he; and without another word they were locked in one another’s arms.

Well, it’id only be nansinse for me thryin’ an’ tell ye all the foolish things they said, and how they looked in one another’s faces, an’ laughed, an’ cried, an’ laughed again; and how, when they came to themselves, and she was able at last to believe it was raly Billy himself that was there, actially holdin’ her hand, and lookin’ in her eyes the same way as ever, barrin’ he was browner and boulder, an’ did not, maybe, look quite as merry in himself as he used to do in former times – an’ fondher for all, an’ more lovin’ than ever – how he tould her all about the wars wid the Frinchmen – an’ how he was wounded, and left for dead in the field iv battle, bein’ shot through the breast, and how he was discharged, an’ got a pinsion iv a full shillin’ a day – and how he was come back to liv the rest iv his days in the sweet glen iv Lisnamoe, an’ (if only she’d consint) to marry herself in spite iv them all.

Well, ye may aisily think they had plinty to talk about, afther seven years without once seein’ one another; and so signs on, the time flew by as swift an’ as pleasant as a bird on the wing, an’ the sun wint down, an’ the moon shone sweet an’ soft instead, an’ they two never knew a ha’porth about it, but kept talkin’ an’ whisperin’, an’ whisperin’ an’ talkin’; for it’s wondherful how often a tinder-hearted girl will bear to hear a purty boy tellin’ her the same story constant over an’ over; ontil at last, sure enough, they heerd the ould man himself comin’ up the boreen, singin’ the “Colleen Rue” – a thing he never done barrin’ whin he had a dhrop in; an’ the misthress walkin’ in front iv him, an’ two illegant Kerry cows he just bought in the fair, an’ the sarvint boys dhriving them behind.

“Oh, blessed hour!” says Molly, “here’s my father.”

“I’ll spake to him this minute,” says Bill.

“Oh, not for the world,” says she; “he’s singin’ the ‘Colleen Rue,’” says she, “and no one dar raison with him,” says she.

“An’ where ’ll I go, thin?” says he, “for they’re into the haggard an top iv us,” says he, “an’ they’ll see me iv I lep through the hedge,” says he.

“Thry the pigsty,” says she, “mavourneen,” says she, “in the name iv God,” says she.

“Well, darlint,” says he, “for your sake,” says he, “I’ll condescend to them animals,” says he.

An’ wid that he makes a dart to get in; bud, begorra, it was too late – the pigs was all gone home, and the pigsty was as full as the Burr coach wid six inside.

“Och! blur-an’-agers,” says he, “there is not room for a suckin’-pig,” says he, “let alone a Christian,” says he.

“Well, run into the house, Billy,” says she, “this minute,” says she, “an’ hide yourself antil they’re quiet,” says she, “an’ thin you can steal out,” says she, “anknownst to them all,” says she.

“I’ll do your biddin’,” says he, “Molly asthore,” says he.

“Run in thin,” says she, “an’ I’ll go an’ meet them,” says she.

So wid that away wid her, and in wint Billy, an’ where ’id he hide himself bud in a little closet that was off iv the room where the ould man and woman slep’. So he closed the doore, and sot down in an ould chair he found there convanient.

Well, he was not well in it when all the rest iv them comes into the kitchen, an’ ould Tim Donovan singin’ the “Colleen Rue” for the bare life, an’ the rest iv them sthrivin’ to humour him, and doin’ exactly everything he bid them, because they seen he was foolish be the manes iv the liquor.

Well, to be sure all this kep’ them long enough, you may be sure, from goin’ to bed, so that Billy could get no manner iv an advantage to get out iv the house, and so he sted sittin’ in the dark closet in state, cursin’ the “Colleen Rue,” and wondherin’ to the divil whin they’d get the ould man into his bed. An’, as if that was not delay enough, who should come in to stop for the night but Father O’Flaherty, of Cahirmore, that was buyin’ a horse at the fair! An’ av course, there was a bed to be med down for his raverence, an’ some other attintions; an’ a long discoorse himself an’ ould Mrs. Donovan had about the slaughter iv Billy Malowney, an’ how he was buried on the field iv battle; an’ his raverence hoped he got a dacent funeral, an’ all the other convaniences iv religion. An’ so you may suppose it was pretty late in the night before all iv them got to their beds.

Well, Tim Donovan could not settle to sleep at all at all, an’ so he kep’ discoorsin’ the wife about the new cows he bought, an’ the stripphers he sould, an’ so an for better than an hour, ontil from one thing to another he kem to talk about the pigs, an’ the poulthry; and at last, having nothing betther to discoorse about, he begun at his daughter Molly, an’ all the heart-scald she was to him be raison iv refusin’ the men. An’ at last says he:

“I onderstand,” says he, “very well how it is,” says he. “It’s how she was in love,” says he, “wid that bliggard, Billy Malowney,” says he, “bad luck to him!” says he; for by this time he was coming to his raison.

“Ah!” says the wife, says she, “Tim darlint, don’t be cursin’ them that’s dead an’ buried,” says she.

“An’ why would not I,” says he, “if they desarve it?” says he.

“Whisht,” says she, “an’ listen to that,” says she. “In the name of the Blessed Vargin,” says she, “what is it?” says she.

An’ sure enough what was it but Bill Malowney that was dhroppin’ asleep in the closet, an’ snorin’ like a church organ.

“Is it a pig,” says he, “or is it a Christian?”

“Arra! listen to the tune iv it,” says she; “sure a pig never done the like is that,” says she.

“Whatever it is,” says he, “it’s in the room wid us,” says he. “The Lord be marciful to us!” says he.

“I tould you not to be cursin’,” says she; “bad luck to you,” says she, “for an ommadhaun!” for she was a very religious woman in herself.

“Sure, he’s buried in Spain,” says he; “an’ it is not for one little innocent expression,” says he, “he’d be comin’ all that a way to annoy the house,” says he.

Well, while they war talkin’, Bill turns in the way he was sleepin’ into an aisier imposture; and as soon as he stopped snorin’ ould Tim Donovan’s courage riz agin, and says he:

“I’ll go to the kitchen,” says he, “an’ light a rish,” says he.

An’ with that away wid him, an’ the wife kep’ workin’ the beads all the time, an’ before he kem back Bill was snorin’ as loud as ever.

“Oh! bloody wars – I mane the blessed saints about us! – that deadly sound,” says he; “it’s going on as lively as ever,” says he.

“I’m as wake as a rag,” says his wife, says she, “wid the fair anasiness,” says she. “It’s out iv the little closet it’s comin,” says she.

“Say your prayers,” says he, “an’ hould your tongue,” says he, “while I discoorse it,” says he. “An’ who are ye,” says he, “in the name iv of all the holy saints?” says he, givin’ the door a dab iv a crusheen that wakened Bill inside. “I ax,” says he, “who are you?” says he.

Well, Bill did not rightly remember where in the world he was, but he pushed open the door, an’ says he:

“Billy Malowney’s my name,” says he, “an’ I’ll thank ye to tell me a betther,” says he.

Well, whin Tim Donovan heard that, an’ actially seen that it was Bill himself that was in it, he had not strength enough to let a bawl out iv him, but he dhropt the candle out iv his hand, an’ down wid himself on his back in the dark.

Well, the wife let a screech you’d hear at the mill iv Killraghlin, an’ —

“Oh,” says she, “the spirit has him, body an’ bones!” says she. “Oh, holy St. Bridget – oh, Mother iv Marcy – oh, Father O’Flaherty!” says she, screechin’ murdher from out iv her bed.

Well, Bill Malowney was not a minute remimberin’ himself, an’ so out wid him quite an’ aisy, an’ through the kitchen; bud in place iv the door iv the house, it’s what he kem to the door iv Father O’Flaherty’s little room, where he was jist wakenin’ wid the noise iv the screechin’ an’ battherin’; an’ bedad, Bill makes no more about it, but he jumps, wid one boult, clever an’ clane into his raverence’s bed.

“What do ye mane, you uncivilised bliggard?” says his raverence. “Is that a venerable way,” says he, “to approach your clargy?” says he.

“Hould your tongue,” says Bill, “an’ I’ll do ye no harum,” says he.

“Who are you, ye scoundhrel iv the world?” says his raverence.

“Whisht!” says he, “I’m Billy Malowney,” says he.

“You lie!” says his raverence for he was frightened beyont all bearin’ – an’ he makes but one jump out iv the bed at the wrong side, where there was only jist a little place in the wall for a press, an’ his raverence could not as much as turn in it for the wealth iv kingdoms. “You lie,” says he; “but for feared it’s the truth you’re tellin’,” says he, “here’s at ye in the name iv all the blessed saints together!” says he.

An’ wid that, my dear, he blazes away at him wid a Latin prayer iv the strongest description, an’, as he said himself afterwards, that was iv a nature that’id dhrive the divil himself up the chimley like a puff iv tobacky smoke, wid his tail betune his legs.

“Arra, what are ye sthrivin’ to say,” says Bill; says he, “if ye don’t hould your tongue,” says he, “wid your parly voo;” says he, “it’s what I’ll put my thumb on your windpipe,” says he, “an’ Billy Malowney never wint back iv his word yet,” says he.

“Thundher-an-owns,” says his raverence, says he – seein’ the Latin took no infect on him, at all at all an’ screechin’ that you’d think he’d rise the thatch up iv the house wid the fair fright – “and thundher and blazes, boys, will none iv yes come here wid a candle, but lave your clargy to be choked by a spirit in the dark?” says he.

Well, be this time the sarvint boys and the rest iv them wor up an’ half dressed, an’ in they all run, one on top iv another, wid pitchforks and spades, thinkin’ it was only what his raverence slep’ a dhrame iv the like, by means of the punch he was afther takin’ just before he rowl’d himself into the bed. But, begorra, whin they seen it was raly Bill Malowney himself that was in it, it was only who’d be foremost out agin, tumblin’ backways, one over another, and his raverence roarin’ an’ cursin’ them like mad for not waitin’ for him.

Well, my dear, it was betther than half an hour before Billy Malowney could explain to them all how it raly was himself, for begorra they were all iv them persuadin’ him that he was a spirit to that degree it’s a wondher he did not give in to it, if it was only to put a stop to the argiment.

Well, his raverence tould the ould people then, there was no use in sthrivin’ agin the will iv Providence an’ the vagaries iv love united; an’ whin they kem to undherstand to a sartinty how Billy had a shillin’ a day for the rest iv his days, begorra they took rather a likin’ to him, and considhered at wanst how he must have riz out of all his nansinse entirely, or his gracious Majesty’id never have condescinded to show him his countenance that way every day of his life, on a silver shillin’.

An’ so, begorra, they never stopt till it was all settled – an’ there was not sich a weddin’ as that in the counthry sinst. It’s more than forty years ago, an’ though I was no more nor a gossoon myself, I remimber it like yestherday. Molly never looked so purty before, an’ Billy Malowney was plisant beyont all hearin’, to that degree that half the girls in it was fairly tarin’ mad – only they would not let on – they had not him to themselves in place iv her. An’ begorra I’d be afeared to tell ye, because you would not believe me, since that blessid man Father Mathew put an end to all soorts of sociality, the Lord reward him, how many gallons iv potteen whisky was dhrank upon that most solemn and tindher occasion.

Pat Hanlon, the piper, had a faver out iv it; an’ Neddy Shawn Heigue, mountin’ his horse the wrong way, broke his collarbone, by the manes iv fallin’ over his tail while he was feelin’ for his head; an’ Payther Brian, the horse-docther, I am tould, was never quite right in the head ever afther; an’ ould Tim Donovan was singin’ the “Colleen Rue” night and day for a full week; an’ begorra the weddin’ was only the foundation iv fun, and the beginning iv divarsion, for there was not a year for ten years afther, an’ more, but brought round a christenin’ as regular as the sasins revarted.

(unknown periodical, June 1850)

The Purcell Papers: Volume III (1880)

APPENDIX

Additional Tales

The first four are original or early versions of tales found in the main body of this book. The final four are by way of being “historical” fiction, with no supernatural elements.

THE FORTUNES OF SIR ROBERT ARDAGH

(1838)

“The earth hath bubbles as the water hath—

And these are of them.”

In the south of Ireland, and on the borders of the county of Limerick, there lies a district of two or three miles in length, which is rendered interesting by the fact that it is one of the very few spots throughout this country in which some vestiges of aboriginal forests still remain. It has little or none of the lordly character of the American forest, for the axe has felled its oldest and its grandest trees; but in the close wood which survives live all the wild and pleasing peculiarities of nature: its complete irregularity, its vistas, in whose perspective the quiet cattle are browsing; its refreshing glades, where the grey rocks arise from amid the nodding fern; the silvery shafts of the old birch-trees; the knotted trunks of the hoary oak, the grotesque but graceful branches which never shed their honours under the tyrant pruning-hook; the soft green sward; the chequered light and shade; the wild luxuriant weeds; the lichen and the moss – all are beautiful alike in the green freshness of spring or in the sadness and sere of autumn. Their beauty is of that kind which makes the heart full with joy – appealing to the affections with a power which belongs to nature only. This wood runs up, from below the base, to the ridge of a long line of irregular hills, having perhaps, in primitive times, formed but the skirting of some mighty forest which occupied the level below.

But now, alas! whither have we drifted? whither has the tide of civilization borne us? It has passed over a land unprepared for it – it has left nakedness behind it; we have lost our forests, but our marauders remain; we have destroyed all that is picturesque, while we have retained everything that is revolting in barbarism. Through the midst of this woodland there runs a deep gully or glen, where the stillness of the scene is broken in upon by the brawling of a mountain stream, which, however, in the winter season, swells into a rapid and formidable torrent.

There is one point at which the glen becomes extremely deep and narrow; the sides descend to the depth of some hundred feet, and are so steep as to be nearly perpendicular. The wild trees which have taken root in the crannies and chasms of the rock are so intersected and entangled, that one can with difficulty catch a glimpse of the stream which wheels, flashes, and foams below, as if exulting in the surrounding silence and solitude.

This spot was not unwisely chosen, as a point of no ordinary strength, for the erection of a massive square tower or keep, one side of which rises as if in continuation of the precipitous cliff on which it is based. Originally, the only mode of ingress was by a narrow portal in the very wall which overtopped the precipice, opening upon a ledge of rock which afforded a precarious pathway, cautiously intersected, however, by a deep trench cut out with great labour in the living rock; so that, in its pristine state, and before the introduction of artillery into the art of war, this tower might have been pronounced, and that not presumptuously, impregnable.

The progress of improvement and the increasing security of the times had, however, tempted its successive proprietors, if not to adorn, at least to enlarge their premises, and about the middle of the last century, when the castle was last inhabited, the original square tower formed but a small part of the edifice.

The castle, and a wide tract of the surrounding country, had from time immemorial belonged to a family which, for distinctness, we shall call by the name of Ardagh; and owing to the associations which, in Ireland, almost always attach to scenes which have long witnessed alike the exercise of stern feudal authority, and of that savage hospitality which distinguished the good old times, this building has become the subject and the scene of many wild and extraordinary traditions. One of them I have been enabled, by a personal acquaintance with an eyewitness of the events, to trace to its origin; and yet it is hard to say whether the events which I am about to record appear more strange and improbable as seen through the distorting medium of tradition, or in the appalling dimness of uncertainty which surrounds the reality.

Tradition says that, sometime in the last century, Sir Robert Ardagh, a young man, and the last heir of that family, went abroad and served in foreign armies; and that, having acquired considerable honour and emolument, he settled at Castle Ardagh, the building we have just now attempted to describe. He was what the country people call a dark man; that is, he was considered morose, reserved, and ill-tempered; and, as it was supposed from the utter solitude of his life, was upon no terms of cordiality with the other members of his family.

The only occasion upon which he broke through the solitary monotony of his life was during the continuance of the racing season, and immediately subsequent to it; at which time he was to be seen among the busiest upon the course, betting deeply and unhesitatingly, and invariably with success. Sir Robert was, however, too well known as a man of honour, and of too high a family, to be suspected of any unfair dealing. He was, moreover, a soldier, and a man of intrepid as well as of a haughty character; and no one cared to hazard a surmise, the consequences of which would be felt most probably by its originator only.

Gossip, however, was not silent; it was remarked that Sir Robert never appeared at the race-ground, which was the only place of public resort which he frequented, except in company with a certain strange-looking person, who was never seen elsewhere, or under other circumstances. It was remarked, too, that this man, whose relation to Sir Robert was never distinctly ascertained, was the only person to whom he seemed to speak unnecessarily; it was observed that while with the country gentry he exchanged no further communication than what was unavoidable in arranging his sporting transactions, with this person he would converse earnestly and frequently. Tradition asserts that, to enhance the curiosity which this unaccountable and exclusive preference excited, the stranger possessed some striking and unpleasant peculiarities of person and of garb – though it is not stated, however, what these were – but they, in conjunction with Sir Robert’s secluded habits and extraordinary run of luck – a success which was supposed to result from the suggestions and immediate advice of the unknown – were sufficient to warrant report in pronouncing that there was something queer in the wind, and in surmising that Sir Robert was playing a fearful and a hazardous game, and that, in short, his strange companion was little better than the Devil himself.

Years rolled quietly away, and nothing very novel occurred in the arrangements of Castle Ardagh, excepting that Sir Robert parted with his odd companion, but as nobody could tell whence he came, so nobody could say whither he had gone. Sir Robert’s habits, however, underwent no consequent change; he continued regularly to frequent the race meetings, without mixing at all in the convivialities of the gentry, and immediately afterwards to relapse into the secluded monotony of his ordinary life.

It was said that he had accumulated vast sums of money – and, as his bets were always successful and always large, such must have been the case. He did not suffer the acquisition of wealth, however, to influence his hospitality or his housekeeping – he neither purchased land, nor extended his establishment; and his mode of enjoying his money must have been altogether that of the miser – consisting merely in the pleasure of touching and telling his gold, and in the consciousness of wealth.

Sir Robert’s temper, so far from improving, became more than ever gloomy and morose. He sometimes carried the indulgence of his evil dispositions to such a height that it bordered upon insanity. During these paroxysms he would neither eat, drink, nor sleep. On such occasions he insisted on perfect privacy, even from the intrusion of his most trusted servants; his voice was frequently heard, sometimes in earnest supplication, sometimes raised, as if in loud and angry altercation with some unknown visitant. Sometimes he would for hours together walk to and fro throughout the long oak-wainscoted apartment which he generally occupied, with wild gesticulations and agitated pace, in the manner of one who has been roused to a state of unnatural excitement by some sudden and appalling intimation.

These paroxysms of apparent lunacy were so frightful, that during their continuance even his oldest and most faithful domestics dared not approach him; consequently his hours of agony were never intruded upon, and the mysterious causes of his sufferings appeared likely to remain hidden forever.

On one occasion a fit of this kind continued for an unusual time; the ordinary term of their duration – about two days – had been long past, and the old servant who generally waited upon Sir Robert after these visitations, having in vain listened for the well-known tinkle of his master’s hand-bell, began to feel extremely anxious; he feared that his master might have died from sheer exhaustion, or perhaps put an end to his own existence during his miserable depression. These fears at length became so strong, that having in vain urged some of his brother servants to accompany him, he determined to go up alone, and himself see whether any accident had befallen Sir Robert.

He traversed the several passages which conducted from the new to the more ancient parts of the mansion, and having arrived in the old hall of the castle, the utter silence of the hour – for it was very late in the night – the idea of the nature of the enterprise in which he was engaging himself, a sensation of remoteness from anything like human companionship, but, more than all, the vivid but undefined anticipation of something horrible, came upon him with such oppressive weight that he hesitated as to whether he should proceed. Real uneasiness, however, respecting the fate of his master, for whom he felt that kind of attachment which the force of habitual intercourse not unfrequently engenders respecting objects not in themselves amiable, and also a latent unwillingness to expose his weakness to the ridicule of his fellow-servants, combined to overcome his reluctance; and he had just placed his foot upon the first step of the staircase which conducted to his master’s chamber, when his attention was arrested by a low but distinct knocking at the hall door. Not, perhaps, very sorry at finding thus an excuse even for deferring his intended expedition, he placed the candle upon a stone block which lay in the hall and approached the door, uncertain whether his ears had not deceived him. This doubt was justified by the circumstance that the hall entrance had been for nearly fifty years disused as a mode of ingress to the castle. The situation of this gate also, which we have endeavoured to describe, opening upon a narrow ledge of rock which overhangs a perilous cliff, rendered it at all times, but particularly at night, a dangerous entrance. This shelving platform of rock, which formed the only avenue to the door, was divided, as I have already stated, by a broad chasm, the planks across which had long disappeared, by decay or otherwise; so that it seemed at least highly improbable that any man could have found his way across the passage in safety to the door, more particularly on a night like this, of singular darkness. The old man, therefore, listened attentively, to ascertain whether the first application should be followed by another. He had not long to wait. The same low but singularly distinct knocking was repeated; so low that it seemed as if the applicant had employed no harder or heavier instrument than his hand, and yet, despite the immense thickness of the door, with such strength that the sound was distinctly audible.

The knock was repeated a third time, without any increase of loudness; and the old man, obeying an impulse for which to his dying hour he could never account, proceeded to remove, one by one, the three great oaken bars which secured the door. Time and damp had effectually corroded the iron chambers of the lock, so that it afforded little resistance. With some effort, as he believed, assisted from without, the old servant succeeded in opening the door; and a low, square-built figure, apparently that of a man wrapped in a large black cloak, entered the hall. The servant could not see much of this visitor with any distinctness; his dress appeared foreign, the skirt of his ample cloak was thrown over one shoulder; he wore a large felt hat, with a very heavy leaf, from under which escaped what appeared to be a mass of long sooty-black hair; his feet were cased in heavy riding-boots. Such were the few particulars which the servant had time and light to observe. The stranger desired him to let his master know instantly that a friend had come, by appointment, to settle some business with him. The servant hesitated, but a slight motion on the part of his visitor, as if to possess himself of the candle, determined him; so, taking it in his hand, he ascended the castle stairs, leaving the guest in the hall.

On reaching the apartment which opened upon the oak-chamber he was surprised to observe the door of that room partly open, and the room itself lit up. He paused, but there was no sound; he looked in, and saw Sir Robert, his head and the upper part of his body reclining on a table, upon which two candles burned; his arms were stretched forward on either side, and perfectly motionless; it appeared that, having been sitting at the table, he had thus sunk forward, either dead or in a swoon. There was no sound of breathing; all was silent, except the sharp ticking of a watch, which lay beside the lamp. The servant coughed twice or thrice, but with no effect; his fears now almost amounted to certainty, and he was approaching the table on which his master partly lay, to satisfy himself of his death, when Sir Robert slowly raised his head, and, throwing himself back in his chair, fixed his eyes in a ghastly and uncertain gaze upon his attendant. At length he said, slowly and painfully, as if he dreaded the answer,

“In God’s name, what are you?”

“Sir,” said the servant, “a strange gentleman wants to see you below.”

At this intimation Sir Robert, starting to his feet and tossing his arms wildly upwards, uttered a shriek of such appalling and despairing terror that it was almost too fearful for human endurance; and long after the sound had ceased it seemed to the terrified imagination of the old servant to roll through the deserted passages in bursts of unnatural laughter. After a few moments Sir Robert said,

“Can’t you send him away? Why does he come so soon? O Merciful Powers! let him leave me for an hour; a little time. I can’t see him now; try to get him away. You see I can’t go down now; I have not strength. O God! O God! let him come back in an hour; it is not long to wait. He cannot lose anything by it; nothing, nothing, nothing. Tell him that! Say anything to him.”

The servant went down. In his own words, he did not feel the stairs under him till he got to the hall. The figure stood exactly as he had left it. He delivered his master’s message as coherently as he could. The stranger replied in a careless tone:

“If Sir Robert will not come down to me; I must go up to him.”

The man returned, and to his surprise he found his master much more composed in manner. He listened to the message, and though the cold perspiration rose in drops upon his forehead faster than he could wipe it away, his manner had lost the dreadful agitation which had marked it before. He rose feebly, and casting a last look of agony behind him, passed from the room to the lobby, where he signed to his attendant not to follow him. The man moved as far as the head of the staircase, from whence he had a tolerably distinct view of the hall, which was imperfectly lighted by the candle he had left there.

He saw his master reel, rather than walk, down the stairs, clinging all the way to the banisters. He walked on, as if about to sink every moment from weakness. The figure advanced as if to meet him, and in passing struck down the light. The servant could see no more; but there was a sound of struggling, renewed at intervals with silent but fearful energy. It was evident, however, that the parties were approaching the door, for he heard the solid oak sound twice or thrice, as the feet of the combatants, in shuffling hither and thither over the floor, struck upon it. After a slight pause, he heard the door thrown open with such violence that the leaf seemed to strike the side-wall of the hall, for it was so dark without that this could only be surmised by the sound. The struggle was renewed with an agony and intenseness of energy that betrayed itself in deep-drawn gasps. One desperate effort, which terminated in the breaking of some part of the door, producing a sound as if the door-post was wrenched from its position, was followed by another wrestle, evidently upon the narrow ledge which ran outside the door, overtopping the precipice. This proved to be the final struggle; it was followed by a crashing sound as if some heavy body had fallen over, and was rushing down the precipice through the light boughs that crossed near the top. All then became still as the grave, except when the moan of the night-wind sighed up the wooded glen.

The old servant had not nerve to return through the hall, and to him the darkness seemed all but endless; but morning at length came, and with it the disclosure of the events of the night. Near the door, upon the ground, lay Sir Robert’s sword-belt, which had given way in the scuffle. A huge splinter from the massive door-post had been wrenched off by an almost superhuman effort – one which nothing but the grip of a despairing man could have severed – and on the rocks outside were left the marks of the slipping and sliding of feet.

At the foot of the precipice, not immediately under the castle, but dragged some way up the glen, were found the remains of Sir Robert, with hardly a vestige of a limb or feature left distinguishable. The right hand, however, was uninjured, and in its fingers were clutched, with the fixedness of death, a long lock of coarse sooty hair – the only direct circumstantial evidence of the presence of a second person.

This story, as I have mentioned, was current among the dealers in such lore; but the original facts are so dissimilar in all but the name of the principal person mentioned and his mode of life, and the fact that his death was accompanied with circumstances of extraordinary mystery, that the two narratives are totally irreconcilable (even allowing the utmost for the exaggerating influence of tradition), except by supposing report to have combined and blended together the fabulous histories of several distinct bearers of the family name. However this may be, I shall lay before the reader a distinct recital of the events from which the foregoing tradition arose. With respect to these there can be no mistake; they are authenticated as fully as anything can be by human testimony; and I state them principally upon the evidence of a lady who herself bore a prominent part in the strange events which she related, and which I now record as being among the few well-attested tales of the marvellous which it has been my fate to hear. I shall, as far as I am able, arrange in one combined narrative the evidence of several distinct persons who were eye-witnesses of what they related, and with the truth of whose testimony I am solemnly and deeply impressed.

~   ~   ~   ~

Sir Robert Ardagh, as we choose to call him, was the heir and representative of the family whose name he bore; but owing to the prodigality of his father, the estates descended to him in a very impaired condition. Urged by the restless spirit of youth, or more probably by a feeling of pride which could not submit to witness, in the paternal mansion, what he considered a humiliating alteration in the style and hospitality which up to that time had distinguished his family, Sir Robert left Ireland and went abroad. How he occupied himself, or what countries he visited during his absence, was never known, nor did he afterwards make any allusion or encourage any inquiries touching his foreign sojourn. He left Ireland in the year 1742, being then just of age, and was not heard of until the year 1760 – about eighteen years afterwards – at which time he returned.

His personal appearance was, as might have been expected, very greatly altered, more altered, indeed, than the time of his absence might have warranted one in supposing likely. But to counterbalance the unfavourable change which time had wrought in his form and features, he had acquired all the advantages of polish of manner and refinement of taste which foreign travel is supposed to bestow. But what was truly surprising was that it soon became evident that Sir Robert was very wealthy – wealthy to an extraordinary and unaccountable degree; and this fact was made manifest, not only by his expensive style of living, but by his proceeding to dis-embarrass his property, and to purchase extensive estates in addition. Moreover, there could be nothing deceptive in these appearances, for he paid ready money for everything, from the most important purchase to the most trifling.

Sir Robert was a remarkably agreeable man, and possessing the combined advantages of birth and property, he was, as a matter of course, gladly received into the highest society which the metropolis then commanded. It was thus that he became acquainted with the two beautiful Miss F———ds, then among the brightest ornaments of the highest circle of Dublin fashion. Their family was in more than one direction allied to nobility; and Lady D———, their elder sister by many years, and some time married to a once well-known nobleman, was now their protectress. These considerations, beside the fact that the young ladies were what is usually termed heiresses, though not to a very great amount, secured to them a high position in the best society which Ireland then produced.

The two young ladies differed strongly, alike in appearance and in character. The elder of the two, Emily, was generally considered the handsomer – for her beauty was of that impressive kind which never failed to strike even at the first glance, possessing as it did all the advantages of a fine person and a commanding carriage. The beauty of her features strikingly assorted in character with that of her figure and deportment. Her hair was raven-black and richly luxuriant, beautifully contrasting with the perfect whiteness of her forehead – her finely pencilled brows were black as the ringlets that clustered near them – and her blue eyes, full, lustrous, and animated, possessed all the power and brilliancy of brown ones, with more than their softness and variety of expression. She was not, however, merely the tragedy queen. When she smiled, and that was not seldom, the dimpling of cheek and chin, the laughing display of the small and beautiful teeth – but, more than all, the roguish archness of her deep, bright eye, showed that nature had not neglected in her the lighter and the softer characteristics of woman.

Her younger sister Mary was, as I believe not infrequently occurs in the case of sisters, quite in the opposite style of beauty. She was light-haired, had more colour, had nearly equal grace, with much more liveliness of manner. Her eyes were of that dark grey which poets so much admire – full of expression and vivacity. She was altogether a very beautiful and animated girl – though as unlike her sister as the presence of those two qualities would permit her to be. Their dissimilarity did not stop here – it was deeper than mere appearance – the character of their minds differed almost as strikingly as did their complexion. The fair-haired beauty had a large proportion of that softness and pliability of temper which physiognomists assign as the characteristics of such complexions. She was much more the creature of impulse than of feeling, and consequently more the victim of extrinsic circumstances than was her sister. Emily, on the contrary, possessed considerable firmness and decision. She was less excitable, but when excited her feelings were more intense and enduring. She wanted much of the gaiety, but with it the volatility of her younger sister. Her opinions were adopted, and her friendships formed more reflectively, and her affections seemed to move, as it were, more slowly, but more determinedly. This firmness of character did not amount to anything masculine, and did not at all impair the feminine grace of her manners.

Sir Robert Ardagh was for a long time apparently equally attentive to the two sisters, and many were the conjectures and the surmises as to which would be the lady of his choice. At length, however, these doubts were determined; he proposed for and was accepted by the dark beauty, Emily F’’’d.

The bridals were celebrated in a manner becoming the wealth and connections of the parties; and Sir Robert and Lady Ardagh left Dublin to pass the honeymoon at the family mansion, Castle Ardagh, which had lately been fitted up in a style bordering upon magnificent. Whether in compliance with the wishes of his lady, or owing to some whim of his own, his habits were henceforward strikingly altered; and from having moved among the gayest if not the most profligate of the votaries of fashion, he suddenly settled down into a quiet, domestic, country gentleman, and seldom, if ever, visited the capital, and then his sojourns were as brief as the nature of his business would permit.

Lady Ardagh, however, did not suffer from this change further than in being secluded from general society; for Sir Robert’s wealth, and the hospitality which he had established in the family mansion, commanded that of such of his lady’s friends and relatives as had leisure or inclination to visit the castle; and as their style of living was very handsome, and its internal resources of amusement considerable, few invitations from Sir Robert or his lady were neglected.

Many years passed quietly away, during which Sir Robert’s and Lady Ardagh’s hopes of issue were several times disappointed. In the lapse of all this time there occurred but one event worth recording. Sir Robert had brought with him from abroad a valet, who sometimes professed himself to be French, at others Italian, and at others again German. He spoke all these languages with equal fluency, and seemed to take a kind of pleasure in puzzling the sagacity and baulking the curiosity of such of the visitors at the castle as at any time happened to enter into conversation with him, or who, struck by his singularities, became inquisitive respecting his country and origin. Sir Robert called him by the French name, Jacque, and among the lower orders he was familiarly known by the title of “Jack, the devil,” an appellation which originated in a supposed malignity of disposition and a real reluctance to mix in the society of those who were believed to be his equals. This morose reserve, coupled with the mystery which enveloped all about him, rendered him an object of suspicion and inquiry to his fellow-servants, amongst whom it was whispered that this man in secret governed the actions of Sir Robert with a despotic dictation, and that, as if to indemnify himself for his public and apparent servitude and self-denial, he in private exacted a degree of respectful homage from his so-called master, totally inconsistent with the relation generally supposed to exist between them.

This man’s personal appearance was, to say the least of it, extremely odd; he was low in stature; and this defect was enhanced by a distortion of the spine, so considerable as almost to amount to a hunch; bis features, too, had all that sharpness and sickliness of hue which generally accompany deformity; he wore his hair, which was black as soot, in heavy neglected ringlets about his shoulders, and always without powder – a peculiarity in those days. There was something unpleasant, too, in the circumstance that he never raised his eyes to meet those of another; this fact was often cited as a proof of his being something not quite right, and said to result not from the timidity which is supposed in most cases to induce this habit, but from a consciousness that his eye possessed a power which, if exhibited, would betray a supernatural origin.

Once, and once only, had he violated this sinister observance: it was on the occasion of Sir Robert’s hopes having been most bitterly disappointed; his lady, after a severe and dangerous confinement, gave birth to a dead child. Immediately after the intelligence had been made known, a servant, having upon some business passed outside the gate of the castle-yard, was met by Jacque, who, contrary to his wont, accosted him, observing, “So. after all the pother, the son and heir is still-born.” This remark was accompanied by a chuckling laugh, the only approach to merriment which he was ever known to exhibit. The servant, who was really disappointed, having hoped for holiday times, feasting and debauchery with impunity during the rejoicings which would have accompanied a christening, turned tartly upon the little valet, telling him that he should let Sir Robert know how he had received the tidings which should have filled any faithful servant with sorrow; and having once broken the ice, he was proceeding with increasing fluency, when his harangue was cut short and his temerity punished, by the little man raising his head and treating him to a scowl so fearful, half-demoniac, half-insane, that it haunted his imagination in nightmares and nervous tremors for months after.

To this man Lady Ardagh had, at first sight, conceived an antipathy amounting to horror, a mixture of loathing and dread so very powerful that she had made it a particular and urgent request to Sir Robert, that he would dismiss him, offering herself, from that property which Sir Robert had by the marriage settlements left at her own disposal, to provide handsomely for him, provided only she might be relieved from the continual anxiety and discomfort which the fear of encountering him induced.

Sir Robert, however, would not hear of it; the request seemed at first to agitate and distress him; but when still urged in defiance of his peremptory refusal, he burst into a violent fit of fury; he spoke darkly of great sacrifices which he had made, and threatened that if the request were at any time renewed he would leave both her and the country forever. This was, however, a solitary instance of violence; his general conduct towards Lady Ardagh, though at no time uxorious, was certainly kind and respectful, and he was more than repaid in the fervent attachment which she bore him in return.

Some short time after this strange interview between Sir Robert and Lady Ardagh; one night after the family had retired to bed, and when everything had been quiet for some time, the bell of Sir Robert’s dressing-room rang suddenly and violently; the ringing was repeated again and again at still shorter intervals, and with increasing violence, as if the person who pulled the bell was agitated by the presence of some terrifying and imminent danger. A servant named Donovan was the first to answer it; he threw on his clothes, and hurried to the room.

Sir Robert had selected for his private room an apartment remote from the bed-chambers of the castle, most of which lay in the more modern parts of the mansion, and secured at its entrance by a double door. As the servant opened the first of these, Sir Robert’s bell again sounded with a longer and louder peal; the inner door resisted his efforts to open it; but after a few violent struggles, not having been perfectly secured, or owing to the inadequacy of the bolt itself, it gave way, and the servant rushed into the apartment, advancing several paces before he could recover himself. As he entered, he heard Sir Robert’s voice exclaiming loudly— “Wait without, do not come in yet;” but the prohibition came too late. Near a low truckle-bed, upon which Sir Robert sometimes slept, for he was a whimsical man, in a large armchair, sat, or rather lounged, the form of the valet Jacque, his arms folded, and his heels stretched forward on the floor, so as fully to exhibit his misshapen legs, his head thrown back, and his eyes fixed upon his master with a look of indescribable defiance and derision, while, as if to add to the strange insolence of his attitude and expression, he had placed upon his head the black cloth cap which it was his habit to wear.

Sir Robert was standing before him, at the distance of several yards, in a posture expressive of despair, terror, and what might be called an agony of humility. He waved his hand twice or thrice, as if to dismiss the servant, who, however, remained fixed on the spot where he had first stood; and then, as if forgetting everything but the agony within him, he pressed his clenched hands on his cold damp brow, and dashed away the heavy drops that gathered chill and thickly there.

Jacque broke the silence.

“Donovan,” said he, “shake up that drone and drunkard, Carlton; tell him that his master directs that the travelling carriage shall be at the door within half-un-hour.”

The servant paused, as if in doubt as to what he should do; but his scruples were resolved by Sir Robert’s saying hurriedly, “Go – go, do whatever he directs; his commands are mine; tell Carlton the same.”

The servant hurried to obey, and in about half-an-hour the carriage was at the door, and Jacque, having directed the coachman to drive to B———n, a small town at about the distance of twelve miles – the nearest point, however, at which post-horses could be obtained – stepped into the vehicle, which accordingly quitted the castle immediately.

Although it was a fine moonlight night, the carriage made its way but very slowly, and after the lapse of two hours the travellers had arrived at a point about eight miles from the castle, at which the road strikes through a desolate and heathy flat, sloping up distantly at either side into bleak undulatory hills, in whose monotonous sweep the imagination beholds the heaving of some dark sluggish sea, arrested in its first commotion by some preternatural power. It is a gloomy and divested spot; there is neither tree nor habitation near it; its monotony is unbroken, except by here and there the grey front of a rock peering above the heath, and the effect is rendered yet more dreary and spectral by the exaggerated and misty shadows which the moon casts along the sloping sides of the hills.

When they had gained about the centre of this tract, Carlton, the coachman, was surprised to see a figure standing at some distance in advance, immediately beside the road, and still more so when, on coming up, he observed that it was no other than Jacque whom he believed to be at that moment quietly seated in the carriage; the coachman drew up, and nodding to him, the little valet exclaimed: “Carlton, I have got the start of you; the roads are heavy, so I shall even take care of myself the rest of the way. Do you make your way back as best you can, and I shall follow my own nose.”

So saying, he chucked a purse into the lap of the coachman, and turning off at a right angle with the road, he began to move rapidly away in the direction of the dark ridge that lowered in the distance.

The servant watched him until he was lost in the shadowy haze of night; and neither he nor any of the inmates of the castle saw Jacque again. His disappearance, as might have been expected, did not cause any regret among the servants and dependants at the castle; and Lady Ardagh did not attempt to conceal her delight; but with Sir Robert matters were different, for two or three days subsequent to this event he confined himself to his room, and when he did return to his ordinary occupations, it was with a gloomy indifference, which showed that he did so more from habit than from any interest he felt in them. He appeared from that moment unaccountably and strikingly changed, and thenceforward walked through life as a thing from which he could derive neither profit nor pleasure. His temper, however, so far from growing wayward or morose, became, though gloomy, very – almost unnaturally – placid and cold; but his spirits totally failed, and he grew silent and abstracted.

These sombre habits of mind, as might have been anticipated, very materially affected the gay house-keeping of the castle; and the dark and melancholy spirit of its master seemed to have communicated itself to the very domestics, almost to the very walls of the mansion.

Several years rolled on in this way, and the sounds of mirth and wassail had long been strangers to the castle, when Sir Robert requested his lady, to her great astonishment, to invite some twenty or thirty of their friends to spend the Christmas, which was fast approaching, at the castle. Lady Ardagh gladly complied, and her sister Mary, who still continued unmarried, and Lady D——— were of course included in the invitations. Lady Ardagh had requested her sisters to set forward as early as possible, in order that she might enjoy a little of their society before the arrival of the other guests; and in compliance with this request they left Dublin almost immediately upon receiving the invitation, a little more than a week before the arrival of the festival which was to be the period at which the whole party were to muster.

For expedition’s sake it was arranged that they should post, while Lady D———’s groom was to follow with her horses, she taking with herself her own maid and one male servant. They left the city when the day was considerably spent, and consequently made but three stages in the first day; upon the second, at about eight in the evening, they had reached the town of K———k, distant about fifteen miles from Castle Ardagh. Here, owing to Miss F———d’s great fatigue, she having been for a considerable time in a very delicate state of health, it was determined to put up for the night. They, accordingly, took possession of the best sitting-room which the inn commanded, and Lady D——— remained in it to direct and urge the preparations for some refreshment, which the fatigues of the day had rendered necessary, while her younger sister retired to her bed-chamber to rest there for a little time, as the parlour commanded no such luxury as a sofa.

Miss F———d was, as I have already stated, at this time in very delicate health; and upon this occasion the exhaustion of fatigue, and the dreary badness of the weather, combined to depress her spirits. Lady D——— had not been left long to herself, when the door communicating with the passage was abruptly opened, and her sister Mary entered in a state of great agitation; she sat down pale and trembling upon one of the chairs, and it was not until a copious flood of tears had relieved her, that she became sufficiently calm to relate the cause of her excitement and distress. It was simply this. Almost immediately upon lying down upon the bed she sank into a feverish and unrefreshing slumber; images of all grotesque shapes and startling colours flitted before her sleeping fancy with all the rapidity and variety of the changes in a kaleidoscope.

At length, as she described it, a mist seemed to interpose itself between her sight and the ever-shifting scenery which sported before her imagination, and out of this cloudy shadow gradually emerged a figure whose back seemed turned towards the sleeper; it was that of a lady who, in perfect silence, was expressing as far as pantomimic gesture could, by wringing her hands, and throwing her head from side to side, in the manner of one who is exhausted by the over-indulgence, by the very sickness and impatience of grief, the extremity of misery. For a long time she sought in vain to catch a glimpse of the face of the apparition, who thus seemed to stir and live before her. But at length the figure seemed to move with an air of authority, as if about to give directions to some inferior, and in doing so, it turned its head so as to display, with a ghastly distinctness, the features of Lady Ardagh, pale as death, with her dark hair all dishevelled, and her eyes dim and sunken with weeping.

The revulsion of feeling which Miss F———d experienced at this disclosure – for up to that point she had contemplated the appearance rather with a sense of curiosity and of interest, than of anything deeper – was so horrible, that the shock awoke her perfectly. She sat up in the bed, and looked fearfully around the room, which was imperfectly lighted by a single candle burning dimly, as if she almost expected to see the reality of her dreadful vision lurking in some corner of the chamber. Her fears were, however, verified, though not in the way she expected; yet in a manner sufficiently horrible – for she had hardly time to breathe and to collect her thoughts, when she heard, or thought she heard, the voice of her sister. Lady Ardagh, sometimes sobbing violently, and sometimes almost [shrieking as if in terror, and calling upon her and Lady D———, with the most imploring earnestness of despair, for God’s sake to lose no time in coming to her. All this was so horribly distinct, that it seemed as if the mourner was standing within a few yards of the spot where Miss F———d lay. She sprang from the bed, and leaving the candle in the room behind her, she made her way in the dark through the passage, the voice still following her, until as she arrived at the door of the sitting-room it seemed to die away in low sobbing.

As soon as Miss F———d was tolerably recovered, she declared her determination to proceed directly, and without further loss of time, to Castle Ardagh. It was not without much difficulty that Lady D——— at length prevailed upon her to consent to remain where they then were, until morning should arrive, when it was to be expected that the young lady would be much refreshed by at least remaining quiet for the night, even though sleep were out of the question. Lady D——— was convinced, from the nervous and feverish symptoms which her sister exhibited, that she had already done too much, and was more than ever satisfied of the necessity of prosecuting the journey no further upon that day.

After some time she persuaded her sister to return to her room, where she remained with her until she had gone to bed, and appeared comparatively composed. Lady D——— then returned to the parlour, and not finding herself sleepy, she remained sitting by the fire. Her solitude was a second time broken in upon, by the entrance of her sister, who now appeared, if possible, more agitated than before. She said that Lady D——— had not long left the room, when she was roused by a repetition of the same wailings and lamentations, accompanied by the wildest and most agonized supplications that no time should be lost in coming to Castle Ardagh, and all in her sister’s voice, and uttered at the same proximity as before. This time the voice had followed her to the very door of the sitting-room, and until she closed it, seemed to pour forth its cries and sobs at the very threshold.

Miss F———d now most positively declared that nothing should prevent her proceeding instantly to the castle, adding that if Lady D——— would not accompany her, she would go on by herself. Superstitious feelings are at all times more or less contagious, and the last century afforded a soil much more congenial to their growth than the present. Lady D——— was so far affected by her sister’s terrors, that she became, at least, uneasy; and seeing that her sister was immovably determined upon setting forward immediately, she consented to accompany her forthwith. After a slight delay, fresh horses were procured, and the two ladies and their attendants renewed their journey, with strong injunctions to the driver to quicken their rate of travelling as much as possible, and promises of reward in case of his doing so.

Roads were then in much worse condition throughout the south, even than they now are; and the fifteen miles which modern posting would have passed in little more than an hour and a half, were not completed even with every possible exertion in twice the time. Miss F———d had been nervously restless during the journey. Her head had been constantly out of the carriage window; and as they approached the entrance to the castle demesne, which lay about a mile from the building, her anxiety began to communicate itself to her sister. The postillion had just dismounted, and was endeavouring to open the gate – at that time a necessary trouble; for in the middle of the last century porter’s lodges were not common in the south of Ireland, and locks and keys almost unknown.

He had just succeeded in rolling back the heavy oaken gate so as to admit the vehicle, when a mounted servant rode rapidly down the avenue, and drawing up at the carriage, asked of the postillion who the party were; and on hearing, he rode round to the carriage window and handed in a note, which Lady D——— received. By the assistance of one of the coach-lamps they succeeded in deciphering it. It was scrawled in great agitation, and ran thus:

BLOCKQUOTE

“My Dear Sister – My Dear Sisters BOTH, – In God’s name lose no time, I am frightened and miserable; I cannot explain all till you come. I am too much terrified to write coherently; but understand me – hasten – do not waste a minute. I am afraid you will come too late.

“E. A.”

BLOCKQUOTE

The servant could tell nothing more than that the castle was in great confusion,, and that Lady Ardagh had been crying bitterly all the night. Sir Robert was perfectly well. Altogether at a loss as to the cause of Lady Ardagh’s great distress, they urged their way up the steep and broken avenue which wound through the crowding trees, whose wild and grotesque branches, now left stripped and naked by the blasts of winter, stretched drearily across the road.

As the carriage drew up in the area before the door, the anxiety of the ladies almost amounted to agony; and scarcely waiting for the assistance of their attendant, they sprang to the ground, and in an instant stood at the castle door. From within were distinctly audible the sounds of lamentation and weeping, and the suppressed hum of voices as if of those endeavouring to soothe the mourner. The door was speedily opened, and when the ladies entered, the first object which met their view was their sister, Lady Ardagh, sitting on a form in the hall, weeping and wringing her hands in deep agony. Beside her stood two old, withered crones, who were each endeavouring in their own way to administer consolation, without even knowing or caring what the subject of her grief might be.

Immediately on Lady Ardagh’s seeing her sisters, she started up, fell on their necks, and kissed them again and again without speaking, and then taking them each by a hand, still weeping bitterly, she led them into a small room adjoining the hall, in which burned a light, and, having closed the door, she sat down between them. After thanking them for the haste they had made, she proceeded to tell them, in words incoherent from agitation, that Sir Robert had in private, and in the most solemn manner, told her that he should die upon that night, and that he had occupied himself during the evening in giving minute directions respecting the arrangements of his funeral. Lady D——— here suggested the possibility of his labouring under the hallucinations of a fever; but to this Lady Ardagh quickly replied:

“Oh! no, no! Would to God I could think it. Oh! no, no! Wait till you have seen him. There is a frightful calmness about all he says and does; and his directions are all so clear, and his mind so perfectly collected, it is impossible, quite impossible.” And she wept yet more bitterly.

At that moment Sir Robert’s voice was heard in issuing some directions, as he came downstairs; and Lady Ardagh exclaimed, hurriedly:

“Go now and see him yourself He is in the hall.”

Lady D——— accordingly went out into the hall, where Sir Robert met her; and, saluting her with kind politeness, he said, after a pause:

“You are come upon a melancholy mission – the house is in great confusion, and some of its inmates in considerable grief.” He took her hand, and looking fixedly in her face, continued: “I shall not live to see tomorrow’s sun shine.”

“You are ill, sir, I have no doubt,” replied she; “but I am very certain we shall see you much better tomorrow, and still better the day following.”

“I am not ill, sister,” replied he. “Feel my temples, they are cool; lay your finger to my pulse, its throb is slow and temperate. I never was more perfectly in health, and yet do I know that ere three hours be past, I shall be no more.”

“Sir, sir,” said she, a good deal startled, but wishing to conceal the impression which the calm solemnity of his manner had, in her own despite, made upon her, “Sir, you should not jest; you should not even speak lightly upon such subjects. You trifle with what is sacred – you are sporting with the best affections of your wife.”

“Stay, my good lady,” said he; “if when this clock shall strike the hour of three, I shall be anything but a helpless clod, then upbraid me. Pray return now to your sister. Lady Ardagh is, indeed, much to be pitied; but what is past cannot now be helped. I have now a few papers to arrange, and some to destroy. I shall see you and Lady Ardagh before my death; try to compose her – her sufferings distress me much; but what is past cannot now be mended.”

Thus saying, he went upstairs, and Lady D——— returned to the room where her sisters were sitting.

“Well,” exclaimed Lady Ardagh, as she re-entered, “is it not so? – do you still doubt? – do you think there is any hope?”

Lady D——— was silent.

“Oh! none, none, none,” continued she; “I see, I see you are convinced.” And she wrung her hands in bitter agony.

“My dear sister,” said Lady D———, “there is, no doubt, something strange in all that has appeared in this matter; but still I cannot but hope that there may be something deceptive in all the apparent calmness of Sir Robert. I still must believe that some latent fever has affected his mind, or that, owing to the state of nervous depression into which he has been sinking, some trivial occurrence has been converted, in his disordered imagination, into an augury foreboding his immediate dissolution.”

In such suggestions, unsatisfactory even to those who originated them, and doubly so to her whom they were intended to comfort, more than two hours passed; and Lady D——— was beginning to hope that the fated term might elapse without the occurrence of any tragical event, when Sir Robert entered the room. On coming in, he placed his finger with a warning gesture upon his lips, as if to enjoin silence; and then having successively pressed the hands of his two sisters-in-law, he stooped sadly over the fainting form of his lady, and twice pressed her cold, pale forehead, with his lips, and then passed silently out of the room.

Lady D———, starting up, followed to the door, and saw him take a candle in the hall, and walk deliberately up the stairs. Stimulated by a feeling of horrible curiosity, she continued to follow him at a distance. She saw him enter his own private room, and heard him close and lock the door after him. Continuing to follow him as far as she could, she placed herself at the door of the chamber, as noiselessly as possible, where after a little time she was joined by her two sisters, Lady Ardagh and Miss F———d.

In breathless silence they listened to what should pass within. They distinctly heard Sir Robert pacing up and down the room for some time; and then, after a pause, a sound as if someone had thrown himself heavily upon the bed. At this moment Lady D———, forgetting that the door had been secured within, turned the handle for the purpose of entering; when someone from the inside, close to the door, said, “Hush! hush!” The same lady, now much alarmed, knocked violently at the door; there was no answer. She knocked again more violently, with no further success. Lady Ardagh, now uttering a piercing shriek, sank in a swoon upon the floor. Three or four servants, alarmed by the noise, now hurried upstairs, and Lady Ardagh was carried apparently lifeless to her own chamber. They then, after having knocked long and loudly in vain, applied themselves to forcing an entrance into Sir Robert’s room. After resisting some violent efforts, the door at length gave way, and all entered the room nearly together.

There was a single candle burning upon a table at the far end of the apartment; and stretched upon the bed lay Sir Robert Ardagh. He was a corpse – the eyes were open – no convulsion had passed over the features, or distorted the limbs – it seemed as if the soul had sped from the body without a struggle to remain there. On touching the body it was found to be cold as clay – all lingering of the vital heat had left it. They closed the ghastly eyes of the corpse, and leaving it to the care of those who seem to consider it a privilege of their age and sex to gloat over the revolting spectacle of death in all its stages, they returned to Lady Ardagh, now a widow. The party assembled at the castle, but the atmosphere was tainted with death. Grief there was not much, but awe and panic were expressed in every face. The guests talked in whispers, and the servants walked on tiptoe, as if afraid of the very noise of their own footsteps.

The funeral was conducted almost with splendour. The body, having been conveyed, in compliance with Sir Robert’s last directions, to Dublin, was there laid within the ancient walls of St. Audoen’s Church – where I have read the epitaph, telling the age and titles of the departed dust. Neither painted escutcheon, nor marble slab, have served to rescue from oblivion the story of the dead, whose very name will ere long moulder from their tracery—

“Et sunt sua fata sepulchris (the fate of their graves).”  [ 1 ]

The events which I have recorded are not imaginary. They are facts; and there lives one whose authority none would venture to question, who could vindicate the accuracy of every statement which I have set down, and that, too, with all the circumstantiality of an eyewitness.  [ 2 ]

[ 1 ]  This prophecy has since been realised; for the aisle in which Sir Robert’s remains were laid has been suffered to fall completely to decay; and the tomb which marked his grave, and other monuments more curious, form now one indistinguishable mass of rubbish.

[ 2 ]  This paper, from a memorandum, I find to have been written in 1803. The lady to whom allusion is made, I believe to be Miss Mary F———d. She never married, and survived both her sisters, living to a very advanced age.

“Dublin University Magazine”, Mar. 1838

The Purcell Papers: Volume I (1880)

revised 1872 “Sir Dominick’s Bargain: A Legend of Dunoran”

SCHALKEN THE PAINTER

(1839 / 1851)

You will no doubt be surprised, my dear friend, at the subject of the following narrative. What had I to do with Schalken, or Schalken with me? He had returned to his native land, and was probably dead and buried before I was born; I never visited Holland, nor spoke with a native of that country. So much I believe you already know. I must, then, give you my authority, and state to you frankly the ground upon which rests the credibility of the strange story which I am about to lay before you.

I was acquainted, in my early days, with a Captain Vandael, whose father had served King William in the Low Countries, and also in my own unhappy land during the Irish campaigns. I know not how it happened that I liked this man’s society, spite of his politics and religion: but so it was; and it was by means of the free intercourse to which our intimacy gave rise that I became possessed of the curious tale which you are about to hear.

I had often been struck, while visiting Vandael, by a remarkable picture, in which, though no connoisseur myself, I could not fail to discern some very strong peculiarities, particularly in the distribution of light and shade, as also a certain oddity in the design itself, which interested my curiosity. It represented the interior of what might be a chamber in some antique religious building – the foreground was occupied by a female figure, arrayed in a species of white robe, part of which was arranged so as to form a veil. The dress, however, was not strictly that of any religious order. In its hand the figure bore a lamp, by whose light alone the form and face were illuminated; the features were marked by an arch smile, such as pretty women wear when engaged in successfully practising some roguish trick; in the background, and (excepting where the dim red light of an expiring fire serves to define the form) totally in the shade, stood the figure of a man equipped in the old fashion, with doublet and so forth, in an attitude of alarm, his hand being placed upon the hilt of his sword, which he appeared to be in the act of drawing.

“There are some pictures,” said I to my friend, “which impress one, I know not how, with a conviction that they represent not the mere ideal shapes and combinations which have floated through the imagination of the artist, but scenes, faces, and situations which have actually existed. When I look upon that picture, something assures me that I behold the representation of a reality.”

Vandael smiled, and, fixing his eyes upon the painting musingly, he said,—

“Your fancy has not deceived you, my good friend, for that picture is the record, and I believe a faithful one, of a remarkable and mysterious occurrence. It was painted by Schalken, and contains, in the face of the female figure which occupies the most prominent place in the design, an accurate portrait of Rose Velderkaust, the niece of Gerard Douw, the first and, I believe, the only love of Godfrey Schalken. My father knew the painter well, and from Schalken himself he learned the story of the mysterious drama, one scene of which the picture has embodied. This painting, which is accounted a fine specimen of Schalken’s style, was bequeathed to my father by the artist’s will, and, as you have observed, is a very striking and interesting production.”

I had only to request Vandael to tell the story of the painting in order to be gratified; and thus it is that I am enabled to submit to you a faithful recital of what I heard myself, leaving you to reject or to allow the evidence upon which the truth of the tradition depends – with this one assurance, that Schalken was an honest, blunt Dutchman, and, I believe, wholly incapable of committing a flight of imagination; and further, that Vandael, from whom I heard the story, appeared firmly convinced of its truth.

There are few forms upon which the mantle of mystery and romance could seem to hang more ungracefully than upon that of the uncouth and clownish Schalken – the Dutch boor – the rude and dogged, but most cunning worker in oils, whose pieces delight the initiated of the present day almost as much as his manners disgusted the refined of his own; and yet this man, so rude, so dogged, so slovenly, I had almost said so savage in mien and manner, during his after successes, had been selected by the capricious goddess, in his early life, to figure as the hero of a romance by no means devoid of interest or of mystery.

Who can tell how meet he may have been in his young days to play the part of the lover or of the hero? who can say that in early life he had been the same harsh, unlicked, and rugged boor that, in his maturer age, he proved? or how far the neglected rudeness which afterwards marked his air, and garb, and manners, may not have been the growth of that reckless apathy not unfrequently produced by bitter misfortunes and disappointments in early life?

These questions can never now be answered.

We must content ourselves, then, with a plain statement of facts, leaving matters of speculation to those who like them.

When Schalken studied under the immortal Gerard Douw, he was a young man; and in spite of the phlegmatic constitution and excitable manner which he shared, we believe, with his countrymen, he was not incapable of deep and vivid impressions, for it is an established fact that the young painter looked with considerable interest upon the beautiful niece of his wealthy master.

Rose Velderkaust was very young, having, at the period of which we speak, not yet attained her seventeenth year; and, if tradition speaks truth, she possessed all the soft dimpling charms of the fair, light-haired Flemish maidens. Schalken had not studied long in the school of Gerard Douw when he felt this interest deepening into something of a keener and intenser feeling than was quite consistent with the tranquillity of his honest Dutch heart; and at the same time he perceived, or thought he perceived, flattering symptoms of a reciprocal attachment, and this was quite sufficient to determine whatever indecision he might have heretofore experienced, and to lead him to devote exclusively to her every hope and feeling of his heart. In short, he was as much in love as a Dutchman could be. He was not long in making his passion known to the pretty maiden herself, and his declaration was followed by a corresponding confession upon her part.

Schalken, howbeit, was a poor man, and he possessed no counterbalancing advantages of birth or position to induce the old man to consent to a union which must involve his niece and ward in the strugglings and difficulties of a young and nearly friendless artist. He was, therefore, to wait until time had furnished him with opportunity, and accident with success; and then, if his labours were found sufficiently lucrative, it was to be hoped that his proposals might at least be listened to by her jealous guardian. Months passed away, and, cheered by the smiles of the little Rose, Schalken’s labours were redoubled, and with such effect and improvement as reasonably to promise the realization of his hopes, and no contemptible eminence in his art, before many years should have elapsed.

The even course of this cheering prosperity was, unfortunately, destined to experience a sudden and formidable interruption, and that, too, in a manner so strange and mysterious as to baffle all investigation, and throw upon the events themselves a shadow of almost supernatural horror.

Schalken had one evening remained in the master’s studio considerably longer than his more volatile companions, who had gladly availed themselves of the excuse which the dusk of evening afforded to withdraw from their several tasks, in order to finish a day of labour in the jollity and conviviality of the tavern.

But Schalken worked for improvement, or rather for love. Besides, he was now engaged merely in sketching a design, an operation which, unlike that of colouring, might be continued as long as there was light sufficient to distinguish between canvas and charcoal. He had not then, nor, indeed, until long after, discovered the peculiar powers of his pencil; and he was engaged in composing a group of extremely roguish-looking and grotesque imps and demons, who were inflicting various ingenious torments upon a perspiring and pot-bellied St. Anthony, who reclined in the midst of them, apparently in the last stage of drunkenness.

The young artist, however, though incapable of executing, or even of appreciating, anything of true sublimity, had nevertheless discernment enough to prevent his being by any means satisfied with his work; and many were the patient erasures and corrections which the limbs and features of saint and devil underwent, yet all without producing in their new arrangement anything of improvement or increased effect.

The large, old-fashioned room was silent, and, with the exception of himself, quite deserted by its usual inmates. An hour had passed – nearly two – without any improved result. Daylight had already declined, and twilight was fast giving way to the darkness of night. The patience of the young man was exhausted, and he stood before his unfinished production, absorbed in no very pleasing ruminations, one hand buried in the folds of his long dark hair, and the other holding the piece of charcoal which had so ill executed its office, and which he now rubbed, without much regard to the sable streaks which it produced, with irritable pressure upon his ample Flemish inexpressibles.

“Pshaw!” said the young man aloud, “would that picture, devils, saint, and all, were where they should be – in hell!”

A short, sudden laugh, uttered startlingly close to his ear, instantly responded to the ejaculation.

The artist turned sharply round, and now for the first time became aware that his labours had been overlooked by a stranger.

Within about a yard and a half, and rather behind him, there stood what was, or appeared to be, the figure of an elderly man: he wore a short cloak, and broad-brimmed hat with a conical crown, and in his hand, which was protected with a heavy, gauntlet-shaped glove, he carried a long ebony walking-stick, surmounted with what appeared, as it glittered dimly in the twilight to be a massive head of gold; and upon his breast, through the folds of the cloak, there shone the links of a rich chain of the same metal.

The room was so obscure that nothing further of the appearance of the figure could be ascertained, and the face was altogether overshadowed by the heavy flap of the beaver which overhung it, so that no feature could be clearly discerned. A quantity of dark hair escaped from beneath this sombre hat, a circumstance which, connected with the firm, upright carriage of the intruder, proved that his years could not yet exceed threescore or thereabouts.

There was an air of gravity and importance about the garb of this person, and something indescribably odd – I might say awful – in the perfect, stone-like movelessness of the figure, that effectually checked the testy comment which had at once risen to the lips of the irritated artist. He therefore, as soon as he had sufficiently recovered the surprise, asked the stranger, civilly, to be seated, and desired to know if he had any message to leave for his master.

“Tell Gerard Douw,” said the unknown, without altering his attitude in the smallest degree, “that Mynher Vanderhausen, of Rotterdam, desires to speak with him tomorrow evening at this hour, and, if he please, in this room, upon matters of weight; that is all. Good-night.”

The stranger, having finished this message, turned abruptly, and, with a quick but silent step quitted the room before Schalken had time to say a word in reply.

The young man felt a curiosity to see in what direction the burgher of Rotterdam would turn on quitting the studio, and for that purpose he went directly to the window which commanded the door.

A lobby of considerable extent intervened between the inner door of the painter’s room and the street entrance, so that Schalken occupied the post of observation before the old man could possibly have reached the street.

He watched in vain, however. There was no other mode of exit.

Had the old man vanished, or was he lurking about the recesses of the lobby for some bad purpose? This last suggestion filled the mind of Schalken with a vague horror, which was so unaccountably intense as to make him alike afraid to remain in the room alone and reluctant to pass through the lobby.

However, with an effort which appeared very disproportioned to the occasion, he summoned resolution to leave the room, and, having double-locked the door, and thrust the key in his pocket, without looking to the right or left, he traversed the passage which had so recently, perhaps still, contained the person of his mysterious visitant, scarcely venturing to breathe till he had arrived in the open street.

“Mynher Vanderhausen,” said Gerard Douw, within himself, as the appointed hour approached; “Mynher Vanderhausen, of Rotterdam! I never heard of the man till yesterday. What can he want of me? A portrait, perhaps, to be painted; or a younger son or a poor relation to be apprenticed; or a collection to be valued; or – pshaw! there’s no one in Rotterdam to leave me a legacy. Well, whatever the business may be, we shall soon know it all.”

It was now the close of day, and every easel, except that of Schalken, was deserted. Gerard Douw was pacing the apartment with the restless step of impatient expectation, every now and then humming a passage from a piece of music which he was himself composing; for, though no great proficient, he admired the art; sometimes pausing to glance over the work of one of his absent pupils, but more frequently placing himself at the window, from whence he might observe the passengers who threaded the obscure by-street in which his studio was placed.

“Said you not, Godfrey,” exclaimed Douw, after a long and fruitless gaze from his post of observation, and turning to Schalken – “said you not the hour of appointment was at about seven by the clock of the Stadhouse?”

“It had just told seven when I first saw him, sir,” answered the student.

“The hour is close at hand, then,” said the master, consulting a horologe as large and as round as a full-grown orange. “Mynher Vanderhausen, from Rotterdam – is it not so?”

“Such was the name.”

“And an elderly man, richly clad?” continued Douw.

“As well as I might see,” replied his pupil. “He could not be young, nor yet very old neither, and his dress was rich and grave, as might become a citizen of wealth and consideration.”

At this moment the sonorous boom of the Stadhouse clock told, stroke after stroke, the hour of seven; the eyes of both master and student were directed to the door; and it was not until the last peal of the old bell had ceased to vibrate, that Douw exclaimed—

“So, so; we shall have his worship presently – that is, if he means to keep his hour; if not, thou mayst wait for him, Godfrey, if you court the acquaintance of a capricious burgomaster. As for me, I think our old Leyden contains a sufficiency of such commodities, without an importation from Rotterdam.”

Schalken laughed, as in duty bound; and, after a pause of some minutes, Douw suddenly exclaimed—

“What if it should all prove a jest, a piece of mummery got up by Vankarp, or some such worthy! I wish you had run all risks, and cudgelled the old burgomaster, stadholder, or whatever else he may be, soundly. I would wager a dozen of Rhenish, his worship would have pleaded old acquaintance before the third application.”

“Here he comes, sir,” said Schalken, in a low, admonitory tone; and instantly, upon turning towards the door, Gerard Douw observed the same figure which had, on the day before, so unexpectedly greeted the vision of his pupil Schalken.

There was something in the air and mien of the figure which at once satisfied the painter that there was no mummery in the case, and that he really stood in the presence of a man of worship; and so, without hesitation, he doffed his cap, and courteously saluting the stranger, requested him to be seated.

The visitor waved his hand slightly, as if in acknowledgement of the courtesy, but remained standing.

“I have the honour to see Mynher Vanderhausen, of Rotterdam?” said Gerard Douw.

“The same,” was the laconic reply.

“I understand your worship desires to speak with me,” continued Douw, “and I am here by appointment to wait your commands.”

“Is that a man of trust?” said Vanderhausen, turning towards Schalken, who stood at a little distance behind his master.

“Certainly,” replied Gerard.

“Then let him take this box and get the nearest jeweller or goldsmith to value its contents, and let him return hither with a certificate of the valuation.”

At the same time he placed a small case, about nine inches square, in the hands of Gerard Douw, who was as much amazed at its weight as at the strange abruptness with which it was handed to him.

In accordance with the wishes of the stranger, he delivered it into the hands of Schalken, and repeating his directions, despatched him upon the mission.

Schalken disposed his precious charge securely beneath the folds of his cloak, and rapidly traversing two or three narrow streets, he stopped at a corner house, the lower part of which was then occupied by the shop of a Jewish goldsmith.

Schalken entered the shop, and calling the little Hebrew into the obscurity of its back recesses, he proceeded to lay before him Vanderhausen’s packet.

On being examined by the light of a lamp, it appeared entirely cased with lead, the outer surface of which was much scraped and soiled, and nearly white with age. This was with difficulty partially removed, and disclosed beneath a box of some dark and singularly hard wood; this, too, was forced, and after the removal of two or three folds of linen, its contents proved to be a mass of golden ingots, close packed, and, as the Jew declared, of the most perfect quality.

Every ingot underwent the scrutiny of the little Jew, who seemed to feel an epicurean delight in touching and testing these morsels of the glorious metal; and each one of them was replaced in the box with the exclamation—

“Mein Gott, how very perfect! not one grain of alloy – beautiful, beautiful!”

The task was at length finished, and the Jew certified under his hand that the value of the ingots submitted to his examination amounted to many thousand rix-dollars.

With the desired document in his bosom, and the rich box of gold carefully pressed under his arm, and concealed by his cloak, he retraced his way, and, entering the studio, found his master and the stranger in close conference.

Schalken had no sooner left the room, in order to execute the commission he had taken in charge, than Vanderhausen addressed Gerard Douw in the following terms:

“I may not tarry with you tonight more than a few minutes, and so I shall briefly tell you the matter upon which I come. You visited the town of Rotterdam some four months ago, and then I saw in the church of St. Lawrence your niece, Rose Velderkaust. I desire to marry her, and if I satisfy you as to the fact that I am very wealthy – more wealthy than any husband you could dream of for her – I expect that you will forward my views to the utmost of your authority. If you approve my proposal, you must close with it at once, for I cannot command time enough to wait for calculations and delays.”

Gerard Douw was, perhaps, as much astonished as anyone could be by the very unexpected nature of Mynher Vanderhausen’s communication; but he did not give vent to any unseemly expression of surprise. In addition to the motives supplied by prudence and politeness, the painter experienced a kind of chill and oppressive sensation – a feeling like that which is supposed to affect a man who is placed unconsciously in immediate contact with something to which he has a natural antipathy – an undefined horror and dread – while standing in the presence of the eccentric stranger, which made him very unwilling to say anything that might reasonably prove offensive.

“I have no doubt,” said Gerard, after two or three prefatory hems, “that the connection which you propose would prove alike advantageous and honourable to my niece; but you must be aware that she has a will of her own, and may not acquiesce in what we may design for her advantage.”

“Do not seek to deceive me, Sir Painter,” said Vanderhausen; “you are her guardian – she is your ward. She is mine if you like to make her so.”

The man of Rotterdam moved forward a little as he spoke, and Gerard Douw, he scarce knew why, inwardly prayed for the speedy return of Schalken.

“I desire,” said the mysterious gentleman, “to place in your hands at once an evidence of my wealth, and a security for my liberal dealing with your niece. The lad will return in a minute or two with a sum in value five times the fortune which she has a right to expect from a husband. This shall lie in your hands, together with her dowry, and you may apply the united sum as suits her interest best; it shall be all exclusively hers while she lives. Is that liberal?”

Douw assented, and inwardly thought that fortune had been extraordinarily kind to his niece. The stranger, he deemed, must be most wealthy and generous, and such an offer was not to be despised, though made by a humorist, and one of no very prepossessing presence.

Rose had no very high pretensions, for she was almost without dowry; indeed, altogether so, excepting so far as the deficiency had been supplied by the generosity of her uncle. Neither had she any right to raise any scruples against the match on the score of birth, for her own origin was by no means elevated; and as to other objections, Gerard resolved, and, indeed, by the usages of the time was warranted in resolving, not to listen to them for a moment.

“Sir,” said he, addressing the stranger, “your offer is most liberal, and whatever hesitation I may feel in closing with it immediately, arises solely from my not having the honour of knowing anything of your family or station. Upon these points you can, of course, satisfy me without difficulty?”

“As to my respectability,” said the stranger, drily, “you must take that for granted at present; pester me with no inquiries; you can discover nothing more about me than I choose to make known. You shall have sufficient security for my respectability – my word, if you are honourable; if you are sordid, my gold.”

“A testy old gentleman,” thought Douw; “he must have his own way. But, all things considered, I am justified in giving my niece to him. Were she my own daughter, I would do the like by her. I will not pledge myself unnecessarily, however.”

“You will not pledge yourself unnecessarily,” said Vanderhausen, strangely uttering the very words which had just floated through the mind of his companion; “but you will do so if it is necessary, I presume; and I will show you that I consider it indispensable. If the gold I mean to leave in your hands satisfies you, and if you desire that my proposal shall not be at once withdrawn, you must, before I leave this room, write your name to this engagement.”

Having thus spoken, he placed a paper in the hands of Gerard, the contents of which expressed an engagement entered into by Gerard Douw, to give to Wilken Vanderhausen, of Rotterdam, in marriage, Rose Velderkaust, and so forth, within one week of the date hereof.

While the painter was employed in reading this covenant, Schalken, as we have stated, entered the studio, and having delivered the box and the valuation of the Jew into the hands of the stranger, he was about to retire, when Vanderhausen called to him to wait; and, presenting the case and the certificate to Gerard Douw, he waited in silence until he had satisfied himself by an inspection of both as to the value of the pledge left in his hands. At length he said:

“Are you content?”

The painter said “he would fain have another day to consider.”

“Not an hour,” said the suitor, coolly.

“Well, then,” said Douw, “I am content; it is a bargain.”

“Then sign at once,” said Vanderhausen; “I am weary.”

At the same time he produced a small case of writing materials, and Gerard signed the important document.

“Let this youth witness the covenant,” said the old man; and Godfrey Schalken unconsciously signed the instrument which bestowed upon another that hand which he had so long regarded as the object and reward of all his labours.

The compact being thus completed, the strange visitor folded up the paper, and stowed it safely in an inner pocket.

“I will visit you tomorrow night, at nine of the clock, at your house, Gerard Douw, and will see the subject of our contract. Farewell.” And so saying, Wilken Vanderhausen moved stiffly, but rapidly out of the room.

Schalken, eager to resolve his doubts, had placed himself by the window in order to watch the street entrance; but the experiment served only to support his suspicions, for the old man did not issue from the door. This was very strange, very odd, very fearful. He and his master returned together, and talked but little on the way, for each had his own subjects of reflection, of anxiety, and of hope.

Schalken, however, did not know the ruin which threatened his cherished schemes.

Gerard Douw knew nothing of the attachment which had sprung up between his pupil and his niece; and even if he had, it is doubtful whether he would have regarded its existence as any serious obstruction to the wishes of Mynher Vanderhausen.

Marriages were then and there matters of traffic and calculation; and it would have appeared as absurd in the eyes of the guardian to make a mutual attachment an essential element in a contract of marriage, as it would have been to draw up his bonds and receipts in the language of chivalrous romance.

The painter, however, did not communicate to his niece the important step which he had taken in her behalf, and his resolution arose not from any anticipation of opposition on her part, but solely from a ludicrous consciousness that if his ward were, as she very naturally might do, to ask him to describe the appearance of the bridegroom whom he destined for her, he would be forced to confess that he had not seen his face, and, if called upon, would find it impossible to identify him.

Upon the next day, Gerard Douw having dined, called his niece to him, and having scanned her person with an air of satisfaction, he took her hand, and looking upon her pretty, innocent face with a smile of kindness, he said:

“Rose, my girl, that face of yours will make your fortune.” Rose blushed and smiled. “Such faces and such tempers seldom go together, and, when they do, the compound is a love-potion which few heads or hearts can resist. Trust me, thou wilt soon be a bride, girl. But this is trifling, and I am pressed for time, so make ready the large room by eight o’clock tonight, and give directions for supper at nine. I expect a friend tonight; and observe me, child, do thou trick thyself out handsomely. I would not have him think us poor or sluttish.”

With these words he left the chamber, and took his way to the room to which we have already had occasion to introduce our readers – that in which his pupils worked.

When the evening closed in, Gerard called Schalken, who was about to take his departure to his obscure and comfortless lodgings, and asked him to come home and sup with Rose and Vanderhausen.

The invitation was of course accepted, and Gerard Douw and his pupil soon found themselves in the handsome and somewhat antique-looking room which had been prepared for the reception of the stranger.

A cheerful wood-fire blazed in the capacious hearth; a little at one side an old-fashioned table, with richly-carved legs, was placed – destined, no doubt, to receive the supper, for which preparations were going forward; and ranged with exact regularity stood the tall-backed chairs whose ungracefulness was more than counterbalanced by their comfort.

The little party, consisting of Rose, her uncle, and the artist, awaited the arrival of the expected visitor with considerable impatience.

Nine o’clock at length came, and with it a summons at the street door, which, being speedily answered, was followed by a slow and emphatic tread upon the staircase; the steps moved heavily across the lobby, the door of the room in which the party which we have described were assembled slowly opened, and there entered a figure which startled, almost appalled, the phlegmatic Dutchmen, and nearly made Rose scream with affright; it was the form, and arrayed in the garb, of Mynher Vanderhausen; the air, the gait, the height was the same, but the features had never been seen by any of the party before.

The stranger stopped at the door of the room, and displayed his form and face completely. He wore a dark-coloured cloth cloak, which was short and full, not falling quite to the knees; his legs were cased in dark purple silk stockings, and his shoes were adorned with roses of the same colour. The opening of the cloak in front showed the under-suit to consist of some very dark, perhaps sable material, and his hands were enclosed in a pair of heavy leather gloves which ran up considerably above the wrist, in the manner of a gauntlet. In one hand he carried his walking-stick and his hat, which he had removed, and the other hung heavily by his side. A quantity of grizzled hair descended in long tresses from his head, and its folds rested upon the plaits of a stiff ruff, which effectually concealed his neck.

So far all was well; but the face! – all the flesh of the face was coloured with the bluish leaden hue which is sometimes produced by the operation of metallic medicines administered in excessive quantities; the eyes were enormous, and the white appeared both above and below the iris, which gave to them an expression of insanity, which was heightened by their glassy fixedness; the nose was well enough, but the mouth was writhed considerably to one side, where it opened in order to give egress to two long, discoloured fangs, which projected from the upper jaw, far below the lower lip; the hue of the lips themselves bore the usual relation to that of the face, and was consequently nearly black. The character of the face was malignant, even satanic, to the last degree; and, indeed, such a combination of horror could hardly be accounted for, except by supposing the corpse of some atrocious malefactor, which had long hung blackening upon the gibbet, to have at length become the habitation of a demon – the frightful sport of satanic possession.

It was remarkable that the worshipful stranger suffered as little as possible of his flesh to appear, and that during his visit he did not once remove his gloves.

Having stood for some moments at the door, Gerard Douw at length found breath and collectedness to bid him welcome, and, with a mute inclination of the head, the stranger stepped forward into the room.

There was something indescribably odd, even horrible about all his motions, something undefinable, something unnatural, unhuman – it was as if the limbs were guided and directed by a spirit unused to the management of bodily machinery.

The stranger said hardly anything during his visit, which did not exceed half an hour; and the host himself could scarcely muster courage enough to utter the few necessary salutations and courtesies: and, indeed, such was the nervous terror which the presence of Vanderhausen inspired, that very little would have made all his entertainers fly bellowing from the room.

They had not so far lost all self-possession, however, as to fail to observe two strange peculiarities of their visitor.

During his stay he did not once suffer his eyelids to close, nor even to move in the slightest degree; and further, there was a deathlike stillness in his whole person, owing to the total absence of the heaving motion of the chest caused by the process of respiration.

These two peculiarities, though when told they may appear trifling, produced a very striking and unpleasant effect when seen and observed. Vanderhausen at length relieved the painter of Leyden of his inauspicious presence; and with no small gratification the little party heard the street door close after him.

“Dear uncle,” said Rose, “what a frightful man! I would not see him again for the wealth of the States!”

“Tush, foolish girl!” said Douw, whose sensations were anything but comfortable. “A man may be as ugly as the devil, and yet if his heart and actions are good, he is worth all the pretty-faced, perfumed puppies that walk the Mall. Rose, my girl, it is very true he has not thy pretty face, but I know him to be wealthy and liberal; and were he ten times more ugly—”

“Which is inconceivable,” observed Rose.

“These two virtues would be sufficient,” continued her uncle, “to counterbalance all his deformity; and if not of power sufficient actually to alter the shape of the features, at least of efficacy enough to prevent one thinking them amiss.”

“Do you know, uncle,” said Rose, “when I saw him standing at the door, I could not get it out of my head that I saw the old, painted, wooden figure that used to frighten me so much in the church of St. Laurence at Rotterdam.”

Gerard laughed, though he could not help inwardly acknowledging the justness of the comparison. He was resolved, however, as far as he could, to check his niece’s inclination to ridicule the ugliness of her intended bridegroom, although he was not a little pleased to observe that she appeared totally exempt from that mysterious dread of the stranger, which, he could not disguise it from himself, considerably affected him, as it also did his pupil Godfrey Schalken.

Early on the next day there arrived from various quarters of the town, rich presents of silks, velvets, jewellery, and so forth, for Rose; and also a packet directed to Gerard Douw, which, on being opened, was found to contain a contract of marriage, formally drawn up, between Wilken Vanderhausen of the Boom-quay, in Rotterdam, and Rose Velderkaust of Leyden, niece to Gerard Douw, master in the art of painting, also of the same city; and containing engagements on the part of Vanderhausen to make settlements upon his bride far more splendid than he had before led her guardian to believe likely, and which were to be secured to her use in the most unexceptionable manner possible – the money being placed in the hands of Gerard Douw himself.

I have no sentimental scenes to describe, no cruelty of guardians or magnanimity of wards, or agonies of lovers. The record I have to make is one of sordidness, levity, and interest. In less than a week after the first interview which we have just described, the contract of marriage was fulfilled, and Schalken saw the prize which he would have risked anything to secure, carried off triumphantly by his formidable rival.

For two or three days he absented himself from the school; he then returned and worked, if with less cheerfulness, with far more dogged resolution than before; the dream of love had given place to that of ambition.

Months passed away, and, contrary to his expectation, and, indeed, to the direct promise of the parties, Gerard Douw heard nothing of his niece or her worshipful spouse. The interest of the money, which was to have been demanded in quarterly sums, lay unclaimed in his hands. He began to grow extremely uneasy.

Mynher Vanderhausen’s direction in Rotterdam he was fully possessed of. After some irresolution he finally determined to journey thither – a trifling undertaking, and easily accomplished – and thus to satisfy himself of the safety and comfort of his ward, for whom he entertained an honest and strong affection.

His search was in vain, however. No one in Rotterdam had ever heard of Mynher Vanderhausen.

Gerard Douw left not a house in the Boom-quay untried; but all in vain. No one could give him any information whatever touching the object of his inquiry; and he was obliged to return to Leyden, nothing wiser than when he had left it.

On his arrival he hastened to the establishment from which Vanderhausen had hired the lumbering, though, considering the times, most luxurious vehicle which the bridal party had employed to convey them to Rotterdam. From the driver of this machine he learned, that having proceeded by slow stages, they had late in the evening approached Rotterdam; but that before they entered the city, and while yet nearly a mile from it, a small party of men, soberly clad, and after the old fashion, with peaked beards and moustaches, standing in the centre of the road, obstructed the further progress of the carriage. The driver reined in his horses, much fearing, from the obscurity of the hour, and the loneliness of the road, that some mischief was intended.

His fears were, however, somewhat allayed by his observing that these strange men carried a large litter, of an antique shape, and which they immediately set down upon the pavement, whereupon the bridegroom, having opened the coach door from within, descended, and having assisted his bride to do likewise, led her, weeping bitterly and wringing her hands, to the litter, which they both entered. It was then raised by the men who surrounded it, and speedily carried towards the city, and before it had proceeded many yards the darkness concealed it from the view of the Dutch chariot.

In the inside of the vehicle he found a purse, whose contents more than thrice paid the hire of the carriage and man. He saw and could tell nothing more of Mynher Vanderhausen and his beautiful lady. This mystery was a source of deep anxiety and almost of grief to Gerard Douw.

There was evidently fraud in the dealing of Vanderhausen with him, though for what purpose committed he could not imagine. He greatly doubted how far it was possible for a man possessing in his countenance so strong an evidence of the presence of the most demoniac feelings to be in reality anything but a villain; and every day that passed without his hearing from or of his niece, instead of inducing him to forget his fears, tended more and more to intensify them.

The loss of his niece’s cheerful society tended also to depress his spirits; and in order to dispel this despondency, which often crept upon his mind after his daily employment was over, he was wont frequently to prevail upon Schalken to accompany him home, and by his presence to dispel, in some degree, the gloom of his otherwise solitary supper.

One evening, the painter and his pupil were sitting by the fire, having accomplished a comfortable supper. They had yielded to that silent pensiveness sometimes induced by the process of digestion, when their reflections were disturbed by a loud sound at the street door, as if occasioned by some person rushing forcibly and repeatedly against it. A domestic had run without delay to ascertain the cause of the disturbance, and they heard him twice or thrice interrogate the applicant for admission, but without producing an answer or any cessation of the sounds.

They heard him then open the hall door, and immediately there followed a light and rapid tread upon the staircase. Schalken laid his hand on his sword, and advanced towards the door. It opened before he reached it, and Rose rushed into the room. She looked wild and haggard, and pale with exhaustion and terror; but her dress surprised them as much even as her unexpected appearance. It consisted of a kind of white woollen wrapper, made close about the neck, and descending to the very ground. It was much deranged and travel-soiled. The poor creature had hardly entered the chamber when she fell senseless on the floor. With some difficulty they succeeded in reviving her, and on recovering her senses she instantly exclaimed, in a tone of eager, terrified impatience,

“Wine, wine, quickly, or I’m lost!”

Much alarmed at the strange agitation in which the call was made, they at once administered to her wishes, and she drank some wine with a haste and eagerness which surprised him. She had hardly swallowed it, when she exclaimed with the same urgency,

“Food, food, at once, or I perish!”

A considerable fragment of a roast joint was upon the table, and Schalken immediately proceeded to cut some, but he was anticipated; for no sooner had she become aware of its presence than she darted at it with the rapacity of a vulture, and, seizing it in her hands, she tore off the flesh with her teeth and swallowed it.

When the paroxysm of hunger had been a little appeased, she appeared suddenly to become aware how strange her conduct had been, or it may have been that other more agitating thoughts recurred to her mind, for she began to weep bitterly, and to wring her hands.

“Oh! send for a minister of God,” said she; “I am not safe till he comes; send for him speedily.”

Gerard Douw despatched a messenger instantly, and prevailed on his niece to allow him to surrender his bedchamber to her use; he also persuaded her to retire to it at once and to rest; her consent was extorted upon the condition that they would not leave her for a moment.

“Oh that the holy man were here!” she said; “he can deliver me. The dead and the living can never be one – God has forbidden it.”

With these mysterious words she surrendered herself to their guidance, and they proceeded to the chamber which Gerard Douw had assigned to her use.

“Do not – do not leave me for a moment,” said she. “I am lost forever if you do.”

Gerard Douw’s chamber was approached through a spacious apartment, which they were now about to enter. Gerard Douw and Schalken each carried a wax candle, so that a sufficient degree of light was cast upon all surrounding objects. They were now entering the large chamber, which, as I have said, communicated with Douw’s apartment, when Rose suddenly stopped, and, in a whisper which seemed to thrill with horror, she said—

“O God! he is here – he is here! See, see – there he goes!”

She pointed towards the door of the inner room, and Schalken thought he saw a shadowy and ill-defined form gliding into that apartment. He drew his sword, and raising the candle so as to throw its light with increased distinctness upon the objects in the room, he entered the chamber into which the figure had glided. No figure was there – nothing but the furniture which belonged to the room, and yet he could not be deceived as to the fact that something had moved before them into the chamber.

A sickening dread came upon him, and the cold perspiration broke out in heavy drops upon his forehead; nor was he more composed when he heard the increased urgency, the agony of entreaty, with which Rose implored them not to leave her for a moment.

“I saw him,” said she. “He’s here! I cannot be deceived – I know him. He’s by me – he’s with me – he’s in the room. Then, for God’s sake, as you would save, do not stir from beside me!”

They at length prevailed upon her to lie down upon the bed, where she continued to urge them to stay by her. She frequently uttered incoherent sentences, repeating again and again, “The dead and the living cannot be one – God has forbidden it!” and then again, “Rest to the wakeful – sleep to the sleepwalkers.”

These and such mysterious and broken sentences she continued to utter until the clergyman arrived.

Gerard Douw began to fear, naturally enough, that the poor girl, owing to terror or ill-treatment, had become deranged; and he half suspected, by the suddenness of her appearance, and the unseasonableness of the hour, and, above all, from the wildness and terror of her manner, that she had made her escape from some place of confinement for lunatics, and was in immediate fear of pursuit. He resolved to summon medical advice as soon as the mind of his niece had been in some measure set at rest by the offices of the clergyman whose attendance she had so earnestly desired; and until this object had been attained, he did not venture to put any questions to her, which might possibly, by reviving painful or horrible recollections, increase her agitation.

The clergyman soon arrived – a man of ascetic countenance and venerable age – one whom Gerard Douw respected much, forasmuch as he was a veteran polemic, though one, perhaps, more dreaded as a combatant than beloved as a Christian – of pure morality, subtle brain, and frozen heart. He entered the chamber which communicated with that in which Rose reclined, and immediately on his arrival she requested him to pray for her, as for one who lay in the hands of Satan, and who could hope for deliverance only from Heaven.

That our readers may distinctly understand all the circumstances of the event which we are about imperfectly to describe, it is necessary to state the relative positions of the parties who were engaged in it. The old clergyman and Schalken were in the anteroom of which we have already spoken; Rose lay in the inner chamber, the door of which was open; and by the side of the bed, at her urgent desire, stood her guardian; a candle burned in the bedchamber, and three were lighted in the outer apartment.

The old man now cleared his voice, as if about to commence; but before he had time to begin, a sudden gust of air blew out the candle which served to illuminate the room in which the poor girl lay, and she with hurried alarm, exclaimed:

“Godfrey, bring in another candle; the darkness is unsafe.”

Gerard Douw, forgetting for the moment her repeated injunctions in the immediate impulse, stepped from the bedchamber into the other, in order to supply what she desired.

“O God! do not go, dear uncle!” shrieked the unhappy girl; and at the same time she sprang from the bed and darted after him, in order, by her grasp, to detain him.

But the warning came too late, for scarcely had he passed the threshold, and hardly had his niece had time to utter the startling exclamation, when the door which divided the two rooms closed violently after him, as if swung to by a strong blast of wind.

Schalken and he both rushed to the door, but their united and desperate efforts could not avail so much as to shake it.

Shriek after shriek burst from the inner chamber, with all the piercing loudness of despairing terror. Schalken and Douw applied every energy and strained every nerve to force open the door; but all in vain.

There was no sound of struggling from within, but the screams seemed to increase in loudness, and at the same time they heard the bolts of the latticed window withdrawn, and the window itself grated upon the sill as if thrown open.

One last shriek, so long and piercing and agonized as to be scarcely human, swelled from the room, and suddenly there followed a deathlike silence.

A light step was heard crossing the floor, as if from the bed to the window; and almost at the same instant the door gave way, and yielding to the pressure of the external applicants, they were nearly precipitated into the room. It was empty. The window was open, and Schalken sprang to a chair and gazed out upon the street and at the canal below. He saw no form, but he beheld, or thought he beheld, the waters of the broad canal beneath settling ring after ring in heavy circular ripples, as if a moment before disturbed by the immersion of some large and heavy mass.

No trace of Rose was ever after discovered, nor was anything certain respecting her mysterious wooer detected or even suspected; no clue whereby to trace the intricacies of the labyrinth, and to arrive at a distinct conclusion was to be found. But an incident occurred, which, though it will not be received by our rational readers as at all approaching to evidence upon the matter, nevertheless produced a strong and a lasting impression upon the mind of Schalken.

Many years after the events which we have detailed, Schalken, then remotely situated, received an intimation of his father’s death, and of his intended burial upon a fixed day in the church of Rotterdam. It was necessary that a very considerable journey should be performed by the funeral procession, which, as it will readily be believed, was not very numerously attended. Schalken with difficulty arrived in Rotterdam late in the day upon which the funeral was appointed to take place. The procession had not then arrived. Evening closed in, and still it did not appear.

Schalken strolled down to the church – he found it open; notice of the arrival of the funeral had been given, and the vault in which the body was to be laid had been opened. The official who corresponds to our sexton, on seeing a well-dressed gentleman, whose object was to attend the expected funeral, pacing the aisle of the church, hospitably invited him to share with him the comforts of a blazing wood fire, which as was his custom in winter time upon such occasions, he had kindled on the hearth of a chamber which communicated by a flight of steps with the vault below.

In this chamber Schalken and his entertainer seated themselves; and the sexton, after some fruitless attempts to engage his guest in conversation, was obliged to apply himself to his tobacco-pipe and can to solace his solitude.

In spite of his grief and cares, the fatigues of a rapid journey of nearly forty hours gradually overcame the mind and body of Godfrey Schalken, and he sank into a deep sleep, from which he was awakened by someone shaking him gently by the shoulder. He first thought that the old sexton had called him, but he was no longer in the room.

He roused himself, and as soon as he could clearly see what was around him, he perceived a female form, clothed in a kind of light robe of muslin, part of which was so disposed as to act as a veil, and in her hand she carried a lamp. She was moving rather away from him, and towards the flight of steps which conducted towards the vaults.

Schalken felt a vague alarm at the sight of this figure, and at the same time an irresistible impulse to follow its guidance. He followed it towards the vaults, but when it reached the head of the stairs, he paused; the figure paused also, and turning gently round, displayed, by the light of the lamp it carried, the face and features of his first love, Rose Velderkaust. There was nothing horrible, or even sad, in the countenance. On the contrary, it wore the same arch smile which used to enchant the artist long before in his happy days.

A feeling of awe and of interest, too intense to be resisted, prompted him to follow the spectre, if spectre it were. She descended the stairs – he followed; and, turning to the left, through a narrow passage she led him, to his infinite surprise, into what appeared to be an old-fashioned Dutch apartment, such as the pictures of Gerard Douw have served to immortalize.

Abundance of costly antique furniture was disposed about the room, and in one corner stood a four-post bed, with heavy black cloth curtains around it. The figure frequently turned towards him with the same arch smile; and when she came to the side of the bed, she drew the curtains, and by the light of the lamp which she held towards its contents, she disclosed to the horror-stricken painter, sitting bolt upright in the bed, the livid and demoniac form of Vanderhausen. Schalken had hardly seen him when he fell senseless upon the floor, where he lay until discovered, on the next morning, by persons employed in closing the passages into the vaults. He was lying in a cell of considerable size, which had not been disturbed for a long time, and he had fallen beside a large coffin which was supported upon small stone pillars, a security against the attacks of vermin.

To his dying day Schalken was satisfied of the reality of the vision which he had witnessed, and he has left behind him a curious evidence of the impression which it wrought upon his fancy, in a painting executed shortly after the event we have narrated, and which is valuable as exhibiting not only the peculiarities which have made Schalken’s pictures sought after, but even more so as presenting a portrait, as close and faithful as one taken from memory can be, of his early love, Rose Velderkaust, whose mysterious fate must ever remain matter of speculation.

The picture represents a chamber of antique masonry, such as might be found in most old cathedrals, and is lighted faintly by a lamp carried in the hand of a female figure, such as we have above attempted to describe; and in the background, and to the left of him who examines the painting, there stands the form of a man apparently aroused from sleep, and by his attitude, his hand being laid upon his sword, exhibiting considerable alarm; this last figure is illuminated only by the expiring glare of a wood or charcoal fire.

The whole production exhibits a beautiful specimen of that artful and singular distribution of light and shade which has rendered the name of Schalken immortal among the artists of his country. This tale is traditionary, and the reader will easily perceive, by our studiously omitting to heighten many points of the narrative, when a little additional colouring might have added effect to the recital, that we have desired to lay before him, not a figment of the brain, but a curious tradition connected with, and belonging to, the biography of a famous artist.

“Dublin University Magazine”, May 1839

The Purcell Papers: Volume II (1880)

revised 1851 Ghost Stories And Tales Of Mystery

PASSAGE IN THE SECRET HISTORY
OF AN IRISH COUNTESS

(1838)

The following paper is written in a female hand, and was no doubt communicated to my much-regretted friend by the lady whose early history it serves to illustrate, the Countess D———. She is no more – she long since died, a childless and a widowed wife, and, as her letter sadly predicts, none survive to whom the publication of this narrative can prove “injurious, or even painful.” Strange! two powerful and wealthy families, that in which she was born, and that into which she had married, have ceased to be – they are utterly extinct.

To those who know anything of the history of Irish families, as they were less than a century ago, the facts which immediately follow will at once suggest the names of the principal actors; and to others their publication would be useless – to us, possibly, if not probably, injurious. I have, therefore, altered such of the names as might, if stated, get us into difficulty; others, belonging to minor characters in the strange story, I have left untouched.

~   ~   ~   ~

My dear friend, – You have asked me to furnish you with a detail of the strange events which marked my early history, and I have, without hesitation, applied myself to the task, knowing that, while I live, a kind consideration for my feelings will prevent your giving publicity to the statement; and conscious that, when I am no more, there will not survive one to whom the narrative can prove injurious, or even painful.

My mother died when I was quite an infant, and of her I have no recollection, even the faintest. By her death, my education and habits were left solely to the guidance of my surviving parent; and, as far as a stern attention to my religious instruction, and an active anxiety evinced by his procuring for me the best masters to perfect me in those accomplishments which my station and wealth might seem to require, could avail, he amply discharged the task.

My father was what is called an oddity, and his treatment of me, though uniformly kind, flowed less from affection and tenderness than from a sense of obligation and duty. Indeed, I seldom even spoke to him except at meal-times, and then his manner was silent and abrupt; his leisure hours, which were many, were passed either in his study or in solitary walks; in short, he seemed to take no further interest in my happiness or improvement than a conscientious regard to the discharge of his own duty would seem to claim.

Shortly before my birth a circumstance had occurred which had contributed much to form and to confirm my father’s secluded habits – it was the fact that a suspicion of murder had fallen upon his younger brother, though not sufficiently definite to lead to an indictment, yet strong enough to ruin him in public opinion.

This disgraceful and dreadful doubt cast upon the family name, my father felt deeply and bitterly, and not the less so that he himself was thoroughly convinced of his brother’s innocence. The sincerity and strength of this impression he shortly afterwards proved in a manner which produced the dark events which follow. Before, however, I enter upon the statement of them, I ought to relate the circumstances which had awakened the suspicion; inasmuch as they are in themselves somewhat curious, and, in their effects, most intimately connected with my after-history.

My uncle, Sir Arthur T———n, was a gay and extravagant man, and, among other vices, was ruinously addicted to gaming; this unfortunate propensity, even after his fortune had suffered so severely as to render inevitable a reduction in his expenses by no means inconsiderable, nevertheless continued to actuate him, nearly to the exclusion of all other pursuits; he was, however, a proud, or rather a vain man, and could not bear to make the diminution of his income a matter of gratulation and triumph to those with whom he had hitherto competed, and the consequence was, that he frequented no longer the expensive haunts of dissipation, and retired from the gay world, leaving his coterie to discover his reasons as best they might.

He did not, however, forego his favourite vice, for, though he could not worship his great divinity in the costly temples where it was formerly his wont to take his stand, yet he found it very possible to bring about him a sufficient number of the votaries of chance to answer all his ends. The consequence was, that Carrickleigh, which was the name of my uncle’s residence, was never without one or more of such visitors as I have described.

It happened that upon one occasion he was visited by one Hugh Tisdall, a gentleman of loose habits, but of considerable wealth, and who had, in early youth, travelled with my uncle upon the Continent; the period of his visit was winter, and, consequently, the house was nearly deserted excepting by its regular inmates; it was therefore highly acceptable, particularly as my uncle was aware that his visitor’s tastes accorded exactly with his own.

Both parties seemed determined to avail themselves of their suitability during the brief stay which Mr. Tisdall had promised; the consequence was, that they shut themselves up in Sir Arthur’s private room for nearly all the day and the greater part of the night, during the space of nearly a week, at the end of which the servant having one morning, as usual, knocked at Mr. Tisdall’s bedroom door repeatedly, received no answer, and, upon attempting to enter, found that it was locked; this appeared suspicious, and, the inmates of the house having been alarmed, the door was forced open, and, on proceeding to the bed, they found the body of its occupant perfectly lifeless, and hanging halfway out, the head downwards, and near the floor. One deep wound had been inflicted upon the temple, apparently with some blunt instrument which had penetrated the brain; and another blow, less effective, probably the first aimed, had grazed the head, removing some of the scalp, but leaving the skull untouched. The door had been double-locked upon the inside, in evidence of which the key still lay where it had been placed in the lock.

The window, though not secured on the interior, was closed – a circumstance not a little puzzling, as it afforded the only other mode of escape from the room; it looked out, too, upon a kind of courtyard, round which the old buildings stood, formerly accessible by a narrow doorway and passage lying in the oldest side of the quadrangle, but which had since been built up, so as to preclude all ingress or egress; the room was also upon the second story, and the height of the window considerable. Near the bed were found a pair of razors belonging to the murdered man, one of them upon the ground, and both of them open. The weapon which had inflicted the mortal wound was not to be found in the room, nor were any footsteps or other traces of the murderer discoverable.

At the suggestion of Sir Arthur himself, a coroner was instantly summoned to attend, and an inquest was held; nothing, however, in any degree conclusive was elicited; the walls, ceiling, and floor of the room were carefully examined, in order to ascertain whether they contained a trapdoor or other concealed mode of entrance – but no such thing appeared.

Such was the minuteness of investigation employed, that, although the grate had contained a large fire during the night, they proceeded to examine even the very chimney, in order to discover whether escape by it were possible; but this attempt, too, was fruitless, for the chimney, built in the old fashion, rose in a perfectly perpendicular line from the hearth to a height of nearly fourteen feet above the roof, affording in its interior scarcely the possibility of ascent, the flue being smoothly plastered, and sloping towards the top like an inverted funnel, promising, too, even if the summit were attained, owing to its great height, but a precarious descent upon the sharp and steep-ridged roof; the ashes, too, which lay in the grate, and the soot, as far as it could be seen, were undisturbed, a circumstance almost conclusive of the question.

Sir Arthur was of course examined; his evidence was given with clearness and unreserve, which seemed calculated to silence all suspicion. He stated that, up to the day and night immediately preceding the catastrophe, he had lost to a heavy amount, but that, at their last sitting, he had not only won back his original loss, but upwards of four thousand pounds in addition; in evidence of which he produced an acknowledgement of debt to that amount in the handwriting of the deceased, and bearing the date of the fatal night. He had mentioned the circumstance to his lady, and in presence of some of the domestics; which statement was supported by their respective evidence.

One of the jury shrewdly observed, that the circumstance of Mr. Tisdall’s having sustained so heavy a loss might have suggested to some ill-minded persons accidentally hearing it, the plan of robbing him, after having murdered him in such a manner as might make it appear that he had committed suicide; a supposition which was strongly supported by the razors having been found thus displaced, and removed from their case. Two persons had probably been engaged in the attempt, one watching by the sleeping man, and ready to strike him in case of his awakening suddenly, while the other was procuring the razors and employed in inflicting the fatal gash, so as to make it appear to have been the act of the murdered man himself. It was said that while the juror was making this suggestion, Sir Arthur changed colour.

Nothing, however, like legal evidence appeared against him, and the consequence was that the verdict was found against a person or persons unknown; and for some time the matter was suffered to rest, until, after about five months, my father received a letter from a person signing himself Andrew Collis, and representing himself to be the cousin of the deceased. This letter stated that Sir Arthur was likely to incur not merely suspicion, but personal risk, unless he could account for certain circumstances connected with the recent murder, and contained a copy of a letter written by the deceased, and bearing date, the day of the week, and of the month, upon the night of which the deed of blood had been perpetrated. Tisdall’s note ran as follows:

Dear Collis,

I have had sharp work with Sir Arthur; he tried some of his stale tricks, but soon found that I was Yorkshire too: it would not do – you understand me. We went to the work like good ones, head, heart and soul; and, in fact, since I came here, I have lost no time. I am rather fagged, but I am sure to be well paid for my hardship; I never want sleep so long as I can have the music of a dice-box, and wherewithal to pay the piper. As I told you, he tried some of his queer turns, but I foiled him like a man, and, in return, gave him more than he could relish of the genuine dead knowledge.

In short, I have plucked the old baronet as never baronet was plucked before; I have scarce left him the stump of a quill; I have got promissory notes in his hand to the amount of – if you like round numbers, say, thirty thousand pounds, safely deposited in my portable strong-box, alias double-clasped pocketbook. I leave this ruinous old rat-hole early on tomorrow, for two reasons – first, I do not want to play with Sir Arthur deeper than I think his security, that is, his money, or his money’s worth, would warrant; and, secondly, because I am safer a hundred miles from Sir Arthur than in the house with him. Look you, my worthy, I tell you this between ourselves – I may be wrong, but, by God, I am as sure as that I am now living, that Sir A——— attempted to poison me last night; so much for old friendship on both sides.

When I won the last stake, a heavy one enough, my friend leant his forehead upon his hands, and you’ll laugh when I tell you that his head literally smoked like a hot dumpling. I do not know whether his agitation was produced by the plan which he had against me, or by his having lost so heavily – though it must be allowed that he had reason to be a little funked, whichever way his thoughts went; but he pulled the bell, and ordered two bottles of champagne. While the fellow was bringing them he drew out a promissory note to the full amount, which he signed, and, as the man came in with the bottles and glasses, he desired him to be off; he filled out a glass for me, and, while he thought my eyes were off, for I was putting up his note at the time, he dropped something slyly into it, no doubt to sweeten it; but I saw it all, and, when he handed it to me, I said, with an emphasis which he might or might not understand:

“There is some sediment in this; I’ll not drink it.”

“Is there?” said he, and at the same time snatched it from my hand and threw it into the fire. What do you think of that? have I not a tender chicken to manage? Win or lose, I will not play beyond five thousand tonight, and tomorrow sees me safe out of the reach of Sir Arthur’s champagne. So, all things considered, I think you must allow that you are not the last who have found a knowing boy in

Yours to command,

Hugh Tisdall.

Of the authenticity of this document I never heard my father express a doubt; and I am satisfied that, owing to his strong conviction in favour of his brother, he would not have admitted it without sufficient inquiry, inasmuch as it tended to confirm the suspicions which already existed to his prejudice.

Now, the only point in this letter which made strongly against my uncle, was the mention of the “double-clasped pocketbook” as the receptacle of the papers likely to involve him, for this pocketbook was not forthcoming, nor anywhere to be found, nor had any papers referring to his gaming transactions been found upon the dead man. However, whatever might have been the original intention of this Collis, neither my uncle nor my father ever heard more of him; but he published the letter in Faulkner’s newspaper, which was shortly afterwards made the vehicle of a much more mysterious attack. The passage in that periodical to which I allude, occurred about four years afterwards, and while the fatal occurrence was still fresh in public recollection. It commenced by a rambling preface, stating that “a certain person whom certain persons thought to be dead, was not so, but living, and in full possession of his memory, and moreover ready and able to make great delinquents tremble.” It then went on to describe the murder, without, however, mentioning names; and in doing so, it entered into minute and circumstantial particulars of which none but an eye-witness could have been possessed, and by implications almost too unequivocal to be regarded in the light of insinuation, to involve the “titled gambler” in the guilt of the transaction.

My father at once urged Sir Arthur to proceed against the paper in an action of libel; but he would not hear of it, nor consent to my father’s taking any legal steps whatever in the matter. My father, however, wrote in a threatening tone to Faulkner, demanding a surrender of the author of the obnoxious article. The answer to this application is still in my possession, and is penned in an apologetic tone: it states that the manuscript had been handed in, paid for, and inserted as an advertisement, without sufficient inquiry, or any knowledge as to whom it referred.

No step, however, was taken to clear my uncle’s character in the judgment of the public; and as he immediately sold a small property, the application of the proceeds of which was known to none, he was said to have disposed of it to enable himself to buy off the threatened information. However the truth might have been, it is certain that no charges respecting the mysterious murder were afterwards publicly made against my uncle, and, as far as external disturbances were concerned, he enjoyed henceforward perfect security and quiet.

A deep and lasting impression, however, had been made upon the public mind, and Sir Arthur T———n was no longer visited or noticed by the gentry and aristocracy of the county, whose attention and courtesies he had hitherto received. He accordingly affected to despise these enjoyments which he could not procure, and shunned even that society which he might have commanded.

This is all that I need recapitulate of my uncle’s history, and I now recur to my own. Although my father had never, within my recollection, visited, or been visited by, my uncle, each being of sedentary, procrastinating, and secluded habits, and their respective residences being very far apart – the one lying in the county of Galway, the other in that of Cork – he was strongly attached to his brother, and evinced his affection by an active correspondence, and by deeply and proudly resenting that neglect which had marked Sir Arthur as unfit to mix in society.

When I was about eighteen years of age, my father, whose health had been gradually declining, died, leaving me in heart wretched and desolate, and, owing to his previous seclusion, with few acquaintances, and almost no friends.

The provisions of his will were curious, and when I had sufficiently come to myself to listen to or comprehend them, surprised me not a little: all his vast property was left to me, and to the heirs of my body, for ever; and, in default of such heirs, it was to go after my death to my uncle, Sir Arthur, without any entail.

At the same time, the will appointed him my guardian, desiring that I might be received within his house, and reside with his family, and under his care, during the term of my minority; and in consideration of the increased expense consequent upon such an arrangement, a handsome annuity was allotted to him during the term of my proposed residence.

The object of this last provision I at once understood: my father desired, by making it the direct, apparent interest of Sir Arthur that I should die without issue, while at the same time he placed me wholly in his power, to prove to the world how great and unshaken was his confidence in his brother’s innocence and honour, and also to afford him an opportunity of showing that this mark of confidence was not unworthily bestowed.

It was a strange, perhaps an idle scheme; but as I had been always brought up in the habit of considering my uncle as a deeply-injured man, and had been taught, almost as a part of my religion, to regard him as the very soul of honour, I felt no further uneasiness respecting the arrangement than that likely to result to a timid girl, of secluded habits, from the immediate prospect of taking up her abode for the first time in her life among total strangers. Previous to leaving my home, which I felt I should do with a heavy heart, I received a most tender and affectionate letter from my uncle, calculated, if anything could do so, to remove the bitterness of parting from scenes familiar and dear from my earliest childhood, and in some degree to reconcile me to the measure.

It was during a fine autumn that I approached the old domain of Carrickleigh. I shall not soon forget the impression of sadness and of gloom which all that I saw produced upon my mind; the sunbeams were falling with a rich and melancholy tint upon the fine old trees, which stood in lordly groups, casting their long, sweeping shadows over rock and sward. There was an air of neglect and decay about the spot, which amounted almost to desolation; the symptoms of this increased in number as we approached the building itself, near which the ground had been originally more artificially and carefully cultivated than elsewhere, and whose neglect consequently more immediately and strikingly betrayed itself.

As we proceeded, the road wound near the beds of what had been formally two fish-ponds, which were now nothing more than stagnant swamps, overgrown with rank weeds, and here and there encroached upon by the straggling underwood; the avenue itself was much broken, and in many places the stones were almost concealed by grass and nettles; the loose stone walls which had here and there intersected the broad park were, in many places, broken down, so as no longer to answer their original purpose as fences; piers were now and then to be seen, but the gates were gone; and, to add to the general air of dilapidation, some huge trunks were lying scattered through the venerable old trees, either the work of the winter storms, or perhaps the victims of some extensive but desultory scheme of denudation, which the projector had not capital or perseverance to carry into full effect.

After the carriage had travelled a mile of this avenue, we reached the summit of rather an abrupt eminence, one of the many which added to the picturesqueness, if not to the convenience of this rude passage. From the top of this ridge the grey walls of Carrickleigh were visible, rising at a small distance in front, and darkened by the hoary wood which crowded around them. It was a quadrangular building of considerable extent, and the front which lay towards us, and in which the great entrance was placed, bore unequivocal marks of antiquity; the timeworn, solemn aspect of the old building, the ruinous and deserted appearance of the whole place, and the associations which connected it with a dark page in the history of my family, combined to depress spirits already predisposed for the reception of sombre and dejecting impressions.

When the carriage drew up in the grass-grown court yard before the hall door, two lazy-looking men, whose appearance well accorded with that of the place which they tenanted, alarmed by the obstreperous barking of a great chained dog, ran out from some half-ruinous outhouses, and took charge of the horses; the hall door stood open, and I entered a gloomy and imperfectly lighted apartment, and found no one within. However, I had not long to wait in this awkward predicament, for before my luggage had been deposited in the house, indeed, before I had well removed my cloak and other wraps, so as to enable me to look around, a young girl ran lightly into the hall, and kissing me heartily, and somewhat boisterously, exclaimed:

“My dear cousin, my dear Margaret – I am so delighted – so out of breath. We did not expect you till ten o’clock; my father is somewhere about the place, he must be close at hand. James – Corney – run out and tell your master – my brother is seldom at home, at least at any reasonable hour – you must be so tired – so fatigued – let me show you to your room – see that Lady Margaret’s luggage is all brought up – you must lie down and rest yourself – Deborah, bring some coffee – up these stairs; we are so delighted to see you – you cannot think how lonely I have been – how steep these stairs are, are not they? I am so glad you are come – I could hardly bring myself to believe that you were really coming – how good of you, dear Lady Margaret.”

There was real good-nature and delight in my cousin’s greeting, and a kind of constitutional confidence of manner which placed me at once at ease, and made me feel immediately upon terms of intimacy with her. The room into which she ushered me, although partaking in the general air of decay which pervaded the mansion and all about it, had nevertheless been fitted up with evident attention to comfort, and even with some dingy attempt at luxury; but what pleased me most was that it opened, by a second door, upon a lobby which communicated with my fair cousin’s apartment; a circumstance which divested the room, in my eyes, of the air of solitude and sadness which would otherwise have characterised it, to a degree almost painful to one so dejected in spirits as I was.

After such arrangements as I found necessary were completed, we both went down to the parlour, a large wainscoted room, hung round with grim old portraits, and, as I was not sorry to see, containing in its ample grate a large and cheerful fire. Here my cousin had leisure to talk more at her ease; and from her I learned something of the manners and the habits of the two remaining members of her family, whom I had not yet seen.

On my arrival I had known nothing of the family among whom I was come to reside, except that it consisted of three individuals, my uncle, and his son and daughter, Lady T———n having been long dead. In addition to this very scanty stock of information, I shortly learned from my communicative companion that my uncle was, as I had suspected, completely retired in his habits, and besides that, having been so far back as she could well recollect, always rather strict, as reformed rakes frequently become, he had latterly been growing more gloomily and sternly religious than heretofore.

Her account of her brother was far less favourable, though she did not say anything directly to his disadvantage. From all that I could gather from her, I was led to suppose that he was a specimen of the idle, coarse-mannered, profligate, low-minded “squirearchy” – a result which might naturally have flowed from the circumstance of his being, as it were, outlawed from society, and driven for companionship to grades below his own – enjoying, too, the dangerous prerogative of spending much money.

However, you may easily suppose that I found nothing in my cousin’s communication fully to bear me out in so very decided a conclusion.

I awaited the arrival of my uncle, which was every moment to be expected, with feelings half of alarm, half of curiosity – a sensation which I have often since experienced, though to a less degree, when upon the point of standing for the first time in the presence of one of whom I have long been in the habit of hearing or thinking with interest.

It was, therefore, with some little perturbation that I heard, first a slight bustle at the outer door, then a slow step traverse the hall, and finally witnessed the door open, and my uncle enter the room. He was a striking-looking man; from peculiarities both of person and of garb, the whole effect of his appearance amounted to extreme singularity. He was tall, and when young his figure must have been strikingly elegant; as it was, however, its effect was marred by a very decided stoop. His dress was of a sober colour, and in fashion anterior to anything which I could remember. It was, however, handsome, and by no means carelessly put on; but what completed the singularity of his appearance was his uncut, white hair, which hung in long, but not at all neglected curls, even so far as his shoulders, and which combined with his regularly classic features, and fine dark eyes, to bestow upon him an air of venerable dignity and pride, which I have never seen equalled elsewhere. I rose as he entered, and met him about the middle of the room; he kissed my cheek and both my hands, saying:

“You are most welcome, dear child, as welcome as the command of this poor place and all that it contains can make you. I am most rejoiced to see you – truly rejoiced. I trust that you are not much fatigued – pray be seated again.” He led me to my chair, and continued: “I am glad to perceive you have made acquaintance with Emily already; I see, in your being thus brought together, the foundation of a lasting friendship. You are both innocent, and both young. God bless you – God bless you, and make you all that I could wish.”

He raised his eyes, and remained for a few moments silent, as if in secret prayer. I felt that it was impossible that this man, with feelings so quick, so warm, so tender, could be the wretch that public opinion had represented him to be. I was more than ever convinced of his innocence.

His manner was, or appeared to me, most fascinating; there was a mingled kindness and courtesy in it which seemed to speak benevolence itself. It was a manner which I felt cold art could never have taught; it owed most of its charm to its appearing to emanate directly from the heart; it must be a genuine index of the owner’s mind. So I thought.

My uncle having given me fully to understand that I was most welcome, and might command whatever was his own, pressed me to take some refreshment; and on my refusing, he observed that previously to bidding me goodnight, he had one duty further to perform, one in whose observance he was convinced I would cheerfully acquiesce.

He then proceeded to read a chapter from the Bible; after which he took his leave with the same affectionate kindness with which he had greeted me, having repeated his desire that I should consider everything in his house as altogether at my disposal. It is needless to say that I was much pleased with my uncle – it was impossible to avoid being so; and I could not help saying to myself, if such a man as this is not safe from the assaults of slander, who is? I felt much happier than I had done since my father’s death, and enjoyed that night the first refreshing sleep which had visited me since that event.

My curiosity respecting my male cousin did not long remain unsatisfied – he appeared the next day at dinner. His manners, though not so coarse as I had expected, were exceedingly disagreeable; there was an assurance and a forwardness for which I was not prepared; there was less of the vulgarity of manner, and almost more of that of the mind, than I had anticipated. I felt quite uncomfortable in his presence; there was just that confidence in his look and tone which would read encouragement even in mere toleration; and I felt more disgusted and annoyed at the coarse and extravagant compliments which he was pleased from time to time to pay me, than perhaps the extent of the atrocity might fully have warranted. It was, however, one consolation that he did not often appear, being much engrossed by pursuits about which I neither knew nor cared anything; but when he did appear, his attentions, either with a view to his amusement or to some more serious advantage, were so obviously and perseveringly directed to me, that young and inexperienced as I was, even I could not be ignorant of his preference. I felt more provoked by this odious persecution than I can express, and discouraged him with so much vigour, that I employed even rudeness to convince him that his assiduities were unwelcome; but all in vain.

This had gone on for nearly a twelvemonth, to my infinite annoyance, when one day as I was sitting at some needlework with my companion Emily, as was my habit, in the parlour, the door opened, and my cousin Edward entered the room. There was something, I thought, odd in his manner – a kind of struggle between shame and impudence – a kind of flurry and ambiguity which made him appear, if possible, more than ordinarily disagreeable.

“Your servant, ladies,” he said, seating himself at the same time; “sorry to spoil your tête-à-tête, but never mind, I’ll only take Emily’s place for a minute or two; and then we part for a while, fair cousin. Emily, my father wants you in the corner turret. No shilly-shally; he’s in a hurry.” She hesitated. “Be off – tramp, march!” he exclaimed, in a tone which the poor girl dared not disobey.

She left the room, and Edward followed her to the door. He stood there for a minute or two, as if reflecting what he should say, perhaps satisfying himself that no one was within hearing in the hall.

At length he turned about, having closed the door, as if carelessly, with his foot; and advancing slowly, as if in deep thought, he took his seat at the side of the table opposite to mine.

There was a brief interval of silence, after which he said:

“I imagine that you have a shrewd suspicion of the object of my early visit; but I suppose I must go into particulars. Must I?”

“I have no conception,” I replied, “what your object may be.”

“Well, well,” said he, becoming more at his ease as he proceeded, “it may be told in a few words. You know that it is totally impossible – quite out of the question – that an offhand young fellow like me, and a good-looking girl like yourself, could meet continually, as you and I have done, without an attachment – a liking growing up on one side or other; in short, I think I have let you know as plain as if I spoke it, that I have been in love with you almost from the first time I saw you.”

He paused; but I was too much horrified to speak. He interpreted my silence favourably.

“I can tell you,” he continued, “I’m reckoned rather hard to please, and very hard to hit. I can’t say when I was taken with a girl before; so you see fortune reserved me—”

Here the odious wretch wound his arm round my waist. The action at once restored me to utterance, and with the most indignant vehemence I released myself from his hold, and at the same time said:

“I have not been insensible, sir, of your most disagreeable attentions – they have long been a source of much annoyance to me; and you must be aware that I have marked my disapprobation – my disgust – as unequivocally as I possibly could, without actual indelicacy.”

I paused, almost out of breath from the rapidity with which I had spoken; and without giving him time to renew the conversation, I hastily quitted the room, leaving him in a paroxysm of rage and mortification. As I ascended the stairs, I heard him open the parlour door with violence, and take two or three rapid strides in the direction in which I was moving. I was now much frightened, and ran the whole way until I reached my room; and having locked the door, I listened breathlessly, but heard no sound. This relieved me for the present; but so much had I been overcome by the agitation and annoyance attendant upon the scene which I had just gone through, that when my cousin Emily knocked at my door, I was weeping in strong hysterics.

You will readily conceive my distress, when you reflect upon my strong dislike to my cousin Edward, combined with my youth and extreme inexperience. Any proposal of such a nature must have agitated me; but that it should have come from the man whom of all others I most loathed and abhorred, and to whom I had, as clearly as manner could do it, expressed the state of my feelings, was almost too overwhelming to be borne. It was a calamity, too, in which I could not claim the sympathy of my cousin Emily, which had always been extended to me in my minor grievances. Still I hoped that it might not be unattended with good; for I thought that one inevitable and most welcome consequence would result from this painful eclaircissment, in the discontinuance of my cousin’s odious persecution.

When I arose next morning, it was with the fervent hope that I might never again behold the face, or even hear the name, of my cousin Edward; but such a consummation, though devoutly to be wished, was hardly likely to occur. The painful impressions of yesterday were too vivid to be at once erased; and I could not help feeling some dim foreboding of coming annoyance and evil.

To expect on my cousin’s part anything like delicacy or consideration for me, was out of the question. I saw that he had set his heart upon my property, and that he was not likely easily to forego such an acquisition – possessing what might have been considered opportunities and facilities almost to compel my compliance.

I now keenly felt the unreasonableness of my father’s conduct in placing me to reside with a family of all whose members, with one exception, he was wholly ignorant, and I bitterly felt the helplessness of my situation. I determined, however, in case of my cousin’s persevering in his addresses, to lay all the particulars before my uncle, although he had never in kindness or intimacy gone a step beyond our first interview, and to throw myself upon his hospitality and his sense of honour for protection against a repetition of such scenes.

My cousin’s conduct may appear to have been an inadequate cause for such serious uneasiness; but my alarm was caused neither by his acts nor words, but entirely by his manner, which was strange and even intimidating to excess. At the beginning of the yesterday’s interview there was a sort of bullying swagger in his air, which towards the end gave place to the brutal vehemence of an undisguised ruffian – a transition which had tempted me into a belief that he might seek even forcibly to extort from me a consent to his wishes, or by means still more horrible, of which I scarcely dared to trust myself to think, to possess himself of my property.

I was early next day summoned to attend my uncle in his private room, which lay in a corner turret of the old building; and thither I accordingly went, wondering all the way what this unusual measure might prelude. When I entered the room, he did not rise in his usual courteous way to greet me, but simply pointed to a chair opposite to his own. This boded nothing agreeable. I sat down, however, silently waiting until he should open the conversation.

“Lady Margaret,” at length he said, in a tone of greater sternness than I thought him capable of using, “I have hitherto spoken to you as a friend, but I have not forgotten that I am also your guardian, and that my authority as such gives me a right to control your conduct. I shall put a question to you, and I expect and will demand a plain, direct answer. Have I rightly been informed that you have contemptuously rejected the suit and hand of my son Edward?”

I stammered forth with a good deal of trepidation:

“I believe – that is, I have, sir, rejected my cousin’s proposals; and my coldness and discouragement might have convinced him that I had determined to do so.”

“Madam,” replied he, with suppressed, but, as it appeared to me, intense anger, “I have lived long enough to know that coldness and discouragement, and such terms, form the common cant of a worthless coquette. You know to the full, as well as I, that coldness and discouragement may be so exhibited as to convince their object that he is neither distasteful or indifferent to the person who wears this manner. You know, too, none better, that an affected neglect, when skilfully managed, is amongst the most formidable of the engines which artful beauty can employ. I tell you, madam, that having, without one word spoken in discouragement, permitted my son’s most marked attentions for a twelvemonth or more, you have no right to dismiss him with no further explanation than demurely telling him that you had always looked coldly upon him; and neither your wealth nor your ladyship” (there was an emphasis of scorn on the word, which would have become Sir Giles Overreach himself) “can warrant you in treating with contempt the affectionate regard of an honest heart.”

I was too much shocked at this undisguised attempt to bully me into an acquiescence in the interested and unprincipled plan for their own aggrandisement, which I now perceived my uncle and his son to have deliberately entered into, at once to find strength or collectedness to frame an answer to what he had said. At length I replied, with some firmness:

“In all that you have just now said, sir, you have grossly misstated my conduct and motives. Your information must have been most incorrect as far as it regards my conduct towards my cousin; my manner towards him could have conveyed nothing but dislike; and if anything could have added to the strong aversion which I have long felt towards him, it would be his attempting thus to trick and frighten me into a marriage which he knows to be revolting to me, and which is sought by him only as a means for securing to himself whatever property is mine.”

As I said this, I fixed my eyes upon those of my uncle, but he was too old in the world’s ways to falter beneath the gaze of more searching eyes than mine; he simply said:

“Are you acquainted with the provisions of your father’s will?”

I answered in the affirmative; and he continued:

“Then you must be aware that if my son Edward were – which God forbid – the unprincipled, reckless man you pretend to think him” – (here he spoke very slowly, as if he intended that every word which escaped him should be registered in my memory, while at the same time the expression of his countenance underwent a gradual but horrible change, and the eyes which he fixed upon me became so darkly vivid, that I almost lost sight of everything else) – “if he were what you have described him, think you, girl, he could find no briefer means than wedding contracts to gain his ends? ”Twas but to grip your slender neck until the breath had stopped, and lands, and lakes, and all were his.”

I stood staring at him for many minutes after he had ceased to speak, fascinated by the terrible serpent-like gaze, until he continued with a welcome change of countenance:

“I will not speak again to you upon this – topic until one month has passed. You shall have time to consider the relative advantages of the two courses which are open to you. I should be sorry to hurry you to a decision. I am satisfied with having stated my feelings upon the subject, and pointed out to you the path of duty. Remember this day month – not one word sooner.”

He then rose, and I left the room, much agitated and exhausted.

This interview, all the circumstances attending it, but most particularly the formidable expression of my uncle’s countenance while he talked, though hypothetically, of murder, combined to arouse all my worst suspicions of him. I dreaded to look upon the face that had so recently worn the appalling livery of guilt and malignity. I regarded it with the mingled fear and loathing with which one looks upon an object which has tortured them in a nightmare.

In a few days after the interview, the particulars of which I have just related, I found a note upon my toilet-table, and on opening it I read as follows:

My dear Lady Margaret,

You will be perhaps surprised to see a strange face in your room to-day. I have dismissed your Irish maid, and secured a French one to wait upon you – a step rendered necessary by my proposing shortly to visit the Continent, with all my family.

Your faithful guardian,

Arthur T———n.

On inquiry, I found that my faithful attendant was actually gone, and far on her way to the town of Galway; and in her stead there appeared a tall, rawboned, ill-looking, elderly Frenchwoman, whose sullen and presuming manners seemed to imply that her vocation had never before been that of a lady’s-maid. I could not help regarding her as a creature of my uncle’s, and therefore to be dreaded, even had she been in no other way suspicious.

Days and weeks passed away without any, even a momentary doubt upon my part, as to the course to be pursued by me. The allotted period had at length elapsed; the day arrived on which I was to communicate my decision to my uncle. Although my resolution had never for a moment wavered, I could not shake of the dread of the approaching colloquy; and my heart sunk within me as I heard the expected summons.

I had not seen my cousin Edward since the occurrence of the grand eclaircissment; he must have studiously avoided me – I suppose from policy, it could not have been from delicacy. I was prepared for a terrific burst of fury from my uncle, as soon as I should make known my determination; and I not unreasonably feared that some act of violence or of intimidation would next be resorted to.

Filled with these dreary forebodings, I fearfully opened the study door, and the next minute I stood in my uncle’s presence. He received me with a politeness which I dreaded, as arguing a favourable anticipation respecting the answer which I was to give; and after some slight delay, he began by saying:

“It will be a relief to both of us, I believe, to bring this conversation as soon as possible to an issue. You will excuse me, then, my dear niece, for speaking with an abruptness which, under other circumstances, would be unpardonable. You have, I am certain, given the subject of our last interview fair and serious consideration; and I trust that you are now prepared with candour to lay your answer before me. A few words will suffice – we perfectly understand one another.”

He paused, and I, though feeling that I stood upon a mine which might in an instant explode, nevertheless answered with perfect composure:

“I must now, sir, make the same reply which I did upon the last occasion, and I reiterate the declaration which I then made, that I never can nor will, while life and reason remain, consent to a union with my cousin Edward.”

This announcement wrought no apparent change in Sir Arthur, except that he became deadly, almost lividly pale. He seemed lost in dark thought for a minute, and then with a slight effort said:

“You have answered me honestly and directly; and you say your resolution is unchangeable. Well, would it had been otherwise – would it had been otherwise – but be it as it is – I am satisfied.”

He gave me his hand – it was cold and damp as death; under an assumed calmness, it was evident that he was fearfully agitated. He continued to hold my hand with an almost painful pressure, while, as if unconsciously, seeming to forget my presence, he muttered:

“Strange, strange, strange, indeed! fatuity, helpless fatuity!” there was here a long pause. “Madness indeed to strain a cable that is rotten to the very heart – it must break – and then – all goes.”

There was again a pause of some minutes, after which, suddenly changing his voice and manner to one of wakeful alacrity, he exclaimed:

“Margaret, my son Edward shall plague you no more. He leaves this country tomorrow for France – he shall speak no more upon this subject – never, never more – whatever events depended upon your answer must now take their own course; but, as for this fruitless proposal, it has been tried enough; it can be repeated no more.”

At these words he coldly suffered my hand to drop, as if to express his total abandonment of all his projected schemes of alliance; and certainly the action, with the accompanying words, produced upon my mind a more solemn and depressing effect than I believed possible to have been caused by the course which I had determined to pursue; it struck upon my heart with an awe and heaviness which WILL accompany the accomplishment of an important and irrevocable act, even though no doubt or scruple remains to make it possible that the agent should wish it undone.

“Well,” said my uncle, after a little time, “we now cease to speak upon this topic, never to resume it again. Remember you shall have no farther uneasiness from Edward; he leaves Ireland for France on tomorrow; this will be a relief to you. May I depend upon your honour that no word touching the subject of this interview shall ever escape you?”

I gave him the desired assurance; he said:

“It is well – I am satisfied – we have nothing more, I believe, to say upon either side, and my presence must be a restraint upon you, I shall therefore bid you farewell.”

I then left the apartment, scarcely knowing what to think of the strange interview which had just taken place.

On the next day my uncle took occasion to tell me that Edward had actually sailed, if his intention had not been interfered with by adverse circumstances; and two days subsequently he actually produced a letter from his son, written, as it said, “on board,” and despatched while the ship was getting under weigh. This was a great satisfaction to me, and as being likely to prove so, it was no doubt communicated to me by Sir Arthur.

During all this trying period, I had found infinite consolation in the society and sympathy of my dear cousin Emily. I never in afterlife formed a friendship so close, so fervent, and upon which, in all its progress, I could look back with feelings of such unalloyed pleasure, upon whose termination I must ever dwell with so deep, yet so unembittered regret. In cheerful converse with her I soon recovered my spirits considerably, and passed my time agreeably enough, although still in the strictest seclusion.

Matters went on sufficiently smooth, although I could not help sometimes feeling a momentary, but horrible uncertainty respecting my uncle’s character; which was not altogether unwarranted by the circumstances of the two trying interviews whose particulars I have just detailed. The unpleasant impression which these conferences were calculated to leave upon my mind, was fast wearing away, when there occurred a circumstance, slight indeed in itself, but calculated irresistibly to awaken all my worst suspicions, and to overwhelm me again with anxiety and terror.

I had one day left the house with my cousin Emily, in order to take a ramble of considerable length, for the purpose of sketching some favourite views, and we had walked about half a mile when I perceived that we had forgotten our drawing materials, the absence of which would have defeated the object of our walk. Laughing at our own thoughtlessness, we returned to the house, and leaving Emily without, I ran upstairs to procure the drawing-books and pencils, which lay in my bedroom.

As I ran up the stairs I was met by the tall, ill-looking Frenchwoman, evidently a good deal flurried.

“Que veut, madame?” said she, with a more decided effort to be polite than I had ever known her make before.

“No, no – no matter,” said I, hastily running by her in the direction of my room.

“Madame,” cried she, in a high key, “restez ici, s’il vous plait; votre chambre n’est pas faite – your room is not ready for your reception yet.”

I continued to move on without heeding her. She was some way behind me, and feeling that she could not otherwise prevent my entrance, for I was now upon the very lobby, she made a desperate attempt to seize hold of my person: she succeeded in grasping the end of my shawl, which she drew from my shoulders; but slipping at the same time upon the polished oak floor, she fell at full length upon the boards.

A little frightened as well as angry at the rudeness of this strange woman, I hastily pushed open the door of my room, at which I now stood, in order to escape from her; but great was my amazement on entering to find the apartment occupied.

The window was open, and beside it stood two male figures; they appeared to be examining the fastenings of the casement, and their backs were turned towards the door. One of them was my uncle; they both turned on my entrance, as if startled. The stranger was booted and cloaked, and wore a heavy broad-leafed hat over his brows. He turned but for a moment, and averted his face; but I had seen enough to convince me that he was no other than my cousin Edward. My uncle had some iron instrument in his hand, which he hastily concealed behind his back; and coming towards me, said something as if in an explanatory tone; but I was too much shocked and confounded to understand what it might be. He said something about “repairs – windowframes – cold, and safety.”

I did not wait, however, to ask or to receive explanations, but hastily left the room. As I went down the stairs I thought I heard the voice of the Frenchwoman in all the shrill volubility of excuse, which was met, however, by suppressed but vehement imprecations, or what seemed to me to be such, in which the voice of my cousin Edward distinctly mingled.

I joined my cousin Emily quite out of breath. I need not say that my head was too full of other things to think much of drawing for that day. I imparted to her frankly the cause of my alarms, but at the same time as gently as I could; and with tears she promised vigilance, and devotion, and love. I never had reason for a moment to repent the unreserved confidence which I then reposed in her. She was no less surprised than I at the unexpected appearance of Edward, whose departure for France neither of us had for a moment doubted, but which was now proved by his actual presence to be nothing more than an imposture, practised, I feared, for no good end.

The situation in which I had found my uncle had removed completely all my doubts as to his designs. I magnified suspicions into certainties, and dreaded night after night that I should be murdered in my bed. The nervousness produced by sleepless nights and days of anxious fears increased the horrors of my situation to such a degree, that I at length wrote a letter to a Mr. Jefferies, an old and faithful friend of my father’s, and perfectly acquainted with all his affairs, praying him, for God’s sake, to relieve me from my present terrible situation, and communicating without reserve the nature and grounds of my suspicions.

This letter I kept sealed and directed for two or three days always about my person, for discovery would have been ruinous, in expectation of an opportunity which might be safely trusted, whereby to have it placed in the post-office. As neither Emily nor I were permitted to pass beyond the precincts of the demesne itself, which was surrounded by high walls formed of dry stone, the difficulty of procuring such an opportunity was greatly enhanced.

At this time Emily had a short conversation with her father, which she reported to me instantly.

After some indifferent matter, he had asked her whether she and I were upon good terms, and whether I was unreserved in my disposition. She answered in the affirmative; and he then inquired whether I had been much surprised to find him in my chamber on the other day. She answered that I had been both surprised and amused.

“And what did she think of George Wilson’s appearance?”

“Who?” inquired she.

“Oh, the architect,” he answered, “who is to contract for the repairs of the house; he is accounted a handsome fellow.”

“She could not see his face,” said Emily, “and she was in such a hurry to escape that she scarcely noticed him.”

Sir Arthur appeared satisfied, and the conversation ended.

This slight conversation, repeated accurately to me by Emily, had the effect of confirming, if indeed anything was required to do so, all that I had before believed as to Edward’s actual presence; and I naturally became, if possible, more anxious than ever to despatch the letter to Mr. Jefferies. An opportunity at length occurred.

As Emily and I were walking one day near the gate of the demesne, a lad from the village happened to be passing down the avenue from the house; the spot was secluded, and as this person was not connected by service with those whose observation I dreaded, I committed the letter to his keeping, with strict injunctions that he should put it without delay into the receiver of the town post-office; at the same time I added a suitable gratuity, and the man having made many protestations of punctuality, was soon out of sight.

He was hardly gone when I began to doubt my discretion in having trusted this person; but I had no better or safer means of despatching the letter, and I was not warranted in suspecting him of such wanton dishonesty as an inclination to tamper with it; but I could not be quite satisfied of its safety until I had received an answer, which could not arrive for a few days. Before I did, however, an event occurred which a little surprised me.

I was sitting in my bedroom early in the day, reading by myself, when I heard a knock at the door.

“Come in,” said I; and my uncle entered the room.

“Will you excuse me?” said he. “I sought you in the parlour, and thence I have come here. I desired to say a word with you. I trust that you have hitherto found my conduct to you such as that of a guardian towards his ward should be.”

I dared not withhold my consent.

“And,” he continued, “I trust that you have not found me harsh or unjust, and that you have perceived, my dear niece, that I have sought to make this poor place as agreeable to you as may be.”

I assented again; and he put his hand in his pocket, whence he drew a folded paper, and dashing it upon the table with startling emphasis, he said:

“Did you write that letter?”

The sudden and tearful alteration of his voice, manner, and face, but, more than all, the unexpected production of my letter to Mr. Jefferies, which I at once recognised, so confounded and terrified me, that I felt almost choking.

I could not utter a word.

“Did you write that letter?” he repeated with slow and intense emphasis. “You did, liar and hypocrite! You dared to write this foul and infamous libel; but it shall be your last. Men will universally believe you mad, if I choose to call for an inquiry. I can make you appear so. The suspicions expressed in this letter are the hallucinations and alarms of moping lunacy. I have defeated your first attempt, madam; and by the holy God, if ever you make another, chains, straw, darkness, and the keeper’s whip shall be your lasting portion!”

With these astounding words he left the room, leaving me almost fainting.

I was now almost reduced to despair; my last cast had failed; I had no course left but that of eloping secretly from the castle, and placing myself under the protection of the nearest magistrate. I felt if this were not done, and speedily, that I should be murdered.

No one, from mere description, can have an idea of the unmitigated horror of my situation – a helpless, weak, inexperienced girl, placed under the power and wholly at the mercy of evil men, and feeling that she had it not in her power to escape for a moment from the malignant influences under which she was probably fated to fall; and with a consciousness that if violence, if murder were designed, her dying shriek would be lost in void space; no human being would be near to aid her, no human interposition could deliver her.

I had seen Edward but once during his visit, and as I did not meet with him again, I began to think that he must have taken his departure – a conviction which was to a certain degree satisfactory, as I regarded his absence as indicating the removal of immediate danger.

Emily also arrived circuitously at the same conclusion, and not without good grounds, for she managed indirectly to learn that Edward’s black horse had actually been for a day and part of a night in the castle stables, just at the time of her brother’s supposed visit. The horse had gone, and, as she argued, the rider must have departed with it.

This point being so far settled, I felt a little less uncomfortable: when being one day alone in my bedroom, I happened to look out from the window, and, to my unutterable horror, I beheld, peering through an opposite casement, my cousin Edward’s face. Had I seen the evil one himself in bodily shape, I could not have experienced a more sickening revulsion.

I was too much appalled to move at once from the window, but I did so soon enough to avoid his eye. He was looking fixedly into the narrow quadrangle upon which the window opened. I shrank back unperceived, to pass the rest of the day in terror and despair. I went to my room early that night, but I was too miserable to sleep.

At about twelve o’clock, feeling very nervous, I determined to call my cousin Emily, who slept, you will remember, in the next room, which communicated with mine by a second door. By this private entrance I found my way into her chamber, and without difficulty persuaded her to return to my room and sleep with me. We accordingly lay down together, she undressed, and I with my clothes on, for I was every moment walking up and down the room, and felt too nervous and miserable to think of rest or comfort.

Emily was soon fast asleep, and I lay awake, fervently longing for the first pale gleam of morning, reckoning every stroke of the old clock with an impatience which made every hour appear like six.

It must have been about one o’clock when I thought I heard a slight noise at the partition-door between Emily’s room and mine, as if caused by somebody’s turning the key in the lock. I held my breath, and the same sound was repeated at the second door of my room – that which opened upon the lobby – the sound was here distinctly caused by the revolution of the bolt in the lock, and it was followed by a slight pressure upon the door itself, as if to ascertain the security of the lock.

The person, whoever it might be, was probably satisfied, for I heard the old boards of the lobby creak and strain, as if under the weight of somebody moving cautiously over them. My sense of hearing became unnaturally, almost painfully acute. I suppose the imagination added distinctness to sounds vague in themselves. I thought that I could actually hear the breathing of the person who was slowly returning down the lobby. At the head of the staircase there appeared to occur a pause; and I could distinctly hear two or three sentences hastily whispered; the steps then descended the stairs with apparently less caution. I now ventured to walk quickly and lightly to the lobby door, and attempted to open it; it was indeed fast locked upon the outside, as was also the other.

I now felt that the dreadful hour was come; but one desperate expedient remained – it was to awaken Emily, and by our united strength to attempt to force the partition-door, which was slighter than the other, and through this to pass to the lower part of the house, whence it might be possible to escape to the grounds, and forth to the village.

I returned to the bedside and shook Emily, but in vain. Nothing that I could do availed to produce from her more than a few incoherent words – it was a deathlike sleep. She had certainly drank of some narcotic, as had I probably also, spite of all the caution with which I had examined everything presented to us to eat or drink.

I now attempted, with as little noise as possible, to force first one door, then the other – but all in vain. I believe no strength could have effected my object, for both doors opened inwards. I therefore collected whatever movables I could carry thither, and piled them against the doors, so as to assist me in whatever attempts I should make to resist the entrance of those without. I then returned to the bed and endeavoured again, but fruitlessly, to awaken my cousin. It was not sleep, it was torpor, lethargy, death. I knelt down and prayed with an agony of earnestness; and then seating myself upon the bed, I awaited my fate with a kind of terrible tranquillity.

I heard a faint clanking sound from the narrow court which I have already mentioned, as if caused by the scraping of some iron instrument against stones or rubbish. I at first determined not to disturb the calmness which I now felt, by uselessly watching the proceedings of those who sought my life; but as the sounds continued, the horrible curiosity which I felt overcame every other emotion, and I determined, at all hazards, to gratify it. I therefore crawled upon my knees to the window, so as to let the smallest portion of my head appear above the sill.

The moon was shining with an uncertain radiance upon the antique grey buildings, and obliquely upon the narrow court beneath, one side of which was therefore clearly illuminated, while the other was lost in obscurity, the sharp outlines of the old gables, with their nodding clusters of ivy, being at first alone visible.

Whoever or whatever occasioned the noise which had excited my curiosity, was concealed under the shadow of the dark side of the quadrangle. I placed my hand over my eyes to shade them from the moonlight, which was so bright as to be almost dazzling, and, peering into the darkness, I first dimly, but afterwards gradually, almost with full distinctness, beheld the form of a man engaged in digging what appeared to be a rude hole close under the wall. Some implements, probably a shovel and pickaxe, lay beside him, and to these he every now and then applied himself as the nature of the ground required. He pursued his task rapidly, and with as little noise as possible.

“So,” thought I, as, shovelful after shovelful, the dislodged rubbish mounted into a heap, “they are digging the grave in which, before two hours pass, I must lie, a cold, mangled corpse. I am theirs – I cannot escape.”

I felt as if my reason was leaving me. I started to my feet, and in mere despair I applied myself again to each of the two doors alternately. I strained every nerve and sinew, but I might as well have attempted, with my single strength, to force the building itself from its foundation. I threw myself madly upon the ground, and clasped my hands over my eyes as if to shut out the horrible images which crowded upon me.

The paroxysm passed away. I prayed once more, with the bitter, agonised fervour of one who feels that the hour of death is present and inevitable. When I arose, I went once more to the window and looked out, just in time to see a shadowy figure glide stealthily along the wall. The task was finished. The catastrophe of the tragedy must soon be accomplished.

I determined now to defend my life to the last; and that I might be able to do so with some effect, I searched the room for something which might serve as a weapon; but either through accident, or from an anticipation of such a possibility, everything which might have been made available for such a purpose had been carefully removed. I must then die tamely and without an effort to defend myself.

A thought suddenly struck me – might it not be possible to escape through the door, which the assassin must open in order to enter the room? I resolved to make the attempt. I felt assured that the door through which ingress to the room would be effected, was that which opened upon the lobby. It was the more direct way, besides being, for obvious reasons, less liable to interruption than the other. I resolved, then, to place myself behind a projection of the wall, whose shadow would serve fully to conceal me, and when the door should be opened, and before they should have discovered the identity of the occupant of the bed, to creep noiselessly from the room, and then to trust to Providence for escape.

In order to facilitate this scheme, I removed all the lumber which I had heaped against the door; and I had nearly completed my arrangements, when I perceived the room suddenly darkened by the close approach of some shadowy object to the window. On turning my eyes in that direction, I observed at the top of the casement, as if suspended from above, first the feet, then the legs, then the body, and at length the whole figure of a man present himself. It was Edward T———n.

He appeared to be guiding his descent so as to bring his feet upon the centre of the stone block which occupied the lower part of the window; and, having secured his footing upon this, he kneeled down and began to gaze into the room. As the moon was gleaming into the chamber, and the bed-curtains were drawn, he was able to distinguish the bed itself and its contents. He appeared satisfied with his scrutiny, for he looked up and made a sign with his hand, upon which the rope by which his descent had been effected was slackened from above, and he proceeded to disengage it from his waist; this accomplished, he applied his hands to the window-frame, which must have been ingeniously contrived for the purpose, for, with apparently no resistance, the whole frame, containing casement and all, slipped from its position in the wall, and was by him lowered into the room.

The cold night wind waved the bed-curtains, and he paused for a moment – all was still again – and he stepped in upon the floor of the room. He held in his hand what appeared to be a steel instrument, shaped something like a hammer, but larger and sharper at the extremities. This he held rather behind him, while, with three long, tip-toe strides, he brought himself to the bedside.

I felt that the discovery must now be made, and held my breath in momentary expectation of the execration in which he would vent his surprise and disappointment. I closed my eyes – there was a pause, but it was a short one. I heard two dull blows, given in rapid succession: a quivering sigh, and the long-drawn, heavy breathing of the sleeper was forever suspended. I unclosed my eyes, and saw the murderer fling the quilt across the head of his victim: he then, with the instrument of death still in his hand, proceeded to the lobby door, upon which he tapped sharply twice or thrice. A quick step was then heard approaching, and a voice whispered something from without. Edward answered, with a kind of chuckle, “Her ladyship is past complaining; unlock the door, in the devil’s name, unless you’re afraid to come in, and help me to lift the body out of the window.”

The key was turned in the lock – the door opened – and my uncle entered the room.

I have told you already that I had placed myself under the shade of a projection of the wall, close to the door. I had instinctively shrunk down, cowering towards the ground on the entrance of Edward through the window. When my uncle entered the room he and his son both stood so very close to me that his hand was every moment upon the point of touching my face. I held my breath, and remained motionless as death.

“You had no interruption from the next room?” said my uncle.

“No,” was the brief reply.

“Secure the jewels, Ned; the French harpy must not lay her claws upon them. You’re a steady hand, by God! not much blood – eh?”

“Not twenty drops,” replied his son, “and those on the quilt.”

“I’m glad it’s over,” whispered my uncle again. “We must lift the – the thing through the window, and lay the rubbish over it.”

They then turned to the bedside, and, winding the bedclothes round the body, carried it between them slowly to the window, and, exchanging a few brief words with some one below, they shoved it over the windowsill, and I heard it fall heavily on the ground underneath.

“I’ll take the jewels,” said my uncle; “there are two caskets in the lower drawer.”

He proceeded, with an accuracy which, had I been more at ease, would have furnished me with matter of astonishment, to lay his hand upon the very spot where my jewels lay; and having possessed himself of them, he called to his son:

“Is the rope made fast above?”

“I’m not a fool – to be sure it is,” replied he.

They then lowered themselves from the window. I now rose lightly and cautiously, scarcely daring to breathe, from my place of concealment, and was creeping towards the door, when I heard my cousin’s voice, in a sharp whisper, exclaim: “Scramble up again! God damn you, you’ve forgot to lock the room door!” and I perceived, by the straining of the rope which hung from above, that the mandate was instantly obeyed.

Not a second was to be lost. I passed through the door, which was only closed, and moved as rapidly as I could, consistently with stillness, along the lobby. Before I had gone many yards, I heard the door through which I had just passed double-locked on the inside. I glided down the stairs in terror, lest, at every corner, I should meet the murderer or one of his accomplices.

I reached the hall, and listened for a moment to ascertain whether all was silent around; no sound was audible. The parlour windows opened on the park, and through one of them I might, I thought, easily effect my escape. Accordingly, I hastily entered; but, to my consternation, a candle was burning in the room, and by its light I saw a figure seated at the dinner-table, upon which lay glasses, bottles, and the other accompaniments of a drinking-party. Two or three chairs were placed about the table irregularly, as if hastily abandoned by their occupants.

A single glance satisfied me that the figure was that of my French attendant. She was fast asleep, having probably drank deeply. There was something malignant and ghastly in the calmness of this bad woman’s features, dimly illuminated as they were by the flickering blaze of the candle. A knife lay upon the table, and the terrible thought struck me – “Should I kill this sleeping accomplice in the guilt of the murderer, and thus secure my retreat?”

Nothing could be easier – it was but to draw the blade across her throat – the work of a second. An instant’s pause, however, corrected me. “No,” thought I, “the God who has conducted me thus far through the valley of the shadow of death, will not abandon me now. I will fall into their hands, or I will escape hence, but it shall be free from the stain of blood. His will be done.”

I felt a confidence arising from this reflection, an assurance of protection which I cannot describe. There was no other means of escape, so I advanced, with a firm step and collected mind, to the window. I noiselessly withdrew the bars and unclosed the shutters – I pushed open the casement, and, without waiting to look behind me, I ran with my utmost speed, scarcely feeling the ground under me, down the avenue, taking care to keep upon the grass which bordered it.

I did not for a moment slack my speed, and I had now gained the centre point between the park-gate and the mansion-house. Here the avenue made a wider circuit, and in order to avoid delay, I directed my way across the smooth sward round which the pathway wound, intending, at the opposite side of the flat, at a point which I distinguished by a group of old birch-trees, to enter again upon the beaten track, which was from thence tolerably direct to the gate.

I had, with my utmost speed, got about half way across this broad flat, when the rapid treading of a horse’s hoofs struck upon my ear. My heart swelled in my bosom as though I would smother. The clattering of galloping hoofs approached – I was pursued – they were now upon the sward on which I was running – there was not a bush or a bramble to shelter me – and, as if to render escape altogether desperate, the moon, which had hitherto been obscured, at this moment shone forth with a broad clear light, which made every object distinctly visible.

The sounds were now close behind me. I felt my knees bending under me, with the sensation which torments one in dreams. I reeled – I stumbled – I fell – and at the same instant the cause of my alarm wheeled past me at full gallop. It was one of the young fillies which pastured loose about the park, whose frolics had thus all but maddened me with terror. I scrambled to my feet, and rushed on with weak but rapid steps, my sportive companion still galloping round and round me with many a frisk and fling, until, at length, more dead than alive, I reached the avenue-gate and crossed the stile, I scarce knew how.

I ran through the village, in which all was silent as the grave, until my progress was arrested by the hoarse voice of a sentinel, who cried: “Who goes there?” I felt that I was now safe. I turned in the direction of the voice, and fell fainting at the soldier’s feet. When I came to myself; I was sitting in a miserable hovel, surrounded by strange faces, all bespeaking curiosity and compassion.

Many soldiers were in it also: indeed, as I afterwards found, it was employed as a guardroom by a detachment of troops quartered for that night in the town. In a few words I informed their officer of the circumstances which had occurred, describing also the appearance of the persons engaged in the murder; and he, without loss of time, proceeded to the mansion-house of Carrickleigh, taking with him a party of his men. But the villains had discovered their mistake, and had effected their escape before the arrival of the military.

The Frenchwoman was, however, arrested in the neighbourhood upon the next day. She was tried and condemned upon the ensuing assizes; and previous to her execution, confessed that “She had a hand in making Hugh Tisdal’s bed.” She had been a housekeeper in the castle at the time, and a kind of chere amie of my uncle’s. She was, in reality, able to speak English like a native, but had exclusively used the French language, I suppose to facilitate her disguise. She died the same hardened wretch which she had lived, confessing her crimes only, as she alleged, that her doing so might involve Sir Arthur T———n, the great author of her guilt and misery, and whom she now regarded with unmitigated detestation.

With the particulars of Sir Arthur’s and his son’s escape, as far as they are known, you are acquainted. You are also in possession of their after fate – the terrible, the tremendous retribution which, after long delays of many years, finally overtook and crushed them. Wonderful and inscrutable are the dealings of God with His creatures.

Deep and fervent as must always be my gratitude to heaven for my deliverance, effected by a chain of providential occurrences, the failing of a single link of which must have ensured my destruction, I was long before I could look back upon it with other feelings than those of bitterness, almost of agony.

The only being that had ever really loved me, my nearest and dearest friend, ever ready to sympathise, to counsel, and to assist – the gayest, the gentlest, the warmest heart – the only creature on earth that cared for me – her life had been the price of my deliverance; and I then uttered the wish, which no event of my long and sorrowful life has taught me to recall, that she had been spared, and that, in her stead, I were mouldering in the grave, forgotten and at rest.

“Dublin University Magazine”, Nov. 1838

The Purcell Papers: Volume II (1880)

revised (1851 ?) “The Murdered Cousin”

THE WATCHER

FROM THE REMINISCENCES OF A BACHELOR

(1847)

It is now more than fifty years since the occurrences which I am about to relate caused a strange sensation in the gay society of Dublin. The fashionable world, however, is no recorder of traditions; the memory of selfishness seldom reaches far; and the events which occasionally disturb the polite monotony of its pleasant and heartless progress, however stamped with the characters of misery and horror, scarcely outlive the gossip of a season, and (except, perhaps, in the remembrance of a few more directly interested in the consequences of the catastrophe) are in a little time lost to the recollection of all. The appetite for scandal, or for horror, has been sated; the incident can yield no more of interest or novelty – curiosity, frustrated by impenetrable mystery, gives over the pursuit in despair; the tale has ceased to be new, grows stale and flat – and so, in a few years, inquiry subsides into indifference, and all is forgotten.

I was a young man at the time, and intimately acquainted with some of the actors in this strange tale; the impression which its incidents made upon me, therefore, were deep and lasting. I shall now endeavour, with fulness and precision, to relate them all, combining, of course, in the narrative, whatever I have learned from various sources, tending, however imperfectly, to illuminate the darkness which involves its progress and termination.

~   ~   ~   ~

Somewhere about the year 1794, the younger brother of a certain baronet, whom I shall call Sir James Barton, returned to Dublin. He had served in the navy with some distinction, having commanded one of his Majesty’s frigates during the greater part of the American war. Captain Barton was now apparently some two or three-and-forty years of age. He was an intelligent and agreeable companion, when he chose it, though generally reserved, and occasionally even moody. In society, however, he deported himself as a man of the world and a gentleman. He had not contracted any of the noisy brusqueness sometimes acquired at sea; on the contrary, his manners were remarkably easy, quiet, and even polished. He was in person about the middle size, and somewhat strongly formed; his countenance was marked with the lines of thought, and on the whole wore an expression of gravity and even of melancholy. Being, however, as we have said, a man of perfect breeding, as well as of affluent circumstances and good family, he had, of course, ready access to the best society of the metropolis, without the necessity of any other credentials. In his personal habits Captain Barton was economical. He occupied lodgings in one of the then fashionable streets in the south side of the town, kept but one horse and one servant, and though a reputed free-thinker, he lived an orderly and moral life, indulging neither in gaming, drinking, nor any other vicious pursuit, living very much to himself, without forming any intimacies, or choosing any companions, and appearing to mix in gay society rather for the sake of its bustle and distraction, than for any opportunities which it offered of interchanging either thoughts or feelings with its votaries. Barton was therefore pronounced a saving, prudent, unsocial sort of a fellow, who bid fair to maintain his celibacy alike against stratagem and assault, and was likely to live to a good old age, die rich and leave his money to a hospital.

It was soon apparent, however, that the nature of Captain Barton’s plans had been totally misconceived. A young lady, whom we shall call Miss Montague, was at this time introduced into the fashionable world of Dublin by her aunt, the Dowager Lady L———. Miss Montague was decidedly pretty and accomplished, and having some natural cleverness, and a great deal of gaiety, became for a while the reigning toast. Her popularity, however, gained her, for a time, nothing more than that unsubstantial admiration which, however pleasant as an incense to vanity, is by no means necessarily antecedent to matrimony, for, unhappily for the young lady in question, it was an understood thing, that, beyond her personal attractions, she had no kind of earthly provision. Such being the state of affairs, it will readily be believed that no little surprise was consequent upon the appearance of Captain Barton as the avowed lover of the penniless Miss Montague.

His suit prospered, as might have been expected, and in a short time it was confidentially communicated by old Lady L——— to each of her hundred and fifty particular friends in succession, that Captain Barton had actually tendered proposals of marriage, with her approbation, to her niece, Miss Montague, who had, moreover, accepted the offer of his hand, conditionally upon the consent of her father, who was then upon his homeward voyage from India, and expected in two or three months at furthest. About his consent there could be no doubt – the delay, therefore, was one merely of form – they were looked upon as absolutely engaged, and Lady L———, with a rigour of old-fashioned decorum with which her niece would, no doubt, gladly have dispensed, withdrew her thenceforward from all further participation in the gaieties of the town. Captain Barton was a constant visitor as well as a frequent guest at the house, and was permitted all the privileges and intimacy which a betrothed suitor is usually accorded. Such was the relation of parties, when the mysterious circumstances which darken this narrative with inexplicable melancholy first began to unfold themselves.

Lady L——— resided in a handsome mansion at the north side of Dublin, and Captain Barton’s lodgings, as we have already said, were situated at the south. The distance intervening was considerable, and it was Captain Barton’s habit generally to walk home without an attendant, as often as he passed the evening with the old lady and her fair charge. His shortest way in such nocturnal walks lay, for a considerable space, through a line of streets which had as yet been merely laid out, and little more than the foundations of the houses constructed. One night, shortly after his engagement with Miss Montague had commenced, he happened to remain unusually late, in company only with her and Lady L———. The conversation had turned upon the evidences of revelation, which he had disputed with the callous scepticism of a confirmed infidel. What were called “French principles” had, in those days, found their way a good deal into fashionable society, especially that portion of it which professed allegiance to Whiggism, and neither the old lady nor her charge was so perfectly free from the taint as to look upon Captain Barton’s views as any serious objection to the proposed union. The discussion had degenerated into one upon the supernatural and the marvellous, in which he had pursued precisely the same line of argument and ridicule. In all this, it is but true to state, Captain Barton was guilty of no affectation – the doctrines upon which he insisted were, in reality, but too truly the basis of his own fixed belief, if so it might be called; and perhaps not the least strange of the many strange circumstances connected with this narrative, was the fact that the subject of the fearful influences we are about to describe was himself, from the deliberate conviction of years, an utter disbeliever in what are usually termed preternatural agencies.

It was considerably past midnight when Mr. Barton took his leave, and set out upon his solitary walk homeward. He rapidly reached the lonely road, with its unfinished dwarf walls tracing the foundations of the projected rows of houses on either side. The moon was shining mistily, and its imperfect light made the road he trod but additionally dreary – that utter silence, which has in it something indefinably exciting, reigned there, and made the sound of his steps, which alone broke it, unnaturally loud and distinct. He had proceeded thus some way, when on a sudden he heard other footsteps, pattering at a measured pace, and, as it seemed, about two score steps behind him. The suspicion of being dogged is at all times unpleasant; it is, however, especially so in a spot so desolate and lonely: and this suspicion became so strong in the mind of Captain Barton, that he abruptly turned about to confront his pursuers, but, though there was quite sufficient moonlight to disclose any object upon the road he had traversed, no form of any kind was visible.

The steps he had heard could not have been the reverberation of his own, for he stamped his foot upon the ground, and walked briskly up and down, in the vain attempt to wake an echo. Though by no means a fanciful person, he was at last compelled to charge the sounds upon his imagination, and treat them as an illusion. Thus satisfying himself, he resumed his walk, and before he had proceeded a dozen paces, the mysterious footfalls were again audible from behind, and this time, as if with the special design of showing that the sounds were not the responses of an echo, the steps sometimes slackened nearly to a halt, and sometimes hurried for six or eight strides to a run, and again abated to a walk.

Captain Barton, as before, turned suddenly round, and with the same result; no object was visible above the deserted level of the road. He walked back over the same ground, determined that, whatever might have been the cause of the sounds which had so disconcerted him, it should not escape his search; the endeavour, however, was unrewarded. In spite of all his scepticism, he felt something like a superstitious fear stealing fast upon him, and, with these unwonted and uncomfortable sensations, he once more turned and pursued his way. There was no repetition of these haunting sounds, until he had reached the point where he had last stopped to retrace his steps. Here they were resumed, and with sudden starts of running, which threatened to bring the unseen pursuer close up to the alarmed pedestrian. Captain Barton arrested his course as formerly; the unaccountable nature of the occurrence filled him with vague and almost horrible sensations, and, yielding to the excitement he felt gaining upon him, he shouted sternly, “Who goes there?”

The sound of one’s own voice, thus exerted, in utter solitude, and followed by total silence, has in it something unpleasantly exciting, and he felt a degree of nervousness which, perhaps, from no cause had he ever known before. To the very end of this solitary street the steps pursued him, and it required a strong effort of stubborn pride on his part to resist the impulse that prompted him every moment to run for safety at the top of his speed. It was not until he had reached his lodging, and sat by his own fireside, that he felt sufficiently reassured to arrange and reconsider in his own mind the occurrences which had so discomposed him: so little a matter, after all, is sufficient to upset the pride of scepticism, and vindicate the old simple laws of nature within us.

Mr. Barton was next morning sitting at a late breakfast, reflecting upon the incidents of the previous night, with more of inquisitiveness than awe – so speedily do gloomy impressions upon the fancy disappear under the cheerful influences of day – when a letter just delivered by the postman was placed upon the table before him. There was nothing remarkable in the address of this missive, except that it was written in a hand which he did not know – perhaps it was disguised – for the tall narrow characters were sloped backward; and with the self-inflicted suspense which we so often see practised in such cases, he puzzled over the inscription for a full minute before he broke the seal. When he did so, he read the following words, written in the same hand:

“Mr. Barton, late captain of the ‘Dolphin,’ is warned of DANGER. He will do wisely to avoid ——— Street – (here the locality of his last night’s adventure was named) if he walks there as usual he will meet with something unlucky – let him take warning, once for all, for he has reason to dread

THE WATCHER.”

Captain Barton read and re-read this strange effusion; in every light and in every direction he turned it over and over. He examined the paper on which it was written, and closely scrutinized the handwriting. Defeated here, he turned to the seal; it was nothing but a patch of wax, upon which the accidental impression of a coarse thumb was imperfectly visible. There was not the slightest mark, no clue or indication of any kind, to lead him to even a guess as to its possible origin. The writer’s object seemed a friendly one, and yet he subscribed himself as one whom he had “good reason to dread.” Altogether, the letter, its author, and its real purpose, were to him an inexplicable puzzle, and one, moreover, unpleasantly suggestive, in his mind, of associations connected with the last night’s adventure.

In obedience to some feeling – perhaps of pride – Mr. Barton did not communicate, even to his intended bride, the occurrences which we have just detailed. Trifling as they might appear, they had in reality most disagreeably affected his imagination, and he cared not to disclose, even to the young lady in question, what she might possibly look upon as evidences of weakness. The letter might very well be but a hoax, and the mysterious footfall but a delusion of his fancy. But although he affected to treat the whole affair as unworthy of a thought, it yet haunted him pertinaciously, tormenting him with perplexing doubts, and depressing him with undefined apprehensions. Certain it is, that for a considerable time afterwards he carefully avoided the street indicated in the letter as the scene of danger.

It was not until about a week after the receipt of the letter which I have transcribed, that anything further occurred to remind Captain Barton of its contents, or to counteract the gradual disappearance from his mind of the disagreeable impressions which he had then received. He was returning one night, after the interval I have stated, from the theatre, which was then situated in Crow Street, and having there handed Miss Montague and Lady L——— into their carriage, he loitered for some time with two or three acquaintances. With these, however, he parted close to the College, and pursued his way alone. It was now about one o’clock, and the streets were quite deserted. During the whole of his walk with the companions from whom he had just parted, he had been at times painfully aware of the sound of steps, as it seemed, dogging them on their way. Once or twice he had looked back, in the uneasy anticipation that he was again about to experience the same mysterious annoyances which had so much disconcerted him a week before, and earnestly hoping that he might see some form from whom the sounds might naturally proceed. But the street was deserted; no form was visible. Proceeding now quite alone upon his homeward way, he grew really nervous and uncomfortable, as he became sensible, with increased distinctness, of the well-known and now absolutely dreaded sounds.

By the side of the dead wall which bounded the College Park, the sounds followed, recommencing almost simultaneously with his own steps. The same unequal pace, sometimes slow, sometimes, for a score yards or so, quickened to a run, was audible from behind him. Again and again he turned, quickly and stealthily he glanced over his shoulder almost at every half-dozen steps; but no one was visible. The horrors of this intangible and unseen persecution became gradually all but intolerable; and when at last he reached his home his nerves were strung to such a pitch of excitement that he could not rest, and did not attempt even to lie down until after the daylight had broken.

He was awakened by a knock at his chamber door, and his servant entering, handed him several letters which had just been received by the early post. One among them instantly arrested his attention; a single glance at the direction aroused him thoroughly. He at once recognized its character, and read as follows:

“You may as well think, Captain Barton, to escape from your own shadow as from me; do what you may, I will see you as often I please, and you shall see me, for I do not want to hide myself, as you fancy. Do not let it trouble your rest, Captain Barton; for, with a good conscience, what need you fear from the eye of

THE WATCHER.”

It is scarcely necessary to dwell upon the feelings elicited by a perusal of this strange communication. Captain Barton was observed to be unusually absent and out of spirits for several days afterwards; but no one divined the cause. Whatever he might think as to the phantom steps which followed him, there could be no possible illusion about the letters he had received; and, to say the least of it, their immediate sequence upon the mysterious sounds which had haunted him was an odd coincidence. The whole circumstance, in his own mind, was vaguely and instinctively connected with certain passages in his past life, which, of all others, he hated to remember.

It so happened that just about this time, in addition to his approaching nuptials, Captain Barton had fortunately, perhaps, for himself, some business of an engrossing kind connected with the adjustment of a large and long-litigated claim upon certain properties. The hurry and excitement of business had its natural effect in gradually dispelling the marked gloom which had for a time occasionally oppressed him, and in a little while his spirits had entirely resumed their accustomed tone.

During all this period, however, he was occasionally dismayed by indistinct and half-heard repetitions of the same annoyance, and that in lonely places, in the daytime as well as after nightfall. These renewals of the strange impressions from which he had suffered so much were, however, desultory and faint, insomuch that often he really could not, to his own satisfaction, distinguish between them and the mere suggestions of an excited imagination.

One evening he walked down to the House of Commons with a member, an acquaintance of his and mine. This was one of the few occasions upon which I have been in company with Captain Barton. As we walked down together, I observed that he became absent and silent, and to a degree so marked as scarcely to consist with good breeding, and which, in one who was obviously, in all his habits, perfectly a gentleman, seemed to argue the pressure of some urgent and absorbing anxiety. I afterwards learned that, during the whole of our walk, he had heard the well-known footsteps dogging him as we proceeded. This, however, was the last time he suffered from this phase of the persecution, of which he was already the anxious victim. A new and a very different one was about to be presented.

Of the new series of impressions which were afterwards gradually to work out his destiny, I that evening witnessed the first; and but for its relation to the train of events which followed, the incident would scarcely have been now remembered by me. As we were walking in at the passage, a man, of whom I remember only that he was short in stature, looked like a foreigner, and wore a kind of travelling-cap, walked very rapidly, and as if under some fierce excitement, directly toward us, muttering to himself, fast and vehemently the while. This odd-looking person walked straight toward Barton, who was foremost of the three, and halted, regarding him for a moment or two with a look of menace and fury almost maniacal; and then turning about as abruptly, he walked before us at the same agitated pace, and disappeared at a side passage. I do distinctly remember being a good deal shocked at the countenance and bearing of this man, which indeed irresistibly impressed me with an undefined sense of danger, such as I have never felt before or since from the presence of anything human; but these sensations were, on my part, far from amounting to anything so disconcerting as to flurry or excite me – I had seen only a singularly evil countenance, agitated, as it seemed, with the excitement of madness. I was absolutely astonished, however, at the effect of this apparition upon Captain Barton.

I knew him to be a man of proud courage and coolness in real danger – a circumstance which made his conduct upon this occasion the more con spicuously odd. He recoiled a step or two as the stranger advanced, and clutched my arm in silence, with what seemed to me to be a spasm of agony or terror; and then, as the figure disappeared, shoving me roughly back, he followed it for a few paces, stopped in great disorder, and sat down upon a form. I never beheld a countenance more ghastly and haggard.

“For God’s sake, Barton, what is the matter?” said our companion, really alarmed at his appearance. “You’re not hurt, are you? – or unwell? What is it?”

“What did he say? – I did not hear it – what was it?” asked Barton, wholly disregarding the question.

“Tut, tut – nonsense,” said ———, greatly surprised; “who cares what the fellow said. You are unwell, Barton – decidedly unwell; let me call a coach.”

“Unwell! Yes – no – not exactly unwell,” he said, evidently making an effort to recover his self-possession; “but, to say the truth, I am fatigued – a little over-worked – and perhaps over anxious. You know I have been in chancery, and the winding up of a suit is always a nervous affair. I have felt uncomfortable all this evening; but I am better now. Come, come – shall we go on?”

“No, no. Take my advice, Barton, and go home; you really do need rest; you are looking absolutely ill. I really do insist on your allowing me to see you home,” replied his friend. I seconded ———’s advice, the more readily as it was obvious that Barton was not himself disinclined to be persuaded. He left us, politely declining our offered escort. I was not sufficiently intimate with ——— to discuss the scene which we had both just witnessed, and in which his friend had appeared in so strange a light. I was, however, convinced, from his manner in the few commonplace comments and regrets which we exchanged, that he was just as little satisfied as I with the extempore plea of illness with which he had accounted for the strange exhibition, and that we were both agreed in suspecting some lurking mystery in the matter.

I called next day at Barton’s lodgings, to inquire for him, and learned from the servant that he had not left his room since his return the night before; but that he was not seriously indisposed, and hoped to be out again in a few days. That evening he sent for Doctor Richards then in large and fashionable practice in Dublin, and their interview was, it is said, an odd one.

He entered into a detail of his own symptoms in an abstracted and desultory kind of way, which seemed to argue a strange want of interest in his own cure, and, at all events, made it manifest that there was some topic engaging his mind of more engrossing importance than his present ailment. He complained of occasional palpitations, and headache. Doctor Richards asked him, among other questions, whether there was any irritating circumstance or anxiety then occupying his thoughts. This he denied quickly and almost peevishly; and the physician thereupon declared it his opinion, that there was nothing amiss except some slight derangement of the digestion, for which he accordingly wrote a prescription, and was about to withdraw, when Mr. Barton, with the air of a man who suddenly recollects a topic which had nearly escaped him, recalled him.

“I beg your pardon, doctor, but I had really almost forgot; will you permit me to ask you two or three medical questions – rather odd ones, perhaps, but as a wager depends upon their solution, you will, I hope, excuse my unreasonableness.”

The physician readily undertook to satisfy the inquirer.

Barton seemed to have some difficulty about opening the proposed interrogatories, for he was silent for a minute, then walked to his bookcase, and returned as he had gone; at last he sat down, and said—

“You’ll think them very childish questions, but I can’t recover my wager without a decision; so I must put them. I want to know first about lockjaw. If a man actually has had that complaint, and appears to have died of it – so much so, that a physician of average skill pronounces him actually dead – may he, after all, recover?”

The physician smiled, and shook his head.

“But – but a blunder may be made,” resumed Barton. “Suppose an ignorant pretender to medical skill; may he be so deceived by any stage of the complaint, as to mistake what is only a part of the progress of the disease, for death itself?”

“No one who had ever seen death,” answered he, “could mistake it in a case of lockjaw.”

Barton mused for a few minutes. “I am going to ask you a question, perhaps, still more childish; but first, tell me, are not the regulations of foreign hospitals, such as that of, let us say, Lisbon, very lax and bungling. May not all kinds of blunders and slips occur in their entries of names, and so forth?”

Doctor Richards professed his inability to answer that query.

“Well, then, doctor, here is the last of my questions. You will, probably, laugh at it; but it must out, nevertheless. Is there any disease, in all the range of human maladies, which would have the effect of perceptibly contracting the stature, and the whole frame – causing the man to shrink in all his proportions, and yet to preserve his exact resemblance to himself in every particular – with the one exception, his height and bulk; any disease, mark – no matter how rare – how little believed in, generally – which could possibly result in producing such an effect?”

The physician replied with a smile, and a very decided negative.

“Tell me, then,” said Barton, abruptly, “if a man be in reasonable fear of assault from a lunatic who is at large, can he not procure a warrant for his arrest and detention?”

“Really, that is more a lawyer’s question than one in my way,” replied Doctor Richards; “but I believe, on applying to a magistrate, such a course would be directed.”

The physician then took his leave; but, just as he reached the hall door, remembered that he had left his cane upstairs, and returned. His reappearance was awkward, for a piece of paper, which he recognized as his own prescription, was slowly burning upon the fire, and Barton sitting close by with an expression of settled gloom and dismay. Doctor Richards had too much tact to appear to observe what presented itself; but he had seen quite enough to assure him that the mind, and not the body, of Captain Barton was in reality the seat of his sufferings.

A few days afterwards, the following advertisement appeared in the Dublin newspapers:

“If Sylvester Yelland, formerly a foremast man on board his Majesty’s frigate Dolphin, or his nearest of kin, will apply to Mr. Robert Smith, solicitor, at his office, Dame Street, he or they may hear of something greatly to his or their advantage. Admission may be had at any hour up to twelve o’clock at night for the next fortnight, should parties desire to avoid observation; and the strictest secrecy, as to all communications intended to be confidential, shall be honourably observed.”

The Dolphin, as we have mentioned, was the vessel which Captain Barton had commanded; and this circumstance, connected with the extraordinary exertions made by the circulation of handbills, etc., as well as by repeated advertisements, to secure for this strange notice the utmost possible publicity, suggested to Doctor Richards the idea that Captain Barton’s extreme uneasiness was somehow connected with the individual to whom the advertisement was addressed, and he himself the author of it. This, however, it is needless to add, was no more than a conjecture. No information whatsoever, as to the real purpose of the advertisement itself, was divulged by the agent, nor yet any hint as to who his employer might be.

Mr. Barton, although he had latterly begun to earn for himself the character of a hypochondriac, was yet very far from deserving it. Though by no means lively, he had yet, naturally, what are termed “even spirits,” and was not subject to continual depressions. He soon, therefore, began to return to his former habits; and one of the earliest symptoms of this healthier tone of spirits was his appearing at a grand dinner of the Freemasons, of which worthy fraternity he was himself a brother. Barton, who had been at first gloomy and abstracted, drank much more freely than was his wont – possibly with the purpose of dispelling his own secret anxieties – and under the influence of good wine, and pleasant company, became gradually (unlike his usual self) talkative, and even noisy. It was under this unwonted excitement that he left his company at about half-past ten o’clock; and as conviviality is a strong incentive to gallantry, it occurred to him to proceed forthwith to Lady L———’s, and pass the remainder of the evening with her and his destined bride.

Accordingly, he was soon at ——— Street, and chatting gaily with the ladies. It is not to be supposed that Captain Barton had exceeded the limits which propriety prescribes to good fellowship; he had merely taken enough of wine to raise his spirits, without, however, in the least degree unsteadying his mind, or affecting his manners. With this undue elevation of spirits had supervened an entire oblivion or contempt of those undefined apprehensions which had for so long weighed upon his mind, and to a certain extent estranged him from society; but as the night wore away, and his artificial gaiety began to flag, these painful feelings gradually intruded themselves again, and he grew abstracted and anxious as heretofore. He took his leave at length, with an unpleasant foreboding of some coming mischief, and with a mind haunted with a thousand mysterious apprehensions, such as, even while he acutely felt their pressure, he, nevertheless, inwardly strove, or affected to contemn.

It was his proud defiance of what he considered to be his own weakness which prompted him upon this occasion to the course which brought about the adventure which we are now about to relate. Mr. Barton might have easily called a coach, but he was conscious that his strong inclination to do so proceeded from no cause other than what he desperately persisted in representing to himself to be his own superstitious tremors. He might also have returned home by a route different from that against which he had been warned by his mysterious correspondent; but for the same reason he dismissed this idea also, and with a dogged and half desperate resolution to force matters to a crisis of some kind, to see if there were any reality in the causes of his former suffering, and if not, satisfactorily to bring their delusiveness to the proof, he determined to follow precisely the course which he had trodden upon the night so painfully memorable in his own mind as that on which his strange persecution had commenced. Though, sooth to say, the pilot who for the first time steers his vessel under the muzzles of a hostile battery never felt his resolution more severely tasked than did Captain Barton, as he breathlessly pursued this solitary path; a path which, spite of every effort of scepticism and reason, he felt to be, as respected him, infested by a malignant influence.

He pursued his way steadily and rapidly, scarcely breathing from intensity of suspense; he, however, was troubled by no renewal of the dreaded footsteps, and was beginning to feel a return of confidence, as, more than three-fourths of the way being accomplished with impunity, he approached the long line of twinkling oil lamps which indicated the frequented streets. This feeling of self-congratulation was, however, but momentary. The report of a musket at some two hundred yards behind him, and the whistle of a bullet close to his head, disagreeably and startlingly dispelled it. His first impulse was to retrace his steps in pursuit of the assassin; but the road on either side was, as we have said, embarrassed by the foundations of a street, beyond which extended waste fields, full of rubbish and neglected lime and brick kilns, and all now as utterly silent as though no sound had ever disturbed their dark and unsightly solitude. The futility of attempting, single-handed, under such circumstances, a search for the murderer, was apparent, especially as no further sound whatever was audible to direct his pursuit.

With the tumultuous sensations of one whose life had just been exposed to a murderous attempt, and whose escape has been the narrowest possible, Captain Barton turned, and without, however, quickening his pace actually to a run, hurriedly pursued his way. He had turned, as we have said, after a pause of a few seconds, and had just commenced his rapid retreat, when on a sudden he met the well-remembered little man in the fur cap. The encounter was but momentary. The figure was walking at the same exaggerated pace, and with the same strange air of menace as before; and as it passed him, he thought he heard it say, in a furious whisper, “Still alive, still alive!”

The state of Mr. Barton’s spirits began now to work a corresponding alteration in his health and looks, and to such a degree that it was impossible that the change should escape general remark. For some reasons, known but to himself, he took no step whatsoever to bring the attempt upon his life, which he had so narrowly escaped, under the notice of the authorities; on the contrary, he kept it jealously to himself; and it was not for many weeks after the occurrence that he mentioned it, and then in strict confidence to a gentleman, the torments of his mind at last compelled him to consult a friend.

Spite of his blue devils, however, poor Barton, having no satisfactory reason to render to the public for any undue remissness in the attentions which his relation to Miss Montague required, was obliged to exert himself, and present to the world a confident and cheerful bearing. The true source of his sufferings, and every circumstance connected with them, he guarded with a reserve so jealous, that it seemed dictated by at least a suspicion that the origin of his strange persecution was known to himself, and that it was of a nature which, upon his own account, he could not or dare not disclose.

The mind thus turned in upon itself, and constantly occupied with a haunting anxiety which it dared not reveal, or confide to any human breast, became daily more excited; and, of course, more vividly impressible, by a system of attack which operated through the nervous system; and in this state he was destined to sustain, with increasing frequency, the stealthy visitations of that apparition, which from the first had seemed to possess so unearthly and terrible a hold upon his imagination.

~   ~   ~   ~

It was about this time that Captain Barton called upon the then celebrated preacher, Doctor Macklin, with whom he had a slight acquaintance; and an extraordinary conversation ensued. The divine was seated in his chambers in college, surrounded with works upon his favourite pursuit and deep in theology, when Barton was announced. There was something at once embarrassed and excited in his manner, which, along with his wan and haggard countenance, impressed the student with the unpleasant consciousness that his visitor must have recently suffered terribly indeed to account for an alteration so striking, so shocking.

After the usual interchange of polite greeting, and a few commonplace remarks, Captain Barton, who obviously perceived the surprise which his visit had excited, and which Doctor Macklin was unable wholly to conceal, interrupted a brief pause by remarking,

“This is a strange call, Doctor Macklin, perhaps scarcely warranted by an acquaintance so slight as mine with you. I should not, under ordinary circumstances, have ventured to disturb you, but my visit is neither an idle nor impertinent intrusion. I am sure you will not so account it, when—”

Doctor Macklin interrupted him with assurances, such as good breeding suggested, and Barton resumed—

“I am come to task your patience by asking your advice. When I say your patience, I might, indeed, say more; I might have said your humanity, your compassion; for I have been, and am a great sufferer.”

“My dear sir,” replied the churchman, “it will, indeed, afford me infinite gratification if I can give you comfort in any distress of mind, but – but—”

“I know what you would say,” resumed Barton, quickly. “I am an unbeliever, and, therefore, incapable of deriving help from religion, but don’t take that for granted. At least you must not assume that, however unsettled my convictions may be, I do not feel a deep, a very deep, interest in the subject. Circumstances have lately forced it upon my attention in such a way as to compel me to review the whole question in a more candid and teachable spirit, I believe, than I ever studied it in before.”

“Your difficulties, I take it for granted, refer to the evidences of revelation,” suggested the clergyman.

“Why – no – yes; in fact I am ashamed to say I have not considered even my objections sufficiently to state them connectedly; but – but there is one subject on which I feel a peculiar interest.”

He paused again, and Doctor Macklin pressed him to proceed.

“The fact is,” said Barton, “whatever may be my uncertainty as to the authenticity of what we are taught to call revelation, of one fact I am deeply and horribly convinced: that there does exist beyond this a spiritual world – a system whose workings are generally in mercy hidden from us – a system which may be, and which is sometimes, partially and terribly revealed. I am sure, I know,” continued Barton, with increasing excitement, “there is a God – a dreadful God – and that retribution follows guilt. In ways, the most mysterious and stupendous; by agencies, the most inexplicable and terrific; there is a spiritual system – great Heavens, how frightfully I have been convinced! – a system malignant, and inexorable, and omnipotent, under whose persecutions I am, and have been, suffering the torments of the damned! – yes, sir – yes – the fires and frenzy of hell!”

As Barton continued, his agitation became so vehement that the divine was shocked and even alarmed. The wild and excited rapidity with which he spoke, and, above all, the indefinable horror which stamped his features, afforded a contrast to his ordinary cool and unimpassioned self-possession, striking and painful in the last degree.

“My dear sir,” said Doctor Macklin, after a brief pause, “I fear you have been suffering much, indeed; but I venture to predict that the depression under which you labour will be found to originate in purely physical causes, and that with a change of air and the aid of a few tonics, your spirits will return, and the tone of your mind be once more cheerful and tranquil as heretofore. There was, after all, more truth than we are quite willing to admit in the classic theories which assigned the undue predominance of any one affection of the mind to the undue action or torpidity of one or other of our bodily organs. Believe me, that a little attention to diet, exercise, and the other essentials of health, under competent direction, will make you as much yourself as you can wish.”

“Doctor Macklin,” said Barton, with something like a shudder, “I cannot delude myself with such a hope. I have no hope to cling to but one, and that is, that by some other spiritual agency more potent than that which tortures me, it may be combated, and I delivered. If this may not be, I am lost – now and for ever lost.”

“But, Mr. Barton, you must remember,” urged his companion, “that others have suffered as you have done, and—”

“No, no, no,” interrupted he with irritability; “no, sir, I am not a credulous – far from a superstitious man. I have been, perhaps, too much the reverse – too sceptical, too slow of belief; but unless I were one whom no amount of evidence could convince, unless I were to contemn the repeated, the perpetual evidence of my own senses, I am now – now at last constrained to believe I have no escape from the conviction, the overwhelming certainty, that I am haunted and dogged, go where I may, by – by a Demon.”

There was an almost preternatural energy of horror in Barton’s face, as, with its damp and deathlike lineaments turned towards his companion, he thus delivered himself.

“God help you, my poor friend!” said Doctor Macklin, much shocked. “God help you; for, indeed, you are a sufferer, however your sufferings may have been caused.”

“Aye, aye, God help me,” echoed Barton sternly; “but will He help me? will He help me?”

“Pray to Him; pray in an humble and trusting spirit,” said he.

“Pray, pray,” echoed he again; “I can’t pray; I could as easily move a mountain by an effort of my will. I have not belief enough to pray; there is something within me that will not pray. You prescribe impossibilities – literal impossibilities.”

“You will not find it so, if you will but try,” said Doctor Macklin.

“Try! I have tried, and the attempt only fills me with confusion and terror. I have tried in vain, and more than in vain. The awful, unutterable idea of eternity and infinity oppresses and maddens my brain, whenever my mind approaches the contemplation of the Creator; I recoil from the effort, scared, confounded, terrified. I tell you, Doctor Macklin, if I am to be saved, it must be by other means. The idea of the Creator is to me intolerable; my mind cannot support it.”

“Say, then, my dear sir,” urged he, “say how you would have me serve you. What you would learn of me. What can I do or say to relieve you?”

“Listen to me first,” replied Captain Barton, with a subdued air, and an evident effort to suppress his excitement; “listen to me while I detail the circumstances of the terrible persecution under which my life has become all but intolerable – a persecution which has made me fear death and the world beyond the grave as much as I have grown to hate existence.”

Barton then proceeded to relate the circumstances which we have already detailed, and then continued,

“This has now become habitual – an accustomed thing. I do not mean the actual seeing him in the flesh; thank God, that at least is not permitted daily. Thank God, from the unutterable horrors of that visitation I have been mercifully allowed intervals of repose, though none of security; but from the consciousness that a malignant spirit is following and watching me wherever I go, I have never, for a single instant, a temporary respite: I am pursued with blasphemies, cries of despair, and appalling hatred; I hear those dreadful sounds called after me as I turn the corners of streets; they come in the night-time while I sit in my chamber alone; they haunt me everywhere, charging me with hideous crimes, and – great God! – threatening me with coming vengeance and eternal misery! Hush! do you hear that?” he cried, with a horrible smile of triumph. “There – there, will that convince you?”

The clergyman felt the chillness of horror irresistibly steal over him, while, during the wail of a sudden gust of wind, he heard, or fancied he heard, the half articulate sounds of rage and derision mingling in their sough.

“Well, what do you think of that?” at length Barton cried, drawing a long breath through his teeth.

“I heard the wind,” said Doctor Macklin; “what should I think of it? What is there remarkable about it?”

“The prince of the powers of the air,” muttered Barton, with a shudder.

“Tut, tut! my dear sir!” said the student, with an effort to reassure himself; for though it was broad daylight, there was nevertheless something disagreeably contagious in the nervous excitement under which his visitor so obviously suffered. “You must not give way to those wild fancies: you must resist those impulses of the imagination.”

“Aye, aye; ‘resist the devil, and he will flee from thee,’” said Barton, in the same tone; “but how resist him? Aye, there it is: there is the rub. What – what am I to do? What can I do?”

“My dear sir, this is fancy,” said the man of folios; “you are your own tormentor.”

“No, no, sir; fancy has no part in it,” answered Barton, somewhat sternly. “Fancy, forsooth! Was it that made you, as well as me, hear, but this moment, those appalling accents of hell? Fancy, indeed! No, no.”

“But you have seen this person frequently,” said the ecclesiastic; “why have you not accosted or secured him? Is it not somewhat precipitate, to say no more, to assume, as you have done, the existence of preternatural agency, when, after all, everything may be easily accountable, if only proper means were taken to sift the matter.”

“There are circumstances connected with this – this appearance,” said Barton, “which it were needless to disclose, but which to me are proofs of its horrible and unearthly nature. I know that the being who haunts me is not man. I say I know this; I could prove it to your own conviction.” He paused for a minute, and then added, “And as to accosting it, I dare not – I could not! When I see it I am powerless; I stand in the gaze of death, in the triumphant presence of preterhuman power and malignity; my strength, and faculties, and memory all forsake me. Oh, God! I fear, sir, you know not what you speak of. Mercy, mercy! heaven have pity on me!”

He leaned his elbow on the table, and passed his hand across his eyes, as if to exclude some image of horror, muttering the last words of the sentence he had just concluded, again and again.

“Dr. Macklin,” he said, abruptly raising himself, and looking full upon the clergyman with an imploring eye, “I know you will do for me whatever may be done. You know now fully the circumstances and the nature of the mysterious agency of which I am the victim. I tell you I cannot help myself; I cannot hope to escape; I am utterly passive. I conjure you, then, to weigh my case well, and if anything may be done for me by vicarious supplication, by the intercession of the good, or by any aid or influence whatsoever, I implore of you, I adjure you in the name of the Most High, give me the benefit of that influence, deliver me from the body of this death! Strive for me; pity me! I know you will; you cannot refuse this; it is the purpose and object of my visit. Send me away with some hope, however little – some faint hope of ultimate deliverance, and I will nerve myself to endure, from hour to hour, the hideous dream into which my existence is transformed.”

Doctor Macklin assured him that all he could do was to pray earnestly for him, and that so much he would not fail to do. They parted with a hurried and melancholy valediction. Barton hastened to the carriage which awaited him at the door, drew the blinds, and drove away, while Dr. Macklin returned to his chamber, to ruminate at leisure upon the strange interview which had just interrupted his studies.

It was not to be expected that Captain Barton’s changed and eccentric habits should long escape remark and discussion. Various were the theories suggested to account for it. Some attributed the alteration to the pressure of secret pecuniary embarrassments; others to a repugnance to fulfil an engagement into which he was presumed to have too precipitately entered; and others, again, to the supposed incipiency of mental disease, which latter, indeed, was the most plausible, as well as the most generally received, of the hypotheses circulated in the gossip of the day.

From the very commencement of this change, at first so gradual in its advances, Miss Montague had, of course, been aware of it. The intimacy involved in their peculiar relation, as well as the near interest which it inspired, afforded, in her case, alike opportunity and motive for the successful exercise of that keen and penetrating observation peculiar to the sex. His visits became, at length, so interrupted, and his manner, while they lasted, so abstracted, strange, and agitated, that Lady L———, after hinting her anxiety and her suspicions more than once, at length distinctly stated her anxiety, and pressed for an explanation. The explanation was given, and although its nature at first relieved the worst solicitudes of the old lady and her niece, yet the circumstances which attended it, and the really dreadful consequences which it obviously threatened as regarded the spirits, and, indeed, the reason, of the now wretched man who made the strange declaration, were enough, upon a little reflection, to fill their minds with perturbation and alarm.

General Montague, the young lady’s father, at length arrived. He had himself slightly known Barton, some ten or twelve years previously, and being aware of his fortune and connections, was disposed to regard him as an unexceptionable and indeed a most desirable match for his daughter. He laughed at the story of Barton’s supernatural visitations, and lost not a moment in calling upon his intended son-in-law.

“My dear Barton,” he continued gaily, after a little conversation, “my sister tells me that you are a victim to blue devils in quite a new and original shape.”

Barton changed countenance, and sighed profoundly.

“Come, come; I protest this will never do,” continued the General; “you are more like a man on his way to the gallows than to the altar. These devils have made quite a saint of you.”

Barton made an effort to change the conversation.

“No, no, it won’t do,” said his visitor, laughing; “I am resolved to say out what I have to say about this magnificent mock mystery of yours. Come, you must not be angry; but, really, it is too bad to see you, at your time of life, absolutely frightened into good behaviour, like a naughty child, by a bugaboo, and, as far as I can learn, a very particularly contemptible one. Seriously, though, my dear Barton, I have been a good deal annoyed at what they tell me; but, at the same time, thoroughly convinced that there is nothing in the matter that may not be cleared up, with just a little attention and management, within a week at furthest.”

“Ah, General, you do not know—” he began.

“Yes, but I do know quite enough to warrant my confidence,” interrupted the soldier. “I know that all your annoyance proceeds from the occasional appearance of a certain little man in a cap and greatcoat, with a red vest and bad countenance, who follows you about, and pops upon you at the corners of lanes, and throws you into ague fits. Now, my dear fellow, I’ll make it my business to catch this mischievous little mountebank, and either beat him into a jelly with my own hands, or have him whipped through the town at the cart’s tail.”

“If you knew what I know,” said Barton, with gloomy agitation, “you would speak very differently. Don’t imagine that I am so weak and foolish as to assume, without proof the most overwhelming, the conclusion to which I have been forced. The proofs are here, locked up here.” As he spoke, he tapped upon his breast, and with an anxious sigh continued to walk up and down the room.

“Well, well, Barton,” said his visitor, “I’ll wager a rump and a dozen I collar the ghost, and convince yourself before many days are over.”

He was running on in the same strain when he was suddenly arrested, and not a little shocked, by observing Barton, who had approached the window, stagger slowly back, like one who had received a stunning blow – his arm feebly extended towards the street, his face and his very lips white as ashes – while he uttered, “There – there – there!”

General Montague started mechanically to his feet, and, from the window of the drawing-room, saw a figure corresponding, as well as his hurry would permit him to discern, with the description of the person whose appearance so constantly and dreadfully disturbed the repose of his friend. The figure was just turning from the rails of the area upon which it had been leaning, and without waiting to see more, the old gentleman snatched his cane and hat, and rushed down the stairs and into the street, in the furious hope of securing the person, and punishing the audacity of the mysterious stranger. He looked around him, but in vain, for any trace of the form he had himself distinctly beheld. He ran breathlessly to the nearest corner, expecting to see from thence the retreating figure, but no such form was visible. Back and forward, from crossing to crossing, he ran at fault, and it was not until the curious gaze and laughing countenances of the passers-by reminded him of the absurdity of his pursuit, that he checked his hurried pace, lowered his walking-cane from the menacing altitude which he had mechanically given it, adjusted his hat, and walked composedly back again, inwardly vexed and flurried. He found Barton pale and trembling in every joint; they both remained silent, though under emotions very different. At last Barton whispered, “You saw it?”

“It! – him – someone – you mean – to be sure I did,” replied Montague, testily. “But where is the good or the harm of seeing him? The fellow runs like a lamplighter. I wanted to catch him, but he had stolen away before I could reach the hall door. However, it is no great matter; next time, I dare say, I’ll do better; and, egad, if I once come within reach of him, I’ll introduce his shoulders to the weight of my cane, in a way to make him cry peccavi.”

Notwithstanding General Montague’s undertakings and exhortations, however, Barton continued to suffer from the selfsame unexplained cause. Go how, when, or where he would, he was still constantly dogged or confronted by the hateful being who had established over him so dreadful and mysterious an influence; nowhere, and at no time, was he secure against the odious appearance which haunted him with such diabolical perseverance. His depression, misery, and excitement became more settled and alarming every day, and the mental agonies that ceaselessly preyed upon him began at last so sensibly to affect his general health, that Lady L——— and General Montague succeeded (without, indeed, much difficulty) in persuading him to try a short tour on the Continent, in the hope that an entire change of scene would, at all events, have the effect of breaking through the influences of local association, which the more sceptical of his friends assumed to be by no means inoperative in suggesting and perpetuating what they conceived to be a mere form of nervous illusion. General Montague, moreover, was persuaded that the figure which haunted his intended son-in-law was by no means the creation of his own imagination, but, on the contrary, a substantial form of flesh and blood, animated by a spiteful and obstinate resolution, perhaps with some murderous object in perspective, to watch and follow the unfortunate gentleman. Even this hypothesis was not a very pleasant one; yet it was plain that if Barton could once be convinced that there was nothing preternatural in the phenomenon, which he had hitherto regarded in that light, the affair would lose all its terrors in his eyes, and wholly cease to exercise upon his health and spirits the baneful influence which it had hitherto done. He therefore reasoned, that if the annoyance were actually escaped from by mere change of scene, it obviously could not have originated in any supernatural agency.

Yielding to their persuasions, Barton left Dublin for England, accompanied by General Montague. They posted rapidly to London, and thence to Dover, whence they took the packet with a fair wind for Calais. The General’s confidence in the result of the expedition on Barton’s spirits had risen day by day since their departure from the shores of Ireland; for, to the inexpressible relief and delight of the latter, he had not, since then, so much as even once fancied a repetition of those impressions which had, when at home, drawn him gradually down to the very abyss of horror and despair. This exemption from what he had begun to regard as the inevitable condition of his existence, and the sense of security which began to pervade his mind, were inexpressibly delightful; and in the exultation of what he considered his deliverance, he indulged in a thousand happy anticipations for a future into which so lately he had hardly dared to look. In short, both he and his companion secretly congratulated themselves upon the termination of that persecution which had been to its immediate victim a source of such unspeakable agony.

It was a beautiful day, and a crowd of idlers stood upon the jetty to receive the packet, and enjoy the bustle of the new arrivals. Montague walked a few paces in advance of his friend, and as he made his way through the crowd, a little man touched his arm, and said to him, in a broad provincial patois,

“Monsieur is walking too fast; he will lose his sick comrade in the throng, for, by my faith, the poor gentleman seems to be fainting.”

Montague turned quickly, and observed that Barton did indeed look deadly pale. He hastened to his side.

“My poor fellow, are you ill?” he asked anxiously.

The question was unheeded, and twice repeated, ere Barton stammered—

“I saw him – by God, I saw him!”

“Him! – who? – where? – when did you see him? – where is he?” cried Montague, looking around him.

“I saw him – but he is gone,” repeated Barton, faintly.

“But where – where? For God’s sake, speak,” urged Montague, vehemently.

“It is but this moment – here,” said he.

“But what did he look like? – what had he on? – what did he wear? – quick, quick,” urged his excited companion, ready to dart among the crowd, and collar the delinquent on the spot.

“He touched your arm – he spoke to you – he pointed to me. God be merciful to me, there is no escape!” said Barton, in the low, subdued tones of intense despair.

Montague had already bustled away in all the flurry of mingled hope and indignation; but though the singular personnel of the stranger who had accosted him was vividly and perfectly impressed upon his recollection, he failed to discover among the crowd even the slightest resemblance to him. After a fruitless search, in which he enlisted the services of several of the bystanders, who aided all the more zealously as they believed he had been robbed, he at length, out of breath and baffled, gave over the attempt.

“Ah, my friend, it won’t do,” said Barton, with the faint voice and bewildered, ghastly look of one who has been stunned by some mortal shock; “there is no use in contending with it; whatever it is, the dreadful association between me and it is now established; I shall never escape – never, never!”

“Nonsense, nonsense, my dear fellow; don’t talk so,” said Montague, with something at once of irritation and dismay; “you must not; never mind, I say – never mind, we’ll jockey the scoundrel yet.”

It was, however, but lost labour to endeavour henceforward to inspire Barton with one ray of hope; he became utterly desponding. This intangible and, as it seemed, utterly inadequate influence was fast destroying his energies of intellect, character, and health. His first object was now to return to Ireland, there, as he believed, and now almost hoped, speedily to die.

To Ireland, accordingly, he came, and one of the first faces he saw upon the shore was again that of his implacable and dreaded persecutor. Barton seemed at last to have lost not only all enjoyment and every hope in existence, but all independence of will besides. He now submitted himself passively to the management of the friends most nearly interested in his welfare. With the apathy of entire despair, he implicitly assented to whatever measures they suggested and advised; and, as a last resource, it was determined to remove him to a house of Lady L———’s in the neighbourhood of Clontarf, where, with the advice of his medical attendant (who persisted in his opinion that the whole train of impressions resulted merely from some nervous derangement) it was resolved that he was to confine himself strictly to the house, and to make use only of those apartments which commanded a view of an enclosed yard, the gates of which were to be kept jealously locked. These precautions would at least secure him against the casual appearance of any living form which his excited imagination might possibly confound with the spectre which, as it was contended, his fancy recognized in every figure that bore even a distant or general resemblance to the traits with which he had at first invested it. A month or six weeks’ absolute seclusion under these conditions, it was hoped, might, by interrupting the series of these terrible impressions, gradually dispel the predisposing apprehension, and effectually break up the associations which had confirmed the supposed disease, and rendered recovery hopeless. Cheerful society and that of his friends was to be constantly supplied, and on the whole, very sanguine expectations were indulged in, that under this treatment the obstinate hypochondria of the patient might at length give way.

Accompanied, therefore, by Lady L———, General Montague, and his daughter – his own affianced bride – poor Barton, himself never daring to cherish a hope of his ultimate emancipation from the strange horrors under which his life was literally wasting away, took possession of the apartments whose situation protected him against the dreadful intrusions from which he shrank with such unutterable terror.

After a little time, a steady persistence in this system began to manifest its results in a very marked though gradual improvement alike in the health and spirits of the invalid. Not, indeed, that anything at all approaching to complete recovery was yet discernible. On the contrary, to those who had not seen him since the commencement of his strange sufferings, such an alteration would have been apparent as might well have shocked them. The improvement, however, such as it was, was welcomed with gratitude and delight, especially by the poor young lady, whom her attachment to him, as well as her now singularly painful position, consequent on his mysterious and protracted illness, rendered an object of pity scarcely one degree less to be commiserated than himself.

A week passed – a fortnight – a month – and yet no recurrence of the hated visitation had agitated and terrified him as before. The treatment had, so far, been followed by complete success. The chain of association had been broken. The constant pressure upon the overtasked spirits had been removed, and, under these comparatively favourable circumstances, the sense of social community with the world about him, and something of human interest, if not of enjoyment, began to reanimate his mind.

It was about this time that Lady L———, who, like most old ladies of the day, was deep in family receipts, and a great pretender to medical science, being engaged in the concoction of certain unpalatable mixtures of marvellous virtue, despatched her own maid to the kitchen garden with a list of herbs which were there to be carefully culled and brought back to her for the purpose stated. The handmaiden, however, returned with her task scarce half-completed, and a good deal flurried and alarmed. Her mode of accounting for her precipitate retreat and evident agitation was odd, and to the old lady unpleasantly startling.

It appeared that she had repaired to the kitchen garden, pursuant to her mistress’s directions, and had there begun to make the specified selection among the rank and neglected herbs which crowded one corner of the enclosure, and while engaged in this pleasant labour she carelessly sang a fragment of an old song, as she said, “to keep herself company.” She was, however, interrupted by a sort of mocking echo of the air she was singing; and looking up, she saw through the old thorn hedge, which surrounded the garden, a singularly ill-looking, little man, whose countenance wore the stamp of menace and malignity, standing close to her at the other side of the hawthorn screen. She described herself as utterly unable to move or speak, while he charged her with a message for Captain Barton, the substance of which she distinctly remembered to have been to the effect that he, Captain Barton, must come abroad as usual, and show himself to his friends out of doors, or else prepare for a visit in his own chamber. On concluding this brief message, the stranger had, with a threatening air, got down into the outer ditch, and seizing the hawthorn stems in his hands, seemed on the point of climbing through the fence, a feat which might have been accomplished without much difficulty. Without, of course, awaiting this result, the girl, throwing down her treasures of thyme and rosemary, had turned and run, with the swiftness of terror, to the house. Lady L——— commanded her, on pain of instant dismissal, to observe an absolute silence respecting all that portion of the incident which related to Captain Barton; and, at the same time, directed instant search to be made by her men in the garden and fields adjacent. This measure, however, was attended with the usual unsuccess, and filled with fearful and indefinable misgivings, Lady L——— communicated the incident to her brother. The story, however, until long afterwards, went no further, and of course it was jealously guarded from Barton, who continued to mend, though slowly and imperfectly.

Barton now began to walk occasionally in the courtyard which we have mentioned, and which, being surrounded by a high wall, commanded no view beyond its own extent. Here he, therefore, considered himself perfectly secure; and, but for a careless violation of orders by one of the grooms, he might have enjoyed, at least for some time longer, his much-prized immunity. Opening upon the public road, this yard was entered by a wooden gate, with a wicket in it, which was further defended by an iron gate upon the outside. Strict orders had been given to keep them carefully locked; but, in spite of these, it had happened that one day, as Barton was slowly pacing this narrow enclosure, in his accustomed walk, and reaching the further extremity, was turning to retrace his steps, he saw the boarded wicket ajar, and the face of his tormentor immovably looking at him through the iron bars. For a few seconds he stood riveted to the earth, breathless and bloodless, in the fascination of that dreaded gaze, and then fell helplessly upon the pavement.

There was he found a few minutes afterwards, and conveyed to his room, the apartment which he was never afterwards to leave alive. Henceforward, a marked and unaccountable change was observable in the tone of his mind. Captain Barton was now no longer the excited and despairing man he had been before; a strange alteration had passed upon him, an unearthly tranquillity reigned in his mind; it was the anticipated stillness of the grave.

“Montague, my friend, this struggle is nearly ended now,” he said, tranquilly, but with a look of fixed and fearful awe. “I have, at last, some comfort from that world of spirits, from which my punishment has come. I know now that my sufferings will be soon over.”

Montague pressed him to speak on.

“Yes,” said he, in a softened voice, “my punishment is nearly ended. From sorrow perhaps I shall never, in time or eternity, escape; but my agony is almost over. Comfort has been revealed to me, and what remains of my allotted struggle I will bear with submission, even with hope.”

“I am glad to hear you speak so tranquilly, my dear fellow,” said Montague; “peace and cheerfulness of mind are all you need to make you what you were.”

“No, no, I never can be that,” said he, mournfully. “I am no longer fit for life. I am soon to die: I do not shrink from death as I did. I am to see him but once again, and then all is ended.”

“He said so, then?” suggested Montague.

“He? No, no; good tidings could scarcely come through him; and these were good and welcome; and they came so solemnly and sweetly, with unutterable love and melancholy, such as I could not, without saying more than is needful or fitting, of other long-past scenes and persons, fully explain to you.” As Barton said this he shed tears.

“Come, come,” said Montague, mistaking the source of his emotions, “you must not give way. What is it, after all, but a pack of dreams and nonsense; or, at worst, the practices of a scheming rascal that enjoys his power of playing upon your nerves, and loves to exert it; a sneaking vagabond that owes you a grudge, and pays it off this way, not daring to try a more manly one.”

“A grudge, indeed, he owes me; you say rightly,” said Barton, with a sullen shudder; “a grudge as you call it. Oh, God! when the justice of heaven permits the Evil One to carry out a scheme of vengeance, when its execution is committed to the lost and frightful victim of sin, who owes his own ruin to the man, the very man, whom he is commissioned to pursue; then, indeed, the torments and terrors of hell are anticipated on earth. But heaven has dealt mercifully with me: hope has opened to me at last; and if death could come without the dreadful sight I am doomed to see, I would gladly close my eyes this moment upon the world. But though death is welcome, I shrink with an agony you cannot understand; a maddening agony, an actual frenzy of terror, from the last encounter with that – that DEMON, who has drawn me thus to the verge of the chasm, and who is himself to plunge me down. I am to see him again, once more, but under circumstances unutterably more terrific than ever.”

As Barton thus spoke, he trembled so violently that Montague was really alarmed at the extremity of his sudden agitation, and hastened to lead him back to the topic which had before seemed to exert so tranquillizing an effect upon his mind.

“It was not a dream,” he said, after a time; “I was in a different state, I felt differently and strangely; and yet it was all as real, as clear and vivid, as what I now see and hear; it was a reality.”

“And what did you see and hear?” urged his companion.

“When I awakened from the swoon I fell into on seeing him,” said Barton, continuing, as if he had not heard the question, “it was slowly, very slowly; I was reclining by the margin of a broad lake, surrounded by misty hills, and a soft, melancholy, rose-coloured light illuminated it all. It was indescribably sad and lonely, and yet more beautiful than any earthly scene. My head was leaning on the lap of a girl, and she was singing a strange and wondrous song, that told, I know not how, whether by words or harmony, of all my life, all that is past, and all that is still to come. And with the song the old feelings that I thought had perished within me came back, and tears flowed from my eyes, partly for the song and its mysterious beauty, and partly for the unearthly sweetness of her voice; yet I know the voice, oh! how well; and I was spellbound as I listened and looked at the strange and solitary scene, without stirring, almost without breathing, and, alas! alas! without turning my eyes toward the face that I knew was near me, so sweetly powerful was the enchantment that held me. And so, slowly and softly, the song and scene grew fainter, and ever fainter, to my senses, till all was dark and still again. And then I wakened to this world, as you saw, comforted, for I knew that I was forgiven much.” Barton wept again long and bitterly.

From this time, as we have said, the prevailing tone of his mind was one of profound and tranquil melancholy. This, however, was not without its interruptions. He was thoroughly impressed with the conviction that he was to experience another and a final visitation, illimitably transcending in horror all he had before experienced. From this anticipated and unknown agony he often shrunk in such paroxysms of abject terror and distraction, as filled the whole household with dismay and superstitious panic. Even those among them who affected to discredit the supposition of preternatural agency in the matter, were often in their secret souls visited during the darkness and solitude of night with qualms and apprehensions which they would not have readily confessed; and none of them attempted to dissuade Barton from the resolution on which he now systematically acted, of shutting himself up in his own apartment. The window-blinds of this room were kept jealously down; and his own man was seldom out of his presence, day or night, his bed being placed in the same chamber.

This man was an attached and respectable servant; and his duties, in addition to those ordinarily imposed upon valets, but which Barton’s independent habits generally dispensed with, were to attend carefully to the simple precautions by means of which his master hoped to exclude the dreaded intrusion of the “Watcher,” as the strange letter he had at first received had designated his persecutor. And, in addition to attending to these arrangements, which consisted merely in anticipating the possibility of his master’s being, through any unscreened window or opened door, exposed to the dreaded influence, the valet was never to suffer him to be for one moment alone: total solitude, even for a minute, had become to him now almost as intolerable as the idea of going abroad into the public ways; it was an instinctive anticipation of what was coming.

It is needless to say, that, under these mysterious and horrible circumstances, no steps were taken toward the fulfilment of that engagement into which he had entered. There was quite disparity enough in point of years, and indeed of habits, between the young lady and Captain Barton, to have precluded anything like very vehement or romantic attachment on her part. Though grieved and anxious, therefore, she was very far from being heartbroken; a circumstance which, for the sentimental purposes of our tale, is much to be deplored. But truth must be told, especially in a narrative whose chief, if not only, pretensions to interest consist in a rigid adherence to facts, or what are so reported to have been.

Miss Montague, nevertheless, devoted much of her time to a patient but fruitless attempt to cheer the unhappy invalid. She read for him, and conversed with him; but it was apparent that whatever exertions he made, the endeavour to escape from the one constant and ever-present fear that preyed upon him was utterly and miserably unavailing.

Young ladies, as all the world knows, are much given to the cultivation of pets; and among those who shared the favour of Miss Montague was a fine old owl, which the gardener, who caught him napping among the ivy of a ruined stable, had dutifully presented to that young lady.

The caprice which regulates such preferences was manifested in the extravagant favour with which this grim and ill-favoured bird was at once distinguished by his mistress; and, trifling as this whimsical circumstance may seem, I am forced to mention it, inasmuch as it is connected, oddly enough, with the concluding scene of the story. Barton, so far from sharing in this liking for the new favourite, regarded it from the first with an antipathy as violent as it was utterly unaccountable. Its very vicinity was insupportable to him. He seemed to hate and dread it with a vehemence absolutely laughable, and to those who have never witnessed the exhibition of antipathies of this kind, his dread would seem all but incredible.

With these few words of preliminary explanation, I shall proceed to state the particulars of the last scene in this strange series of incidents. It was almost two o’clock one winter’s night, and Barton was, as usual at that hour, in his bed; the servant we have mentioned occupied a smaller bed in the same room, and a candle was burning. The man was on a sudden aroused by his master, who said,

“I can’t get it out of my head that that accursed bird has escaped somehow, and is lurking in some corner of the room. I have been dreaming of him. Get up, Smith, and look about; search for him. Such hateful dreams!”

The servant rose, and examined the chamber, and while engaged in so doing, he heard the well-known sound, more like a long-drawn gasp than a hiss, with which these birds from their secret haunts affright the quiet of the night. This ghostly indication of its proximity, for the sound proceeded from the passage upon which Barton’s chamber door opened, determined the search of the servant, who, opening the door, proceeded a step or two forward for the purpose of driving the bird away. He had, however, hardly entered the lobby, when the door behind him slowly swung to under the impulse, as it seemed, of some gentle current of air; but as immediately over the door there was a kind of window, intended in the daytime to aid in lighting the passage, and through which the rays of the candle were then issuing, the valet could see quite enough for his purpose. As he advanced he heard his master (who, lying in a well-curtained bed had not, as it seemed, perceived his exit from the room) call him by name, and direct him to place the candle on the table by his bed. The servant, who was now some way in the long passage, did not like to raise his voice for the purpose of replying, lest he should startle the sleeping inmates of the house, began to walk hurriedly and softly back again, when, to his amazement, he heard a voice in the interior of the chamber answering calmly, and the man actually saw, through the window which over-topped the door, that the light was slowly shifting, as if carried across the chamber in answer to his master’s call. Palsied by a feeling akin to terror, yet not unmingled with a horrible curiosity, he stood breathless and listening at the threshold, unable to summon resolution to push open the door and enter. Then came a rustling of the curtains, and a sound like that of one who in a low voice hushes a child to rest, in the midst of which he heard Barton say, in a tone of stifled horror – “Oh, God – oh, my God!” and repeat the same exclamation several times. Then ensued a silence, which again was broken by the same strange soothing sound; and at last there burst forth, in one swelling peal, a yell of agony so appalling and hideous, that, under some impulse of ungovernable horror, the man rushed to the door, and with his whole strength strove to force it open. Whether it was that, in his agitation, he had himself but imperfectly turned the handle, or that the door was really secured upon the inside, he failed to effect an entrance; and as he tugged and pushed, yell after yell rang louder and wilder through the chamber, accompanied all the while by the same hushing sounds. Actually freezing with terror, and scarce knowing what he did, the man turned and ran down the passage, wringing his hands in the extremity of horror and irresolution. At the stair-head he was encountered by General Montague, scared and eager, and just as they met the fearful sounds had ceased.

“What is it? – who – where is your master?” said Montague, with the incoherence of extreme agitation. “Has anything – for God’s sake, is anything wrong?”

“Lord have mercy on us, it’s all over,” said the man, staring wildly towards his master’s chamber. “He’s dead, sir; I’m sure he’s dead.”

Without waiting for inquiry or explanation, Montague, closely followed by the servant, hurried to the chamber door, turned the handle, and pushed it open. As the door yielded to his pressure, the ill-omened bird of which the servant had been in search, uttering its spectral warning, started suddenly from the far side of the bed, and flying through the doorway close over their heads, and extinguishing, in its passage, the candle which Montague carried, crashed through the skylight that overlooked the lobby, and sailed away into the darkness of the outer space.

“There it is, God bless us!” whispered the man, after a breathless pause.

“Curse that bird!” muttered the general, startled by the suddenness of the apparition, and unable to conceal his discomposure.

“The candle was moved,” said the man, after another breathless pause; “see, they put it by the bed!”

“Draw the curtains, fellow, and don’t stand gaping there,” whispered Montague, sternly.

The man hesitated.

“Hold this, then,” said Montague, impatiently, thrusting the candlestick into the servant’s hand; and himself advancing to the bedside, he drew the curtains apart. The light of the candle, which was still burning at the bedside, fell upon a figure huddled together, and half upright, at the head of the bed. It seemed as though it had shrunk back as far as the solid panelling would allow, and the hands were still clutched in the bed-clothes.

“Barton, Barton, Barton!” cried the general, with a strange mixture of awe and vehemence.

He took the candle, and held it so that it shone full upon his face. The features were fixed, stern and white; the jaw was fallen, and the sightless eyes, still open, gazed vacantly forward toward the front of the bed.

“God Almighty, he’s dead!” muttered the general, as he looked upon this fearful spectacle. They both continued to gaze upon it in silence for a minute or more. “And cold, too,” said Montague, withdrawing his hand from that of the dead man.

“And see, see; may I never have life, sir,” added the man, after another pause, with a shudder, “but there was something else on the bed with him! Look there – look there; see that, sir!”

As the man thus spoke, he pointed to a deep indenture, as if caused by a heavy pressure, near the foot of the bed.

Montague was silent.

“Come, sir, come away, for God’s sake!” whispered the man, drawing close up to him, and holding fast by his arm, while he glanced fearfully round; “what good can be done here now? – come away, for God’s sake!”

At this moment they heard the steps of more than one approaching, and Montague, hastily desiring the servant to arrest their progress, endeavoured to loose the rigid grip with which the fingers of the dead man were clutched in the bed-clothes, and drew, as well as he was able, the awful figure into a reclining posture. Then closing the curtains carefully upon it, he hastened himself to meet those who were approaching.

~   ~   ~   ~

It is needless to follow the personages so slightly connected with this narrative into the events of their after lives; it is enough for us to remark that no clue to the solution of these mysterious occurrences was ever afterwards discovered; and so long an interval having now passed, it is scarcely to be expected that time can throw any new light upon their inexplicable obscurity. Until the secrets of the earth shall be no longer hidden these transactions must remain shrouded in mystery.

The only occurrence in Captain Barton’s former life to which reference was ever made, as having any possible connection with the sufferings with which his existence closed, and which he himself seemed to regard as working out a retribution for some grievous sin of his past life, was a circumstance which not for several years after his death was brought to light. The nature of this disclosure was painful to his relatives and discreditable to his memory.

It appeared, then, that some eight years before Captain Barton’s final return to Dublin, he had formed, in the town of Plymouth, a guilty attachment, the object of which was the daughter of one of the ship’s crew under his command. The father had visited the frailty of his unhappy child with extreme harshness, and even brutality, and it was said that she had died heartbroken. Presuming upon Barton’s implication in her guilt, this man had conducted himself towards him with marked insolence, and Barton resented this – and what he resented with still more exasperated bitterness, his treatment of the unfortunate girl – by a systematic exercise of those terrible and arbitrary severities with which the regulations of the navy arm those who are responsible for its discipline. The man had at length made his escape, while the vessel was in port at Lisbon, but died, as it was said, in an hospital in that town, of the wounds inflicted in one of his recent and sanguinary punishments.

Whether these circumstances in reality bear or not upon the occurrences of Barton’s after-life, it is of course impossible to say. It seems, however, more than probable that they were, at least in his own mind, closely associated with them. But however the truth may be as to the origin and motives of this mysterious persecution, there can be no doubt that, with respect to the agencies by which it was accomplished, absolute and impenetrable mystery is like to prevail until the day of doom.

“Dublin University Magazine”, Nov. 1847

Ghost Stories And Tales Of Mystery (1851)

revised 1872 “The Familiar”

THE FATAL BRIDE

BEING A SECOND CONTRIBUTION
FROM THE REMINISCENCES OF A BACHELOR

(1848)

I am now an old man, and, what is perhaps less excusable, an old bachelor too; and yet, sir, I am not a bachelor of malice prepense – I am no profane railer against wedlock. I would not, for my grandmother’s enamel bonbonniere, which catches my eye this moment, nor for my honoured uncle’s silver mounted and inlaid steel barrels – both of them family reliques dear in their own several ways – that your fair readers should set me down as guilty of premeditated and deliberate celibacy. No such thing. I have more than once narrowly escaped – I should say missed – the fate-matrimonial, and that by pure accident – by no cowardice or perfidy of mine. No; my tendencies were all conjugal – my blessedness, however, has been single; and so far am I from thanking my stars, or taking merit to myself for this state of things, that, sooth to say, even the seventy-and-five winters and summers that have bleached and baked me in succession, still find me, now and then, sighing over the tender recollections and bitter disappointments, which are now for me, the sad and only reliques of the romance of early days.

But though I have had my passages of love, as well as those of the sterner passions, in my day; and though I sometimes take a whim to rummage among old trinkets, lockets, and likenesses, each of them to me a little history in itself, yet I would not have you suppose me a superannuated sentimentalist either. No, sir. I have my tender, and, jesting aside, my melancholy retrospections; but I have also my pleasant, and, even at this time of day, my exciting recollections, too. I would be almost ashamed to tell you how often it comes to pass, that, my solitary pint of old port finished, I find myself sunk in my comfortable, ancient, leathern chair, gazing between my knees into the clear red embers, between which and me are rising and floating, like mystic shapes from an enchanted cauldron, the forms and faces long lost to life, which have mingled in the mazes of early adventure; and some of whom have left upon my time-chilled heart, traces that eternity itself, mayhap, will fail to obliterate.

Thus it is, that in long winter’s evenings, as I sit alone and musing, memory calls up, with chastened colouring and softened outline, the chequered past before me. Passive, as though the pageant were the creation of some Prospero, and I his wondering visitor, I sit by and see, while memory and association crowd my vision with their filmy troops, fragments of old adventure, and glimpses of thrilling scenes, with all their actors duly accoutred, and looking just as they did – how many years ago! The light-hearted and the moody – the loved and the worthless – the prosperous and the ruined – the changed, and the dead and gone – all, in defiance of time and death, take their old places, and wear their old looks and liveries, as they drift by me in sad and wayward procession. Leaving these recollections to themselves, to rise, and shift, and unroll before my listless gaze, as chance, or some unknown law of suggestion wills it, it often happens that strange occurrences, and striking and mournful histories, which had passed from my ordinary remembrances, are thrown up again, like long-buried treasures from the restless sea, and startle me almost with the vividness of novelty.

It may be, that feeling, in most of these stories, that interest which attaches to an acquaintance with the individuals who have taken a part in them, I am unduly predisposed to exaggerate the degree of favour with which an ordinary reader may be presumed to regard them. Incidents well worth recording, as having happened to my lord or lady this, that, or t’other, may yet prove dull enough in the abstract, and unsupported by the borrowed importance of the aforesaid distinguished titles. But whatever interest I might have thrown over these pages, by particularizing individuals, and publishing real names, I feel bound – in some cases by humanity, in others by honour, but in all effectually – to forego. A chronique scandaleuse is not quite the thing for your respectable pages, nor, independently of other and higher considerations, are the tease and worry to which such authorship would expose your humble servant, quite the thing for an easy old bachelor, who has not handled a pistol in anger for full five-and-thirty years, who wishes well to all mankind, and hates trouble, almost as much as law or bloodshed.

The tales I send you, therefore, shall not record the names of those whose acts, follies, or sufferings they recite. In all other respects they shall be faithful narratives of fact – in this alone fictitious. They may prove wondrous dull, as old men’s stories sometimes do. Of their merits, I am, for every reason, the worst possible judge. Decide, then, yourself – put them into your Magazine or into your fire, just as your critical acumen shall determine. As for me, I prize my snug obscurity too justly to aspire to literary honours, or to participate in literary resentments. Blot, burn, or print, just as you please: I have nothing of the genus irritabile, except, perhaps, some symptoms of the cacoethes scribendi about me. I perceive, indeed, with complacency, that you have admitted my former contribution to a place in your November number; this has determined me to despatch another, which, with like encouragement, may be followed by a third, and so on; I, all the while, with your good leave, maintaining my incognito, and despatching my scribblings through that mysterious agency, the penny-post. Should you cease to hear from me, without sufficient apparent cause for the suspension of my correspondence; should, I say, this series – for such, with your permission, I mean to make it – be abruptly and finally cut short, why then you may conclude that the “brief candle,” in whose flickering light I ply this my self-imposed task, has at last gone out, and left your old and unknown correspondent to the darkness and repose to which time is hurrying us all.

With these few preliminary remarks, now offered once for all, I shall end the tedious task of introduction, and plunge at once into the business of my story, merely reiterating, by way of supplemental caution, that names and titles, and a few details of locality, which I fancied might indicate individuals, and lead to detection, have been suppressed and altered; but that in the substance, and, indeed, with those exceptions, in all the minor details of these narratives, I shall observe a strict adherence to the facts, as they were either related to me, or came within my own personal knowledge.

~   ~   ~   ~

The story which I am about to relate, carries me back somewhere about half a century; at which time, it is needless to say, Dublin was, in point of society, a very different city from what it now is. It had then a resident aristocracy, and one whose equipages and housekeeping were maintained upon a scale which put plebeian competition wholly out of the question. I do not mean to offer any ungracious reflections upon the existing state of Dublin society. We have now, alas! more tuft-hunters than tufts to boast of; magnificent pretensions, based, like the Brahmin’s world, nobody can exactly say upon what, strive and strain to fill the void, which a legitimate aristocracy have left; and men, whose grandfathers – but what matters it? the thing is after all but natural. What was a metropolis, is a capital no longer; and it is but lost time sighing after the things that once were, or snarling at those that are.

At the time of which I speak, there resided in Dublin a certain worthy baronet, whom I shall call Sir Arthur Chadleigh. He was then considerably past sixty, and was a venerable monument of what was called hard living, in all its departments. He had been, until gout disabled him, a knowing gentleman on the turf; he was a deep player and a deep drinker, and covered, with an exterior of boisterous jollity, a very cold and selfish heart. He was thoroughly a man of the world, and what was then an essential ingredient in that amiable character, whenever occasion prompted, a very determined duellist. Whatever good nature he was possessed of, was expended upon society at large. In his dealings with his own family, he was arbitrary and severe; and if he did possess any natural affections, he had managed to get them all admirably under control, and never was known, under any circumstances, to suffer from their over-indulgence. This old gentleman had been blessed, in his prime, with an helpmate; but Lady Chadleigh, having been, in her own way, about as domestic a person as Sir Arthur, one fine morning, at three o’clock precisely, when her spouse was entering upon his fourth bottle of claret in the parlour, absconded with young Lord Kildalkin. The happy pair were overtaken at Havre by the baronet, who, at ten paces, duly measured, shot off Kildalkin’s thumb – a feat which satisfied his honour, as some of the sterner brethren of the hair-trigger averred, at much too reasonable a rate. The worthy baronet, however, on his return, explained satisfactorily to a select circle of friends. “For,” said he, “had I shot him through the head, I should not have known what the hell to do with Lady C.” As it was, he left his wife in the hands of his rival, as a moderate equivalent for the joint.

Lady Chadleigh had not been cruel enough to leave her lord without some objects on which to exercise those domestic virtues for which he was so justly celebrated. She had been just five years married, when she took her departure, as I have stated; and she left behind her, for the consolation of her spouse, along with an extensive assortment of macaws, avadavats, lapdogs, and other sundries, three children – two sons and a girl. The macaws, etc., were easily disposed of, but there was no getting rid of the children; so Sir Arthur called in a grim old spinster sister, who, for fourteen years, dating from that day, presided at the baronet’s tea-table, and ruled his little flock. At the end of this period she died, and much about the same time died also the unfortunate Lady Chadleigh, forsaken and heartbroken, in some obscure town in France.

Lady Chadleigh’s name had been proscribed – in Sir Arthur’s presence none dared to mention it; and, with the exception of little Mary, the daughter who, since infancy, had never seen her, no human being appeared to feel the smallest concern about the event. Little Mary Chadleigh, however, felt it deeply; with the yearnings of unavailing affection, she had always clung to the idea, that some time or other her mother would come back, and be fond of her. The reasons of the separation were, of course, wholly unknown to her, and her childish eagerness to learn something of her mother, had been systematically repulsed with a mysterious discouragement, in which she had come gradually to acquiesce. But though she had long learned to look upon her mother’s absence as in some way a necessary and unavoidable privation, and even as a natural thing, and a matter of course, which scarcely required to be accounted for, yet her mind had been constantly busied with the one thought, that at last she would return, and love her as she wished to be loved. And now came these strange tidings, never looked for in her childish dreams, and these black dresses, to tell her that all the little plans and hopes that had silently fluttered her innocent heart so many a time for so many years, must end forever; that the being for whose return she had been watching and wishing ever since she could remember, was never to come again. This was a sore shock to the poor girl, and she wept, in the solitude of her chamber, over this, to her, most bitter calamity, with a vehemence of grief and a sense of desolation, which, to one unacquainted with the cherished reveries, the castle building of the heart, which had been her secret happiness from earliest childhood, would have been unaccountable.

Years passed on – new objects and associations began to fill her reveries; her secret sorrow wore away, and this early grief became but a sad, and scarcely unpleasing remembrance. I was a very young man when first I saw Miss Chadleigh, and I have seldom been so much struck by any combination of beauty, grace, and expression, as when she entered the room at one of Lady’s balls. She was at this time about nineteen, beautifully formed, and with the bearing of natural nobility; her complexion was clear, and rather pale; her eyes dark and lustrous; and her features, as I thought, exquisitely beautiful. The prevailing expression of her face was melancholy, with perhaps some slight character of haughtiness; but when she smiled, there was such a rippling of dimples, such an arch merriment in her lovely eyes, and such a revelation of little, even, pearly teeth, as made her perfectly enchanting. “Well,” thought I, as I watched with absolute fascination the movements of this lovely being, “if beauty the most enchanting be any longer the potent influence it once was, there is no scheme of ambition to whose realization such loveliness as yours may not aspire.” How little did I dream of what was coming !

I was so much attracted – my interest and attention so irresistibly engaged, by this beautiful girl, that I observed her, with scarcely any intermission, during the entire evening. It would be ridiculous to say that I was actually in love; I was not absurd or romantic enough (which you will) to get up a sentimental and hopeless passion at a moment’s notice, and that, too, without having exchanged one word with the object of my aspirations. No such thing. The feeling with which I gazed on Miss Chadleigh, was one of the profoundest admiration, I admit, yet untinctured with any, the least, admixture of actual tenderness. I observed her with the deep and silent pleasure with which beauty of the highest order may be contemplated, without the smallest danger to the heart; and, indeed, of the philosophical nature of my admiration, I had full assurance in the fact, that I remarked, with hardly one flutter of jealousy, the attentions, evidently not ill received, which were devotedly paid her by a singularly handsome young officer, in a perfectly irresistible cavalry uniform. This gentleman was the afterwards too-celebrated Captain Jennings.

That evening remains impressed upon my memory with the vividness – what do I say? – with fifty times the vividness of yesterday. I think I see old Sir Arthur now, as he sat at the whist-table, with his crutch beside him – for gout had claimed him as its own – his fiery face and heavy brows, overcast with the profound calculations of his favourite game, and his massive frame, shaking all over with the stentorian chuckle with which he greeted the conclusion of each successful rubber, while he slyly pocketed the guineas, and rallied and quizzed his discomfited opponents, with ferocious good-humour. I looked at this old man with some curiosity. I had never seen him before, and in his past life were not a few passages of vicissitude, daring, and adventure, such as might well warrant that qualified degree of interest which, as a young man, I not unnaturally felt in him. As I observed this hero of a hundred stories in the gossip of the day – his massive, but now crippled form – his bloated face, in which few could have traced a vestige of the handsome traits which rumour assigned to his early youth, and upon which, in the intervals of his tempestuous good-humour, I thought I could clearly discover the stamp of those sterner and imperious attributes with which general report had invested him; – as I looked on this fierce, crafty, intemperate, but at the same time, strangely enough, by no means unpopular man of the world, it was impossible to avoid the trite but natural contrast which, in a thousand such cases, is forced upon the mind, as often as, turning from him, my eye rested upon his beautiful child. How could a creature so exquisitely lovely, so accomplished in every natural grace – and, if expression might be trusted, at once so refined, so noble, and so sensitive – have ever sprung from a root so gnarled, bitter, and unsightly? Yet his child she doubtless was; for the world, with all its jealous and censorious curiosity, had never once questioned the parentage of Sir Arthur’s children, and in this the world was right. For poor Lady Chadleigh had begun her married life a good and faithful wife, and under circumstances less unhappy, might have been pure and honoured to the last. But the insults of callous profligacy had alienated and exasperated a heart at once proud and impetuous. She had been a spoiled child, and became a ruined woman. Habitually ungoverned, she was incapable of forbearance. With little principle and less prudence, she suffered a restless sense of wrong to hurry her into extravagances of conduct – intended, but without effect, to pique Sir Arthur, and wound at least his pride into jealousy; and in this mad enterprise the unhappy woman had at last effectually compromised herself, and was forced to the terrible necessity of flight. Her fall was not that of an impure, but of a vengeful spirit. It was the act of a bitter and passionate suicide, who would squander fifty lives to bring home one pang of remorse, or any other feeling, to the heart of callous indifference. Poor thing! the world understood her character, and despised her; for want of a due contempt for Sir Arthur’s apathy, and a proper acquiescence in his profligate courses, she had given herself to ruin.

“Who is that officer,” I asked a friend, whom accident brought close to me in the crowded room – “that good-looking fellow, who has been so marked in his devotions to Miss Chadleigh all the evening?”

“Oh that – don’t you know?” he replied. “Why, that is Captain Jennings – Jennings the aide-de-camp – a devilish handsome fellow; the women are quite mad about him, and he knows it.”

“Miss Chadleigh appears intimate with him,” I observed.

“Yes, so she is; he was a friend of young Chadleigh’s, who died, or was taken in some battle in India,” he answered.

“So, one of her brothers is dead, then?” I interrupted.

“Yes; I believe the native army made him a prisoner, and treated him in the usual way,” replied he. “I heard the particulars; they were deuced horrid; but I don’t quite recollect them now.”

“And, Miss Chadleigh – has not she a second brother?” I inquired.

“A second brother! Yes,” he answered. “A pleasant fellow; but a perfect devil for wildness. She was fond of the other brother, and in a sad way, I believe, when the news came; but that is a year and a half since. There, now, you can see young Chadleigh – the young man going to take Miss Chadleigh away.”

He nodded to indicate the party, and I followed the direction of his eye.

Young Chadleigh was a decidedly well-looking man, with a frank and rather distinguished air, and dressed with an almost foppish attention to the prevailing fashion. I had just time to observe that he and Jennings chatted familiarly for a minute or two, and appeared to be on the friendliest terms of intimacy.

“Well,” thought I, “after all, he may be but a friend.”

Whether it be impossible to contemplate such beauty as Miss Chadleigh’s with perfect stoicism, and that, without knowing it, I was really a little jealous, I can’t say; but I certainly had watched the young captain’s attentions with a slight but disagreeable sense of restlessness, and experienced, I know not how, a certain relief in the reflection I had just made. It had, however, hardly visited my mind, when it was again disturbed.

Miss Chadleigh, leaning on her brother’s arm, was passing so close as almost to touch me, whom she had un consciously inspired with so much admiration, when Jennings, following, presented her with her fan, accidentally forgotten. As she took it with a gracious smile, she blushed. Yes, I could not be mistaken, for a more beautiful blush I never beheld in my existence; and, to make the matter worse, I thought I perceived that, as he placed the light weapon of coquetry in her hand, his own rested upon hers for a second longer than was strictly necessary, and in doing so conveyed the slightest possible pressure to her little ivory fingers. I felt, I know not how, disposed to be affronted and incensed, and actually stared, with no very inviting expression, full upon Captain Jennings, as he made his retreat, with a lurking smile of vanity and triumph on his lip. My ill-bred stare was unobserved, and I could, on reflection, scarcely help laughing at the absurdity of the emotion which had inspired it. But, after all, why should I? – the nature of the beast pervades us all. The presence of beauty is a woeful stimulus to unprovoked combativeness, and I do believe there is a lurking idea universally in the mind of man, that beauty should be, somehow, the prize of the fiercest and strongest – the

“Viribus editior ut in grege taurus.”

I know it was ever the case with me – I never saw, at least in my young days, a pretty girl, without feeling a disposition to fight with somebody – and this, although, under ordinary circumstances, as peaceable a fellow as any among her majesty’s liege subjects.

In pursuing this narrative, I am forced occasionally to rely upon the report of others; in some of its oddest scenes, however, as the reader will perceive, I was present, and my self a secondary actor. What I did not myself witness, I shall, as I have said, supply from the testimony of others, and thus present your readers with a connected recital of this eccentric piece of Irish biography. If fortune had condemned Captain Jennings to the torments of love, she was, at all events, resolved to grant him every reasonable mitigation in his distressed condition. For upwards of a month, during that summer, he had the happiness of being a guest at Lord ———’s, where Miss Chadleigh and her brother were also visitors; whether he had succeeded, or not, in making any impression upon the young lady’s heart, was not then known; but as his attentions were, if possible, more marked and devoted than ever, the affair began to be talked of, and, soon after this visit terminated, was mentioned by a friend to Sir Arthur himself.

The baronet forthwith instituted inquiries respecting Captain Jennings’ ways and means – the result was unsatisfactory – and, one day, as the gay young gentleman sat chatting, at an early visit, with Chadleigh and his fair sister, the old baronet hobbled into the room, and set himself down as one of the party – a procedure quite contrary to his ordinary habits. There was nothing ominous in his countenance and bearing, however; on the contrary, he seemed more than usually frank and good-humoured, shook Jennings more heartily by the hand, and laughed more boisterously at all his jokes and stories than ever he had done before. Chadleigh had already gone, and Sir Arthur having dispatched Mary to superintend some customary arrangements affecting his own comforts, the door was closed upon him and Captain Jennings.

“Jennings,” said the baronet.

“Well, sir.”

“You’re a devilish good fellow – Jennings, a devilish pleasant fellow,” said the baronet, “and I’ve no doubt will get on in the world – with prudence, that is, with prudence.”

Jennings bowed his acknowledgements, and looked a little surprised.

“And, as it strikes me, Jennings, my boy,” continued the baronet, in the same jolly tone – “about the most imprudent thing you could possibly do, at the outset, would be to marry; and marriage being out of the question in point of prudence – totally and entirely out of the question – I should not, you understand me, like to have Miss Chadleigh, my daughter, talked of in connection with such an absurdity.”

“Really, Sir Arthur,” interrupted Jennings, changing colour slightly, and affecting a cool hauteur, which he was far from feeling – “I don’t precisely know to what particular circumstances you are pleased to allude.”

“Come, come, my dear fellow,” said Sir Arthur, in the same tone of rough good humour, which, in all his dealings, alike with friend or foe, whether with the dice-box or the pistol, he had ever maintained – “we are, both of us, men of the world – eh? I an old, and you a young one; but both of us unquestionably men of the world, and perfectly wide awake. You know just as well as I, and I as well as you, what is usually termed, paying attentions to a young lady – let us have no shamming at either side – we both of us know this; and I don’t approve of Miss Chadleigh’s receiving any such distinction from you, my dear Jennings; and now I hope I have made myself perfectly intelligible.”

Jennings bowed stiffly, and the baronet continued – “A set of meddling old women have begun to talk, you see, and I took this, the earliest opportunity, of putting you on your guard – for, of course, it would not answer your cards either, to have such nonsense put about, and so, without anything abrupt or re markable, your acquaintance must become cooler, and – and – more distant; and, in short, when you do happen to meet in society, the less you are thrown together, the better; in a word, my dear Jennings, your coolness must effectually give the lie to this ridiculous piece of gossip.”

As Sir Arthur concluded, he was slowly rising from his seat, and having, just at its termination, established his ponderous and gouty person in an erect position, he took Jennings’ hands in both his, and shaking them very cordially, said, in precisely the tone which might have conveyed a hospitable and pressing invitation—

“And, by the way, my dear Jennings, I think it would be very advisable, don’t you, by way of a beginning, to put an immediate stop to these little visits – these foolish little morning calls, which make people talk, and serve no possible purpose, as matters stand, except as a very unnecessary tax upon your time; so, for the future” – here he renewed the shaking, with increasing warmth – “when we do meet, let it be abroad, my dear Jennings, and not here; you understand me, not on any account here; in society, of course, I shall always be delighted to meet you; we shall there, of course, be the best possible friends; and now, my dear Jennings, I think we perfectly understand one another, and I’ll not waste any more of your time, for, of course, you have many more amusing ways of employing it. Good morning, Jennings, my boy – farewell.”

The perfect radiation of cordiality and good humour with which this very peremptory dismissal was conveyed, was so incongruously disconcerting, that Jennings felt totally unable to resent the procedure as he felt disposed to do – for, truth to say, he was more nettled than he cared to confess, even to himself. Returning the old gentleman’s salutation, therefore, stiffly and coldly enough, he withdrew, and had walked nearly halfway along the side of St. Stephen’s-green (in the immediate neighbourhood of which Sir Arthur resided) before he began to recover the angry confusion of this affronting congé. Slackening his pace, however, he began to revolve the occurrences in his mind, and, with the resignation of necessity, began to discover many things to be grateful for among the consequences of this explanation, brusque and unexpected as it undoubtedly was.

“Well, well,” he muttered, “it is, perhaps, much better as it is. She is a devilish fine girl, to be sure, and, I do believe, had well-nigh turned my head; but, egad, I was acting like a fool – a damn fool, to follow her about, and get myself entangled at all – heaven knows what an infernal piece of mischief it might have ended in, if I had been left to my own foolish fancies – I’m a deuced deal a happier man, as matters stand – a safer one, at all events.”

Jennings was a singularly handsome young man, as we have said – very vain and very selfish; he knew no control except that involved in a punctilious subservience to the code of fashionable society in which he lived; and, without any one grain of positive malevolence in his disposition, he had about him a great deal of the raw material out of which circumstances and opportunity might eventually fabricate a villain; an inconsiderate impetuosity, too often mistaken for generosity and impulsive candour; an exacting and ambitious vanity, which, ever seeking for new homage, inspired a constant desire to please – and, with the desire, stimulated the constant practice, too, of all the little arts of pleasing – and which, however despicable a passion in itself, was yet, in its effects, the prime cause of his popularity – these, combined with a constitutional selfishness which instinctively governed all his views and actions, were the leading attributes of a character – unfortunately for the dignity of human nature – commonplace enough. Externally, however, he was a very fascinating person – accomplished, elegant, agreeable, and blessed with an inexhaustible flow of gay and sparkling spirits.

Of course, it was to be presumed that Sir Arthur had conveyed to Miss Chadleigh his views respecting Jennings attentions; and the baronet’s stern and implacable severity in punishing disobedience, and enforcing compliance with his commands, was so thoroughly known and understood, that not one of his children dared openly to disobey his lightest order. Mary Chadleigh and Jennings, however, were destined often to meet – indeed it could not be otherwise, unless one or other of them had withdrawn from that gay society in which both of them mixed so freely. There was, however, a very marked change in their mutual demeanour. There was an obvious reserve on her part; though ill-natured people observed that her eyes were oftener seen following his movements in the crowded saloons than was either to be accounted for by pure accident, or altogether reconcilable with the show of coldness with which she now habitually met him. On his part, the change was also marked; instead of devoting his attentions and his time, as heretofore, whenever fortune brought them together, all but exclusively to her, he now scarcely ever exchanged a dozen sentences with her; in short, though the female world good-naturedly persisted in believing Miss Chadleigh a very ill-used, and, spite of her assumed indifference, a very devoted damsel – yet all were agreed that this affair was totally and finally at an end.

It was not very long until gossip began to busy itself once more with this young lady’s name – a new suitor began to be suspected. Young Lord Dungarret, with a coronet and twelve thousand a year at his disposal, was evidently smitten, and to such a degree, that Miss Chadleigh became ten degrees more ugly than ever in the eyes of the female world of Dublin. While matters were in this state, however, it happened that one day, as Sir Arthur sat in his chamber, damning his old enemy, the gout, in solitary suffering and ill-temper, somebody hesitatingly knocked at his chamber door.

“Come in – well?” he exclaimed, turning his mottled and gloomy visage full on the intruder.

The person who entered was old Martha, a privileged domestic of some three-score years, who had been the nurse, and was now the attendant of Mary Chadleigh, whom she absolutely idolized. “I’m come, sir, about the young mistress,” she said, approaching; “for, indeed, I’m afraid she’s very bad – she’s very sick, sir, and I would not be easy without the doctor seeing her.”

“Sick – is she?” said the baronet; “young ladies are always ailing – it’s interesting, and nurses always croaking – they have nothing else to do; I wish she had half-a-day’s experience of my gout – curse it – and she’d know what pain is like.”

“Why, then, indeed, sir, she really is bad, and very bad, I’m afraid, this time,” said the woman, with dignified emphasis. “It is not, of course, for an old woman like me, that’s nothing to the darling young lady, more than just nursing her and taking care of her, to be dictating to her own father, that, of course, has more feeling for his own child than the likes of me’id have; but all I say is, she is really bad, and—”

“Well, well, well – send for the doctor, to be sure, and don’t plague me any more; and just tell him,” he added, as the old woman reached the door, “if he finds anything seriously amiss, that I will feel much obliged by his looking in here, and telling me what he thinks of her – do you hear?”

In obedience to the summons, accordingly dispatched, Dr. Robertson, as I shall call him, then in extensive practice in Dublin, and who had been for twenty years the physician in attendance upon the family, arrived late in the evening. He was a large, good-natured man, with a rough voice, emphatic delivery, and a brusque and decisive manner – clear-headed and rapid – with a thorough knowledge of the world, as well as a consummate skill in his profession. With a very rough exterior, and an occasional coarseness, and even severity of expression, Dr. Robertson was, nevertheless, a kind and tender-hearted man; and these sterling qualities had served to secure him a vested interest in the practice to which his reputation had once introduced him.

It was, as I have said, late in the evening, when a peremptory double knock at the door announced the arrival of the physician. With brisk and creaking steps he followed the servant, who conducted him directly to the young lady’s chamber. The house was a vast and handsome mansion: and after ascending a stone staircase, and passing a handsome lobby, he found himself in a kind of antechamber, from which the young lady’s sleeping apartment opened. Here he remained for a moment, while old Martha went in to prepare her young mistress for the visit. After about a minute, she returned, and intimated that Miss Chadleigh was ready.

Doctor Robertson accordingly entered. The young lady was lying upon her bed, her face deadly pale, except where two bright spots of hectic crimson glowed with unnatural warmth; her eyes were swollen with tears, and as the physician approached, she turned away from his well-known, good-natured countenance, and hid her face in the bedclothes.

“Well, well, my dear, what is all this? Come, come, we’ll make a cure of you in no time – don’t fret – we’ll have you well in a day or two.”

Thus saying, in rough and kindly tones, he took her hand, and as he felt her pulse, continued—

“And tell me where you feel amiss – there’s a good child – don’t sob – don’t cry – I promise you it won’t signify.”

“Oh, doctor,” she said, with her face still averted, “I am very ill, and – and – in such wretched spirits.”

Here the poor girl again burst into tears; and while she was weeping, the old nurse stole noiselessly out of the chamber, and closing the door, walked restlessly from one spot to another in the outer room we have described; now arranging a screen, now replacing a chair by the wall, now stirring the fire, but, with an abstracted and miserable look, and wringing her withered hands ever and anon in the intervals. This had gone on with little variation, except that the old woman occasionally looked with an expression of intense anxiety, and even horror, at the door which concealed her young mistress and her professional visitor from view, when at last it opened, and Doctor Robertson came out, buried, as it seemed, in profound and painful thought, and looking unusually pale and agitated; he walked, by two or three steps at a time, pausing, and occasionally shaking his head gloomily in the intervals, and sat himself down in silence before the fire, and ruminated for some minutes. At last he stood up briskly, turned his back to the fire, beckoned to the old woman, and as she approached, raised the candle, so that its light fell full upon her face.

“Where do you sleep, Martha?” he asked, abruptly.

“Where – where do I sleep?” she echoed, stammeringly.

“Aye, ma’am, where?” he repeated, sternly.

“Why – why here, sir, here in this room,” she answered, with some confusion.

He fixed his eyes upon her sharply for a few seconds, and then as abruptly said – “And how does your mistress rest at night, pray?”

“She rests – she rests – why, sir, she rests pretty well, sir; but why do you ask me?”

He continued to regard the old woman with the same steady scrutiny for some seconds; at last she said, with an affronted air, and rather an effort, for she was, whatever the cause might be, very much disconcerted—

“I’m sure I don’t know, sir, what you’re looking at me that way for; a body’id think I was took for a thief.”

“There – there – never mind,” he said, putting down the candle; “no offence, nurse, no offence – go in to your young mistress. Is there – aye, there’s pen and ink here – very well – just go in, and I’ll call you when I want you.”

Accordingly, the old woman, muttering and sniffing, hobbled into the adjoining room, and closed the door, unaccountably, as it seemed, both irritated and alarmed.

Doctor Robertson being left alone, leaned, in deep reflection, for a minute or two upon the mantelpiece; he then glanced round the room, and observing another door in it, he walked over, opened it, and looked out. It commanded a landing-place upon a back staircase. “Ha!” said he, as he closed the door, and returned to the fireplace, whistling slowly, and with rather a dismal countenance, a few interrupted staves as he went, he sat down, and after a brief pause exclaimed—

“Poor thing! – poor thing! – it must not rest here. Dear me – dear me – how very strange – I must see her again – humph! – perplexing, but – aye, aye – I’ll see her again – it is much better.”

So saying, he called Martha, gave her some general directions about preparing slops, etc., and telling her to attend to these arrangements meanwhile, he once more entered his patient’s chamber.

It was fully half an hour afterwards, that Dr. Robertson knocked at Sir Arthur Chadleigh’s door.

“Poor little thing!” said he, after a few introductory sentences, exchanged at either side, “she is seriously indisposed, feverish, and very nervous, and, I fear, without an immediate prospect of complete recovery. The best thing to be done for her is, to keep her from all excitement and agitation; her hours must be early, and the fewer visitors she sees the better. In short, I have spoken to her very fully; she is now in possession of my opinion, and appears perfectly disposed to follow my directions implicitly, so there is little else to be done for the present, than to permit her to do as she herself shall desire. In the meantime, I will look in from time to time, to see that all goes on well.”

“And pray, Doctor Robertson, how soon may we expect her perfect restoration to health,” said Sir Arthur, and with a coarse chuckle he added, “for egad, if a girl is to marry at all, it won’t do to have her locked up long – there’s no time like the present, my dear sir, especially in the case of youth and good looks.”

“True, Sir Arthur; very true,” said the medical man; “but, in Miss Chadleigh’s case, it would not be safe to undertake her recovery within any limited time – she may possibly be well in a few weeks, and possibly not for a year; it is impossible to predict with certainty; it is one of those doubtful cases, which may go on for a very long time, and which, at the same time, may just as possibly take a good or an ill turn within a fortnight.”

“It’s cursed provoking – the dear child!” ejaculated Sir Arthur, petulantly, as he thought of Lord Dungarret and his twelve thousand a year – “what do you say to a week or so in the country?”

“Umph! I proposed that; but she did not like it,” said Doctor Robertson; “and her disliking it would make the experiment mischievous instead of useful: her nerves are as much affected as her general health; so that we must not contradict her fancies, or irritate her on any account; she must be al lowed to choose for herself – except in matters of essential importance; and in those she has good sense enough to defer implicitly to her medical adviser; so I shall look in, from time to time, and see that matters go on properly, and report progress to you accordingly.”

With these words he took his leave.

As Doctor Robertson was in large and fashionable practice, Miss Chadleigh’s illness was soon generally known; some said it was merely a ruse to complete the reduction of Lord Dungarret, others, that she was broken-hearted for love of the faithless Captain Jennings; many pitied her, and some few sincerely lamented her absence.

I recollect, about this time, strolling into the theatre one evening with two or three acquaintances. We took our places in the back of a box, in the next one to which I observed Jennings. One of my party happened to be acquainted with him, and the following conversation passed between them – a conversation which indirectly threw a light upon some of the darkest passages of his subsequent history—

“I say, Jennings, did you hear the news about the Chadleighs?”

“No – what news?” he inquired, quickly.

“Why, young Chadleigh told me, not an hour since, a letter has come from his brother Dick, whom we all thought was killed and cut up in India; but far from it, he is perfectly well, and returning home on leave.”

“Good God! how extraordinary! – I really am delighted to hear it!” exclaimed Jennings, growing pale, nevertheless, and looking stunned and alarmed, instead of overjoyed, as his words implied.

“He has quite a tale of wonders to tell about his escapes and all that,” continued his informant; and so rattled on for a time, until, the curtain rising, he directed his attention to the stage.

Though Jennings immediately recovered his serenity of countenance, he grew silent, and in a few minutes withdrew from the theatre, leaving, in my mind at least, impressions not very favourable to the strength of his affections or the value of his friendship. I did not then know the positive reasons which he had for dreading his young friend’s return.

Time wore on – months passed away – still Doctor Robertson responded, with gloomy uncertainty, to the inquiries with which he was assailed from all sides; and the general impression began to be, that poor Miss Chadleigh’s recovery was becoming at least a very doubtful contingency. Such was the posture of affairs, when your humble servant, who pens these pages, was himself involved in an adventure which it is necessary here to detail.

I had left a pleasant party, somewhere about one o’clock at night, and, without having positively transgressed the limits of sobriety, I had taken just wine enough to predispose me to embark in any exciting enterprise which might turn up. I was quite alone; and, as the reader is probably aware, the streets of Dublin were by no means so safe at night-time in the period of which I speak, as they now are; but relying upon the sword, which the fashion of those days made a necessary appendage, and in whose use I was a tolerably accomplished proficient, I rather courted than avoided such adventures as chance might possibly present. And in this spirit, instead of pursuing the open streets, I threaded the narrow alleys and back lanes with a careless sort of swagger, and a pugnacious disposition, the very remembrance of which, even at this time of day, makes me blush for the reckless folly of my youth. The perversity of fortune was, however, in this instance, as in many others, apparent – silence and solitude encountered my advance.

I was now just entering, in my devious ramble, a dingy stable-lane, whose entire length was enlivened by but three twinkling oil-lamps, whose dusky radiance scarcely extended a yard around the wooden posts that supported them. This dismal and silent alley ran immediately behind the west-side of St. Stephen’s-green; and I observed the figure of a man walking up and down, as it seemed to me, with cautious and suspicious tread. I could perceive nothing of him, however, in the dusky light, except that, as he passed and re-passed immediately under one of the lamps, its faint rays fell upon a broad-brimmed hat, and a greatcoat, in which the figure was enveloped. My vague suspicions were confirmed, by observing that this man withdrew himself, with cautious haste, as I advanced, and was soon lost to my sight. I was standing, still looking in the direction in which the figure had disappeared, when a little wicket, in one of the gates opening upon the lane, was drawn back close to where I stood, and a suppressed female voice inquired—

“Are you there?”

“Yes,” answered I, promptly; now, for the first time, beginning to feel that an adventure was coming, and inclined to bear my part in it to the close, end how it might. “Where?” repeated the voice.

“Here,” I answered, approaching the aperture.

A female, muffled in a cloak and bonnet, was passing through the wicket, and making me a sign to draw nearer, she said, hurriedly, “Here – take it – and then wait for us where you are.”

At the same time she placed a small bundle in my hands, which I received, nothing doubting that I was innocently made a partner in some night robbery, whose true accomplice was the man whom I had seen walking to and fro, as I described, and for whom, doubtless, the woman had mistaken me. With a secret satisfaction at the surprise I was about to give the party, I held the parcel fast, and took a few turns, up and down, before the spot where I had received it, awaiting the further progress of the affair.

While thus engaged, I was nearly met, face to face, by the man whom I had at first seen, and who, hearing some noise, doubtless, at the appointed place of rendezvous, had hurried back. On descrying me, however, he instantly retired as before; and I, fearing to interrupt the current of the adventure, forbore in anywise to obstruct his escape. I had walked thus back and forward, bundle in hand, for eight or ten minutes, when the wicket was opened once more, and the woman I had spoken to already, stepped out into the lane, and said—

“Stand back a little bit, an’ follow us, and don’t for the life of you drop that.”

Almost at the same time two other figures came forth, muffled as carefully as the first, and I heard a female voice from within the wicket, pouring forth, as it seemed to me, prayers and blessings, interrupted with sobs. The door was cautiously closed from the inside, and I heard the key slowly and carefully turned in the rusty lock; and as these sounds were audible, the little party began to move forward, while I, in obedience to orders, brought up the rear, carrying the parcel carefully in my arms.

The person in the centre of the three appeared to be feeble, and to advance with pain, and as she did so, leaned heavily upon the others.

Thus we proceeded, until we reached the end of this lane, and turned into another as solitary and ill-lighted. As the party before me passed under the lamp at the corner, one of the women upon whom she in the middle was leaning, exclaimed—

“Give me them, my jewels; they are better off where we are going.”

And thus saying, she drew off two or three rings that glittered upon the fingers that pressed her arm, and slipped them into her pocket. This done, they relapsed into total silence, and, full of curiosity for the issue, I followed close upon their steps.

We had now walked, though very slowly, for nearly ten minutes, when, in a dark spot, close under a broad gateway, they stopped.

“Thank God, we are so far,” said one of the women; “sit down on that, my darling, for a minute;” and so saying, she laid a shawl, which she folded up in the fashion of a cushion, upon the top of one of the short upright stones which protected the corners of the piers; and upon this rude seat, the silent, and, as it seemed, exhausted figure, sank down. The woman who had just accosted me, now beckoned me to her, and taking the bundle from me, said:

“Now run down there, and bring up a chair from the stand at the second corner.”

She indicated the direction with her hand, and I – exerting myself to the full, as much as if I had had a personal stake in the enterprise, in which I thus found myself, through sheer wantonness, actively involved – ran at my utmost speed upon the errand, and quickly returned with the desired conveyance.

Into this, the feeble woman who had been resting as I have described, was hurried, and the chairmen having received directions to follow the two others, and I in turn to follow them, we all trudged onward, for forty minutes and upwards, in absolute silence.

By that time we had penetrated considerably beyond Werburgh-street, and were now entering the Liberties, when turning abruptly into a short, dark, dilapidated street, the women stopped in front of a tall, dingy house, and after inspecting its exterior and interchanging a few words, they signed to the chairmen to set down their conveyance. Someone had probably been watching for its arrival, from one of the many dark windows which overlooked the street, for she who had sat in it was hardly disengaged from the chair, when the hall door was stealthily opened, and a grimy, suspicious-looking girl, with a wretched candle in one hand, and shading her eyes with the other, peeped out.

“Give me that,” said the woman who had spoken to me, and who seemed to have the command of the expedition, at the same time entering, and taking the candle from her, while she drew the door fully open.

“All right?” she added, inquiringly, glancing significantly upwards.

“Aye, everything,” rejoined the other, sleepily; at the same time the other two women entered and passed silently on toward the stairs.

“Pay the men, now, and come in yourself,” added the same woman, addressing me. I fortunately had about me enough change to satisfy the chairmen, which, as it seemed it was my province to do, and having dismissed them, I followed my conductress into the house, and surrendered the bundle into her hands.

She turned the key in the hall door, and beckoned me into a dilapidated wainscotted back-room, on the windowsill of which she placed the dipt candle, which faintly lighted this in hospitable apartment, and pointing to the only piece of furniture which garnished its walls, a solitary, clumsy chair, placed there, I suppose, in anticipation of my arrival, she said—

“Wait there, my good man, till I come back by-and-by, and you know the rest.”

As she spoke to me, I for the first time saw her countenance, which was about as ugly and sinister a one as I had ever beheld; very nearly resembling the lineaments usually ascribed in fairy tales, and other such authentic records, to witches of the malignant kind; a yellow skin, hooked nose, a wide mouth, with a few carious fangs, and a marvellous prominence of chin, gave additional effect to a pair of eyes, whose fierce and rat-like vivacity seemed scarcely reconcilable with the evident antiquity of her other features; and though her head was somewhat sunk upon her chest, yet her original wiry activity seemed to have suffered little abatement from years. This woman’s countenance, I confess, impressed me most unfavourably with respect to the object of these arrangements; and I could not help entertaining a vague and unpleasant suspicion of meditated foul play, and impending mischief, as the glance of this ill-favoured hag continued to haunt my fancy long after she had left me to the dreary solitude of the apartment. There was something, perhaps, a little wounding to the self-love of a young man in being thus coolly set down, as I clearly was, for a lackey; but this I must do myself the justice to say, that I was buttoned up in a great coat fashioned more with a view to comfort than to elegance; and provided with a hat which had seen a great deal of rough night-duty.

The interest I felt in the denouement of the adventure, however, prevented my troubling myself much about this; and seating myself, pursuant to the old woman’s directions, in the solitary chair, I was left alone to keep watch in this singularly bleak and comfortless apartment.

Insensibly I began to grow sleepy; and, adjusting myself in as easy an attitude as my uncomfortable position would permit, I fell into an uneasy dose, in which the ill-looking hag, who had last left me, was in my sleeping fancy, hovering about me, and offering me share of the rings I had seen her take, on condition of my being accessory to some infernal crime, which she was always on the point of confiding to me, yet, somehow or other, never divulged, when I was startled from my dreams by a piercing cry. For a moment I forgot where I was; the sound was still ringing in my ears, and the candle, the snuff of which out-topped its blaze, afforded but an imperfect and shadowy light. Full of uneasy apprehensions, I walked softly into the hall, and made my way to the foot of the stairs, where I stood, listening breathlessly for the slightest sound of a human voice, but in vain. I thought, indeed, I could distinguish in some remote upper room the shuffling of feet, but of this I could not, on account of the constant rattling of the old window-frames in the wind, be perfectly certain. After waiting for a considerable time, I was about to abandon my new position, or to return to my post in the parlour, when I once more distinctly heard the same piercing cry of agony which had at first startled me. Without one moment’s hesitation, I drew my sword, strode by three-at-a-time up the stairs, the cries continuing as I ascended; and just as I reached the room from which they were issuing, they subsided into a moan, and I heard the tread of steps as before. I rushed directly to the door, sword in hand, and pushing it open, was some paces towards the centre of the chamber before I could arrest my advance. I had good reason to be astounded.

A fire was lighted, and several wax-candles were burning in the room, and illuminated abundance of furniture, somewhat dingy to be sure, but still, as it struck me, comfortable and respectable in appearance; there were curtains carefully drawn across the windows, a carpet on the floor, and a large bed, at one side of which stood, the one a little in advance of the other, the two women I had accompanied, now divested of their bonnets and cloaks; at the other, Doctor Robertson; and in the bed itself, flushed, exhausted, and as it seemed to me, well-nigh dying – heavens! could I believe it – Miss Chadleigh herself.

I stood for several moments absolutely petrified with amazement; and those upon whose offices I had thus unexpectedly intruded, in so warlike an attitude, returned my look with a gaze of scarcely less astonishment than mine. The poor young lady, who lay quite motionless, with her eyes just closed, appeared, however, wholly unconscious of the intrusion. Before I had recovered sufficiently from the stupefaction of this extraordinary discovery, Doctor Robertson had taken me roughly by the collar, and drew me, or rather pushed me out of the apartment.

In reply to his angry interrogatories, which he had suppressed until I had reached the lobby, I offered the best explanation, namely, the simple truth.

“Robbers, indeed!” he muttered – “more likely to be one of the gang yourself—”

And calling out one of the women, and having exchanged a few words in a whisper with her, I presume touching myself, he appeared satisfied, and told me to get down again as fast as I could, and to beware how I came again where I was not wanted. Sustaining as well as I could the character assigned me, as it were, by common consent, I conducted myself under this rebuke, as a respectful lackey might be supposed to do. I was so much shocked, that on reaching the chamber where I I could scarcely collect my thoughts. Only to think of Miss Chadleigh’s being reduced to a situation so strange and deplorable ! – she whom I had last seen the admired of all beholders – the life and the ornament of the gay and elegant society in which she moved. Merciful heaven how repulsive, degrading, and melancholy was the contrast. A prey to a thousand conflicting and tumultuous feelings, I leaned upon the old chimney-piece, gazing into the black and empty grate, lost, not in conjecture or surmise, but in mere confusion, amazement, and, I might almost add, consternation.

While thus engaged, I was tapped on the shoulder by the old woman, whose entrance I had not perceived.

“Poor young lady!” said I – “how is she now?”

“Bad enough,” said the woman – “don’t you hear her?”

“Poor thing! she seems very ill, indeed,” I answered.

“Aye, aye,” she repeated, with a smile, for which I could have strangled her, “it’s all one, rich or poor, on that bed. She’s in the hands of God now, an’ nothing but Him and patience to look to—”

“God help her – God help her!” I repeated.

“Och, never a fear of her,” said she, snuffing the candle with her bony fingers; and then putting her hand in her pocket, she gave me a note, saying—

“You’re to bring that to him the minute the child’s born; and mind, you’re to tell him – for the foolish creature set her heart on it – that she wrote it the very last minute she could hold a pen, do you mind? and don’t go until I come back and tell you whether it’s a boy or a girl; though, God knows, I don’t see much differ it makes.”

With this remark she withdrew, and I, with intense curiosity, approached the candle to read the address of the billet. “Richard Hamilton Jennings, Esq.,” was written with a trembling hand upon it, and, fortunately for my incognito, his address in full subscribed. I now began, for the first time, fully to appreciate the extreme awkwardness and embarrassment of the very equivocal position into which my precipitate folly had led me. I had become possessed of a secret, involving the reputations, perhaps the lives of others, and by a coincidence which, however purely accidental and unpremeditated upon my part, I yet could not help perceiving might, at the same time, expose me to the most painful and disreputable surmises and misconstruction. It was, however, too late now to extricate myself, without possibly doing still further mischief; my now withdrawing could effect no possible good; and, on the whole, I judged it best to perform the services committed to the domestic whose place I had so foolishly taken, and then to confide in Doctor Robertson (whose character, as well as his appearance, I perfectly knew, although I had no actual acquaintance with himself), the exact nature of my position in the affair, believing, and as I still think, with reason, that it would be a relief to the parties who had reason to dread being compromised, to learn that their secret accidentally divulged, had, at all events, fallen into the keeping of a gentleman and a man of honour.

I had hardly arrived at this resolution, when I heard the stealthy tread, and the uneasy respiration of the old woman on her return.

“Well, it’s all over, an’ a quick case it was,” she murmured, as she entered. “She may well be thankful, so she may, not to be undher them, like many a poor creature that’s bad fur a night and a day, and longer.”

“And how is she?” I urged.

“Och, well enough – as well as can be,” she answered – “right well. Don’t be delaying any longer; an’ don’t drop the note, for the life of you. Tell him it’s a boy, an’ a real plentiful boy; and she’s getting on elegant.”

So saying, she hurried me to the hall door, and observed in conclusion – “Don’t clap the door, do ye mind? and if you have any message back, don’t knock loud – do you hear me?”

It was still profoundly dark, and the streets silent and deserted. It was past three o’clock, probably, nearer four, as I knocked at Captain Jennings’ lodgings. He had a handsome set of apartments in Kildare-street, and through the blinds of the drawing room windows I could see the glare of lights, and the shadows of persons in the room. The hall, too, was lighted; and from the promptitude with which the door was opened, as well as from the talking and laughter audible from the drawing-room, as I followed the servant up the stairs, it was manifest that Captain Jennings was seeing company.

The servant was a novice in his duties, I suppose; for instead of acquainting his master with my arrival, and leaving me to wait in the hall, he ushered me up at once into his presence. Perhaps, indeed, by way of compensation to my self-esteem, the worthy fellow, with more discrimination than those whom I had last encountered, detected something of the gentleman under my assumed lackeyism. In obedience to his directions, therefore, and perhaps with some lurking curiosity to witness the contrasted situation of himself and of his victim, in the selfsame hour, I stepped into the room. It was light as day with wax-lights, and the party, which con sisted of some eight or ten, were for the most part engaged at cards. They were all talking and laughing with noisy gaiety; and an elegant supper was laid, with a profusion of plate and wine-coolers, at a long side-table. One of the first persons I saw was young Chadleigh, who was just concluding a satirical anecdote as I entered, and the next was Jennings. I saw the latter cast an angry glance at the servant, and instantly resume the smile with which he awaited the point of young Chadleigh’s story; but I plainly perceived that in spite of his command of muscle, his face had grown almost deadly pale.

He waved his hand impatiently to us to withdraw, and as I did so, I saw him fill out a glass of wine. In the midst of the buzz and laughter which followed Chadleigh’s anecdote, Captain Jennings joined me in the lobby, and as he did so, I heard Chadleigh call after him some quizzing insinuation as to the nature of my message, which, coming from that quarter, and uttered in all the thoughtless levity of gaiety and dissipation, sounded sadly enough in my ear.

“Follow me,” said Jennings, drily, and led the way to the parlour. Placing the candle on the chimney-piece, and standing close by the fireplace, he signed to me to shut the door, which I accordingly did; and when, in obedience to another sign, I had approached so near that our conversation could be distinctly carried on in tones little above a whisper, he continued, with manifest tokens of agitation—

“You came – you came from—” and abruptly stopped, looking at me with a pallid countenance, in which was stamped the intensest anxiety.

“I come, sir, with this note and a message,” I replied, placing the letter in his hand.

He broke the seal and read the note hurriedly through, but without any change of expression; then looked at me with anxious abstraction for a second or two, and once more read the note through from end to end.

“And the the patient,” he added, fixing his eyes on me again; “you know – I suppose you know who she is?”

“Yes – Miss Chadleigh,” I replied, with an effort.

“He knows it all,” he muttered, scarce audibly, and looking at me still with the same abstracted and fear stricken expression. “And how is she?” he asked after a pause – “is she safe?”

“She is doing well, sir,” I replied; “she is safely over her trial.”

“That’s well,” he said, drawing a long breath, as if relieved, but with out exhibiting any corresponding cheer in the expression of his face.

“And the infant,” I began.

“Well,” said he, quickly, “what of it?”

“Is also doing well,” I replied – “a boy, the nurse desired me to tell you – a very fine boy, indeed.”

“The nurse!” he repeated, while his face darkened with renewed alarm – “What nurse? Why, my great God! she’s not mad enough – surely it can’t – she’s not at home?”

“No, indeed, sir, very far from her home, and not likely to be found either,” I replied.

He seemed relieved; again took up the note, but replaced it on the table unread, and turned, and leaned his head on his hands on the chimney-piece, as it seemed, either buried in profound reflection, or wrung by some sudden agony. After a while he turned about, and thrusting his hands into his pockets, stood with his back to the fireplace, and his head sunk forward. The light of the solitary candle upon the mantelpiece above him, deepened with its shadows the furrows of his contracted brow and down-drawn mouth. He looked, I thought, the very picture of comfortless and guilty wretchedness.

I had conceived instinctively, almost from the first moment I beheld him, a certain feeling of dislike toward Captain Jennings, and this predisposition my recent discoveries were, as you may readily suppose, by no means calculated to mitigate or remove. I could not help saying, in a tone which, had he been less agitated at the moment, might very possibly have provoked his anger—

“And may I ask, sir, have you no message of any kind for the unfortunate young lady?”

“Aye, aye, you’re right; I forgot – to be sure,” he answered, glancing quickly and anxiously around him; and then raising his hand in painful reflection to his face, replied – “You are very right – a message – yes, yes, yes.”

As he said this, he mechanically took up the note again, and looking vacantly at it for a few seconds, threw it, as it seemed, unconsciously upon the table. My eyes followed it involuntarily, and as it fell before me (it is, I hope, needless to say, totally without my intending it, and merely in the accidental way in which the eye is often irresistibly by, and attracted to, exactly the object from which we are most anxious to avert it), I saw, and in some inappreciable fraction of a second, actually read the three first words of the note: they were – “Darling, darling husband.” Turning it hastily face downward, I pushed it back again toward Captain Jennings.

“Husband!” Unworthy as I believed the man to be, you would scarcely credit me were I to describe the sense of relief and delight with which my heart expanded as that one word met my eye. It seemed as if the voices of a thousand blessed angels were repeating it in melody and gratulations to my ear; in the glance that revealed it to me, I saw a creature rescued from the abyss of the dark est and most irretrievable of earthly ruin, and standing pure and safe in the light of heaven; my heart swelled within me, and tears rose to my eyes.

While those emotions agitated me, Captain Jennings continued lost in thought, and at last he said:

“Aye, it is better to write;” and tearing off the outer leaf of the note which lay before him, he traced a line or two with his pencil, but checking himself, again paused, crumpled the note he had just commenced, and that he had received, together, applied them to the candle, and dropped them blazing into the grate.

“Say that I will be with her as soon as I can possibly get away,” said he; “but where is the house – where is she—” he added, suddenly.

I described by the landmarks with which he was acquainted, exactly the spot where the poor young lady was to be found.

“Then, just say as I told you, that I will be there without one moment’s avoidable delay.”

Thus speaking, he hastily led the way to the hall door; for some of his half-tipsy guests were beginning to call for him, and, as it seemed, were about making an exploratory excursion from the drawing-room. Muttering a broken curse upon them all, he opened the door, and I heard him, as I walked down the stone steps, respond in tones of affected gaiety to their clamorous challenge. With the rapid pace which indicates an excited mind, I retraced my steps; the bells were chiming, and the watchmen drowsily calling four o’clock, as I approached the scene of my strange adventure.

“Thank God, at all events,” I fervently murmured – “thank God, the poor creature is not disgraced and ruined; a strange, perplexing, and, I fear, a most imprudent affair it unquestionably is; but, after all, what an escape! – how much to be thankful for!”

I had now reached my destination, and was admitted. The young lady, I was told, was doing well; so I delivered my message, and took my place in the parlour as before, resolved to await the departure of Doctor Robertson, who was still up stairs, and to explain, as was my fixed intention, the foolish accident which had involved me in the affair; acquaint him with my name and address, and assure him of my secrecy.

I had not waited very long, when I heard him, with creaking steps, slowly descending the stairs, issuing, as he did, some parting directions to the woman who attended him with the candle.

“I shall look in, in the evening, after dark,” he said; “everything promises fairly – so that will do; I’ll make my own way out; never mind – good morning.”

As the worthy man uttered these gruff civilities, I presented myself at the foot of the stairs, and requested a word with him in the parlour. Merely directing me to be brief, and with a prodigious yawn, he accompanied me thither. I then proceeded to lay before him a full statement concerning myself, and the causes of my participation in the business. He was first, disposed to be angry; but my own frankness, and perhaps an old acquaintance with my father, an intimate of his youth, disarmed him, and my explanation ended by his shaking me good-naturedly by the hand.

“Egad, I believe I have been in greater fault of the two, young gentleman, in this affair,” he said; “for I undertook my part with my eyes open; and a troublesome and an awkward part it must e’en prove, at the best. But,” he added, in a changed tone, “with all its trouble and awkwardness, I would not have declined it for a thousand pounds; poor little thing; no, no; this was a matter of life or death; the poor child reposed confidence in me, and trusted me with the secret of her situation, under the seal of silence. I could not honourably divulge it; nor could I, with one particle of common humanity, refuse my aid; her life was in the balance; she would have had none attend her but me, and without proper assistance must have died; to have declined that aid, through any consideration of consequences affecting myself, would have been the act of a respectable scoundrel; it would have been to perpetrate a prudential murder.”

As he spoke, there came a hurried knocking at the hall door.

“This must be Captain Jennings,” I said.

“Umph! he must not go up suddenly; they must prepare her for the meeting,” said he, and, opening the chamber door, he said to the attendant—

“Show Captain Jennings, if this be he, into this chamber; and as soon as you think the lady sufficiently recovered to see him, you can tell him so.”

With this direction, he re-entered the room, and walked up and down once or twice, with rather an inauspicious expression of countenance, while he awaited the appearance of the new visitor; he had not long to wait; the door opened, and Captain Jennings, muffled in a cloak, entered the comfortless apartment.

Doctor Robertson received him with a stiff nod. After a few brief inquiries, rather drily answered, the physician said, in reply to a significant glance which Jennings had directed toward me—

“You need have no apprehension on account of his presence, Captain Jennings; whatever you have to say to me, may be said before him; he already knows all that is of moment in this affair, and his honour may be relied on.”

“Honour!” repeated Jennings; “so then he’s a gentleman, as I suspected.”

“Permit me, Captain Jennings,” said Doctor Robertson, “to recommend to you, what I conceive honour and common sense alike indicate, as the proper course to be pursued in this painful affair. I have not had until this moment, it is true, an opportunity of so much as even speaking to you upon this subject, and do not know, even if I had, that I was at liberty to introduce it. I can have now, however, no scruple in fully telling you my mind; and I must say, that the extreme imprudence into which you have led an inexperienced and fondly-attached, girl, threatens seriously to compromise her, not only with her own relatives, but in the eyes of the world. You have placed her in a situation calculated, unless it be at once explained, to prejudice her reputation fatally; and I am bound to say, as an old friend of the family, that unless you come forward, and put Sir Arthur in possession of the real state of facts, I shall feel it my duty to do so myself.”

“There is no need of any disclosure – at least immediately,” said the young man, hurriedly. “Everything is arranged. No one but her old attendant has access to her chamber at home, and Sir Arthur and young Chadleigh don’t see her once in five weeks. They don’t suspect anything, and need not. Is it not clear that an explosion – a scene – just now, would be about the worst thing in the world for her?”

“Very true,” said Doctor Robertson, drily; “all very true; but if there be an explosion, there is no need it should reach her ears. No, no, sir. Believe me, the only honourable course now open before you, is that of promptitude and candour. You ought, with out the delay of an hour, to acquaint Sir Arthur with the fact of your marriage.”

“And who the devil—” began Jennings, with a look which partook at once of rage and terror. The expression remained fixed for a time, but the sentence died away unfinished; and muttering some incoherent words, he walked, with a sort of half-agitated, half-defiant air, twice or thrice across the floor, and stopping at the empty fireplace, planted his foot upon the bar, and stood looking vacantly into the inhospitable grate, with an aspect as black and cheerless as its own.

“Well, sir,” said Doctor Robert son, somewhat sternly, “you will, of course, act as you think proper; but I again advise you to be the first to open this affair to Sir Arthur; for, as I have already told you, he shall other wise learn it all from myself. I have a very strong opinion about it.”

“Of course, of course,” said Jennings, petulantly; and continued, in a haughtier tone, perhaps intended to show Doctor Robertson that his further pursuing the subject would be considered impertinent – “By the way, sir, I ought to have thanked you before this for your able professional assistance.”

“Sir, I intended no obligation what ever to you. My interest is naturally strongly engaged on the poor young lady’s account,” replied Doctor Robertson, gruffly, as he buttoned up his greatcoat to his chin, and then drew on his warm gloves; “for her I would, if need were, do a great deal more.”

He turned, stiffly and grimly, from the young man, shook me again by the hand, and took his departure.

Almost at the same moment, in obedience to an intimation from the attendant, Captain Jennings proceeded up the stairs, to the chamber where the young lady lay. As he followed the matron up stairs, the wailing of a newborn baby reached his ears. This feeble and plaintive appeal to his paternal sympathies, was probably far from welcome; for he looked as if, but for very shame, he would have cursed the helpless little creature; and now he stood at the chamber door. Perhaps some touch of better feelings moved him, for his look grew sadder and softened. He entered. Faint, and with eyes half-closed, the fair young mother – her sore trial over – lay in the hushed and darkened room. Weak and exhausted as she was, a faint cry of joy broke from her pale lips; and such a look of ecstasy welcomed his appearance, as must have moved a heart of stone.

“Oh! Richard, Richard – oh Richard,” was all the poor creature could say, as he stooped over the bed and kissed her, with at least a show of fondness; while her feeble arm was clasped round his neck with an agony of delight, as if she had never hoped to have seen him again.

“Oh Richard – Richard, darling! – it is you – darling, it is you!”

She clung to him, sobbing, and smiling, and softly repeating words of endearment, till, gently disengaging himself, he kissed her again, clasped her hand in his, and pressed it, and wrung it fondly, as he sat by the bedside. Thus silently testifying his affection, he leaned back, so that the curtain interposed between his face and hers. Two or three bitter tears started down his cheeks, and such a look of unutterable anguish darkened his countenance, as might have shadowed the eternal despair of the damned. Thus some minutes passed, while he pressed the feeble hand he held with a feverish grasp.

This interview was prolonged to more than an hour; and at length Jennings, warned by the approach of the dawn, took his departure, in sore disorder and dismay – his heart agitated with a tumult of terrible passions and sensations, his brain burning with a thousand wild and irreconcilable plans and projects – a thoroughly miserable man.

Meanwhile, I had returned to my lodgings, and thrown myself into bed, not to awaken to the remembrance of my last night’s strange adventure until late in the day. It is, of course, unnecessary to say, that I felt the intensest curiosity respecting the progress and final denouement of this extraordinary affair. The conclusion was not long suspended.

Jennings had returned to his chamber in Kildare-street; but repose for him was out of the question. He had spent hours of agonized uncertainty; but at last his mind was made up, and his resolution taken.

“I have but one course to take – necessity controls me – I have no choice left,” he muttered. “What infernal influence could have possessed me – what accursed witchcraft can have blinded and infatuated me! Great God! what a serious, what a frightful business, it is turning out. Well, I suppose it was my destiny. I wonder if the old fellow had any inkling of my real situation when he forbid me his house? Merciful Heaven! if I had but acted then like a man of common sense; but some accursed delusion was over me. I had got interested and piqued in the pursuit. I did not dream of mischief. I could swear, with my dying breath, I never meant harm, until accident and the devil – and poor, poor Mary herself – put that, accursed piece of madness into my head. Curse my folly! It is a desperate, a frightful situation; but self-preservation is, they say, the first law of nature; and were I even to sacrifice myself, I don’t see that she would be essentially the better.” He consulted his watch, and continued—

“My measures must be taken promptly; that meddling doctor-fellow, will be on the fidgets till he does mischief. I can’t be too prompt.”

He rang the bell, directed the servant peremptorily to deny him to all visitors, drew the window-blinds, bolted the door, and then, seating him self before his desk, wrote, with painful attention and assiduity, for full two hours, without rising. This task completed, he carefully raised the manuscript, making various erasures and interpolations, and at last, folded carefully, sealed it, and placing it in his waistcoat pocket (in those days a tolerably capacious receptacle), he buttoned his coat across it.

“Will he do it?” he muttered, doubtfully; “we’ll see – we’ll see. In the first place, he may never be called on to say a word, pro or con; in the second, even if he be, this is as easily said as anything else; and, in the third, we will gild the pill pretty thickly.”

So saying, he opened a drawer in the desk, and took out a handful of guineas and a bundle of bank notes, the spoils of his last might’s successful play.

“Let me see what have I got in bank,” he reflected; “I must leave enough for my part of the business; it would not do to be money-bound just now. Aye, aye, he may have the three hundred. I think three hundred will be strong enough for him. Poor Mary – poor Mary!”

Having counted out, in notes and guineas, the sum he had named, he rolled them up, and stuffed them into his pocket; then muffling his face in a shawl, and putting on his hat and cloak, he sallied forth upon an expedition, of the last importance to his plans.

~   ~   ~   ~

It was drawing towards evening, on the same day, when a servant called at my lodgings with a note, and sent up word that he waited for an answer. I did not know the hand, but expecting an invitation, nevertheless, I broke the seal eagerly, and read the following – to a very different purport, as you may perceive:

“Kildare-street.

“Captain Jennings presents his compliments to Mr. ———, and trusts that he will pardon the liberty which, under very peculiar circumstances, he takes, in venturing to entreat the favour of his (Mr. ———’s) presence for a few moments, upon a matter of the utmost importance, as respects an affair in which he has already evinced an interest. Captain Jennings has an engagement for this evening, but will be at home till seven o’clock; and will esteem it a real obligation if Mr. ——— will honour him with a call at any time before that hour.”

I instantly wrote a civil answer, complying with his request; and, full of impatience for the result, I prepared to follow the messenger without losing a moment.

My preparations were quickly made, and I was soon in the street, and traversing the intervening space between mine and Captain Jennings’ lodgings at a rapid pace. As I turned the corner of Nassau-street, I met my friend ———, a notorious gossip in his day. I perceived, by his at once taking my arm and turning about with me, that he had a story to tell, and was rather shocked at his opening sentence—

“Well, what do you think of the affair in Stephen’s-green? – of course you have heard it all – about the Chadleighs; a shocking piece of business, upon my life – a devilish fine girl, too – a great pity.”

I affected surprise, and asked the particulars.

“Somewhere about twelve o’clock today,” he said, “old Sir Arthur received an invitation – at least so I’m told, for I have not yet had time to sift the matter myself – an invitation for himself and Miss Chadleigh, they say, to old Lady ———’s, down in what-d’ye-call-it – that place in Kildare, you know; and they say – egad, I can scarce help laughing, though I’m devilish sorry too – they tell me her ladyship mentioned, by way of inducement, that young Lord Dungarret, an admirer, as it was thought, of Miss Chadleigh, was to be there; and this consideration determined the old boy to accept it, come what might, though his daughter had been ailing for a long time. And so he took his crutches, and hobbled up to her room, where he had not been for a month before, to tell her – ha! ha! – his sovereign will and pleasure; but, egad, the old boy had his hobble for nothing, for, rat me, the bird was flown, the cage was empty; the invalid had absconded, the fair lady had fled; how, why, whither, or with whom, remains a profound secret.”

“And when did she go?” I asked, anxious to ascertain how far the particulars were known.

“Oh, last night, and it is supposed by the back way,” he replied; “it was devilish well managed – a clever girl, sir – a deep scheme.”

“Do they suspect the purpose or the companion of her flight?” I inquired.

“The purpose! – poh, poh, that’s plain enough; I have not heard yet who was the gallant gay but I forgot to tell you, by-the-by, the old fellow – old Sir Arthur – put himself into such a devil of a frenzy, when he found it out, that he got a sort of a fit – a devilish bad fit, I am told. Poor old fellow! he is a deuced deal too purple and bull-necked to stand excitement. I should not be a bit surprised if he’s done for – regularly done for. There goes Dr. Robertson’s carriage – egad, direct to Stephen’s-green, too; I venture an even guinea, he’s going straight to shave and blister old Chadleigh. You know he’s their family physician – a great oddity, a perfect character. I’m told Lady Chadleigh, poor woman! used to say, whenever – by the way, it’s odd how things run in the blood – there’s Miss Chadleigh just taking after her mother, a run-away already.”

Here he broke off, for, seeing a friend at the other side of the street, he hastened across to tell the news to a fresh listener, and leaving me opportunity enough, for we had just reached the corner of Kildare-street, and for many reasons, I had no wish that he should see me enter Jennings’ lodgings.

What I had just heard, satisfied me that the catastrophe, whatever it might be, was certainly not far distant; and with a degree of anxiety proportioned to the imminence of the event, in which I could not help feeling the profoundest interest, I knocked at the hall door, and was promptly shown upstairs, and found myself vis-a-vis with Captain Jennings.

I found him in his dressing-gown and slippers. He looked pale and anxious, but had quite recovered his coolness and self-possession by this time.

“I feel that I have taken a great liberty, in giving you so much trouble,” he continued, after the usual salutations had been interchanged, and I had taken a chair; “but, with the exception of Doctor Robertson, with whom my acquaintance is just as slight as with you, I have no other gentleman to apply to in this most unhappy affair” – (here he slightly shrugged his shoulders, with an air of chagrin and discontent, which somehow impressed me more than all that had yet passed, with a conviction of that callous selfishness which I believed to be the basis of his character) – “You and Doctor Robertson are alone acquainted with the particulars of this business, and you will, I trust, forgive the preference which makes me, not, perhaps, unnaturally, select you, rather than him, as the depository of the only confidence I have to make.”

He said this in his most engaging and conciliatory manner; but, as I bowed in acknowledgement of the preference, I felt my original dislike of him rather increased than abated.

“I offer no defence whatever for my conduct; God knows I blame myself as severely as anybody else can possibly do,” he continued, with a contrite shake of the head; “I ran blindly into extreme temptation, and have compromised, not only myself, but a young lady, whom I would gladly die to extricate from the unfortunate position into which I have unguardedly led her.”

Equivocal as had been his agitation that morning, it was, at all events, genuine; but now he had recalled all the artificial graces of his manner. I saw in the polished ease of his remorse, and in the studied melancholy of his compassion, something indescribably repulsive and abominable.

“Without further tasking your patience,” he resumed, at the same time taking a paper from his desk, “I have to entreat your consent to become the depository of this paper. It is a piece of evidence which may throw an important light upon this affair; the copy of a document, which I keep in my possession, and which you will, perhaps, oblige me by retaining in yours; the nature of it you will see at a glance, and I have endorsed upon it the name and address of the party whose testimony it is, so that, if need be, there can be no difficulty in applying it properly. All I ask of you is, to guard it equally from destruction, and from the eyes of all others, but yourself; and that, whenever, I write to you to that effect, you will kindly hand it to my law-agent in town, whom I will name to you, whenever it becomes necessary to employ one. Will you kindly undertake this commission?”

I could hardly decline an office, as it seemed, so easily performed. I so little liked the applicant himself, however, that a slight, and not very gracious hesitation, preceded my acceptance of its duties. He thanked me, however, profusely; and I had risen for the purpose of taking my departure, when a vehicle of some kind stopped at the hall door, and a thundering double-knock announced the arrival of a visitor.

“Tell them I’m dressing,” said Jennings to the servant, who appeared at the room door; and, in the next moment, the summons at the hall door was answered.

“Captain Jennings is dressing for the evening,” I heard the servant say, in reply to the inquiry of the footman who had knocked.

This intimation, however, had not the desired effect, for the steps of the carriage were let down with a sharp clang, and, almost at the same moment, I heard a different voice, that, I presumed, of the visitor in person, demand—

“Is your master at home?”

The same answer was repeated, and the applicant for admission replied in a sharp decisive tone—

“Ha! dressing for the evening, very good; then he is at home?”

“But, sir, I beg pardon; he positively cannot see anybody at present,” urged the man.

“He shall certainly see me,” retorted the visitor, in the same tone. “I know the way – don’t mind.”

From the moment the clatter of the carriage-steps smote my ear, my mind unaccountably misgave me, and a foreboding of impending collision and mischief, filled me with an almost painful suspense. My instinctive apprehensions did not deceive me. The drawing-room door was pushed abruptly open, and young Chadleigh entered the room.

The moment I saw him, I perceived that in his face which warned me of the truth of my vague anticipations. Pale, stern, and collected, he walked slowly a few steps into the room, bowed with an ominous and icy formality to Captain Jennings, and, in a tone so cold and deadly, as I think I never heard before, or since, said—

“Captain Jennings, I presume you apprehend the subject of my visit?”

It was scarcely necessary to put the question. He had advanced to receive Chadleigh with his usual air of frank and easy gaiety, their eyes met, and in the encounter he read the truth – the smile passed away in an instant from his countenance, and was succeeded by a look, to the full as stern and ominous as that which confronted him. The young men felt that a deadly quarrel lay between them, and I think I never saw a more portentous greeting.

“You have not announced it, sir,” said Jennings, with cold and measured politeness; “but I have no hesitation in saying, that I do suspect the cause of your visit.”

“Good, sir!” replied Chadleigh, in the same constrained voice; “I came on behalf of Miss Mary Chadleigh’s father, and in my own right, as her brother, to demand of you, in the first place, where that young lady at present is.”

“Without meaning to dispute your right, to put that question,” replied Jennings, “I mean to stand upon mine, to decline answering it.”

“You refuse to answer?” said his visitor, while his countenance darkened.

“I do – most distinctly refuse,” repeated he.

“Pray, think better of it, sir,” retorted Chadleigh, with a ghastly mimicry of courtesy.

“Mr. Chadleigh,” replied Jennings, haughtily, “I recommend you strongly to act as a man of the world in this business. The mischief, whatever it be, is now past cure. If you will only allow events to take their course, scandal may be avoided, and a great deal of unnecessary trouble, exposure, and violence spared. If you will persist in pushing this matter to extremity, do so; upon your head be the consequences.”

“Sir,” said Chadleigh, “you greatly mistake me, if you fancy that your mean and perfidious conduct, in spiriting away the daughter of a gentleman, who frankly told you that he peremptorily declined the connection which your conduct seemed to offer – if you fancy that your base and mercenary conduct in inveigling her, a young lady entitled to a fortune, and with most suitable prospects before her, into a marriage with you, a mere adventurer—”

“Mr. Chadleigh, before you proceed further, let me ask you, have you actually made up your mind to push this affair to a public quarrel?” insisted Jennings.

“Yes, sir,” retorted Chadleigh, proudly and bitterly. “Mary Chadleigh has selected for herself – embraced her own degradation – married a man whom her father expressly forbid his house, because he suspected him of entertaining the schemes he has but too securely realized. She is now, and henceforward, to Sir Arthur and to me, a stranger; we renounce and disown her; and by God, she shall not stand between you and the punishment you deserve.” He paused; and added emphatically – “I presume you will be at home by eleven o’clock tonight?”

“Certainly, sir,” answered Jennings, calmly.

His visitor bowed sternly, and began to withdraw.

“I wish, if you please, to add one word,” said Jennings.

“Certainly,” said Chadleigh, returning.

Jennings looked down for a moment, in agitated and guilty abstraction – bit his lips, and grew deadly pale, as though inwardly agonized with a mortal struggle. “I have to request your attention, too, Mr. ———,” he said, addressing me, and arresting my departure. “It is, unfortunately, due to myself that you should hear what I am about to say.”

“Be so good as to say, without further delay, what you desire me to hear,” said Chadleigh.

“Yes, sir; you have forced me to it,” said Jennings, drawing himself up, and looking with a steady, and singularly evil scowl, full in his visitor’s face. “You talked of marriage?”

“Yes, sir,” replied Chadleigh.

“Well, sir, as you will have it a quarrel between us, it is, unfortunately, due to myself to say, that there is no such thing as marriage in the case.”

Jennings spoke these words with a resolute and measured distinctness, which left no room for misapprehension.

“No! – no marriage!” said Chadleigh, after a hideous pause of some seconds, and speaking almost in a whisper, like one half-stunned, while he returned the guilty gaze of his transformed friend with a stare of actual horror.

For my own part, I confess I was scarcely one degree less astounded than Chadleigh, at this utterly unlooked for declaration.

“Not married – not married Why, great God, can it – is it credible! You monstrous, measureless villain—”

The flimsy varnish of affected courtesy was gone, and the hell-born passions it had masked broke forth in an instant, in undisguised and titanic revelation. With one hoarse execration, shrieked rather than spoken, Chadleigh advanced toward Jennings.

“Take care, Chadleigh – take care; I would not harm you,” said Jennings, sternly.

“Hold, for God’s sake,” I cried, interposing between the two young men. “Mr. Chadleigh, I implore of you – remember, consider; what can come of this?”

“Let me go, sir,” cried Chadleigh, hoarsely.

“Mr. Jennings,” I cried, still clinging to Chadleigh, for in his furious paroxysm of excitement, I could not tell what dreadful results might possibly attend a physical encounter, “for God’s sake, avoid this: you’ll have bloodshed else. Mr. Chadleigh, reflect; stay for one moment.”

“Let me go, sir; let me go, or by God, I’ll strike you down,” cried Chadleigh, straining and struggling to reach the object of his fury.

“Get into your room, Mr. Jennings, unless you wish for murder. Go, for Heaven’s sake,” I repeated. “I can’t prevent it longer. I tell you go – go, in God’s name. Will you go, or not?”

Jennings’ momentary agitation had entirely disappeared with the immediate menace of such an encounter as that which threatened him. His physical courage no one had ever doubted; and the moment it was tasked, his intrepid calmness instantly returned. He hesitated for a second; then, with one glance of mingled remorse and disdain at Chadleigh, he turned, and strode sullenly into his chamber, flinging the door close after him. The key was, fortunately, in the outside; and, without giving Chadleigh time to get before me, I sprang to the door, locked it, and, placing the key in my pocket, stood facing the baffled assailant.

“Sir,” he said bitterly, “by God, you shall answer for this.”

“When and how you please, Mr. Chadleigh,” I replied, sadly. “I have done my duty, and no more, in preventing a murderous fray; and I thank God I have succeeded.”

He stood undecided for a few seconds. At last he said—

“Perhaps you were right, sir; and I ought to ask your pardon. You were right, sir, and I was wrong. Pardon me.”

I gave him the assurance he required, and he added abruptly—

“This is no place for me. Good night, sir.”

So saying, he left the room; and I, from the window, saw him re-enter the carriage, and drive away, ere I returned to turn the key in Jennings’ room. I did so, and called him; there was no answer. I pushed the door open a little, and went in. He had thrown himself into a chair, and was sitting close by a table, his forehead laid upon his arm, and his face concealed – he was sobbing. He started up abruptly, on becoming aware of my presence, and with a violent effort commanded himself.

“Mr. ———,” said he, “pray don’t leave me, for a few minutes. Mr. ———, you don’t know what I am suffering, and what I have suffered. I am about the most miserable and unfortunate mortal you have ever seen or heard of – indeed I am. Sir, you can’t understand – I can’t explain to you the horrors of my position.”

“The poor young lady,” I said, coldly, “is certainly impressed with the belief that she is legally married. Dr. Robertson distinctly told me so – nay, he himself believed it.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” he interrupted, vehemently; “but I can prove it is not so. The paper I have placed in your hand will show you that there has been no such thing. She thinks it – she believes, no doubt, poor creature; but she’s wrong – quite wrong.”

I was greatly shocked at the sinister eagerness with which Jennings laboured to impress this fact, which, of all others, I thought he ought naturally to be most anxious to conceal for the present, upon my conviction; and I could not forbear saying—

“At all events, you will not fail to make all the reparation now in your power, and—”

“What reparation?” he asked, vehemently.

“There is but one,” I answered, “which you can now offer; and that is, marriage.”

“You are right, indeed,” he answered, sullenly, after a long pause; “it is the only – the only reparation for such a wrong.”

He sank into a moody and compunctious silence. At last he said, abruptly—

“They talk of generosity, and impulse, and all that, but take my word for it, prudence is worth them all. My own utter want of reflection has done it. I have been drawn into a situation in which I am powerless, at least for good; but do me justice, sir; you must do me justice, for, by God, I designed no wrong; I am not a cold-blooded wretch. I was led away by passion – misguided and betrayed into a position, as I told you, where I am no longer a free agent, and then my conduct is criticised, as if I could do just as I pleased. Is this justice or honesty? I’m railed at like a cold, scheming villain, and damned for not making reparation – I, that never laid a deliberate plot in my life, or hesitated to make atonement where I could. By heavens, sir, I tell you truth. Is this fair dealing – is it candour – is it common toleration?”

I reminded Jennings that I had no right to judge in the matter; and also intimated that I had already stayed too long, and so rose to take my departure.

“Well, well, well,” he said, with a dreary sort of shrug; “patience, and shuffle the cards – who knows what may turn up – who knows? Though, egad, take it which way, you will, it is about as cursed, black a looking business, as ever man was in for. It is hard – hard, by God. It looks as if they were all in a savage conspiracy to ruin me; and what good, in the devil’s name, can come of it – a pack of fools!”

I now took my leave. A feeling of curiosity, and, still more strongly, one of intense interest in the unfortunate young lady, with whose fate he was so disastrously connected, had tempted me, minute after minute, to prolong my visit. It was already nearly dark, and the street-lamps were burning. I had reached the corner of Grafton-street, buried in profound abstraction, when I was suddenly accosted by a familiar voice. It was that of my friend Fitzgerald, a wild fellow, and a pleasant one to boot, and an accomplished adept in all the then important mysteries of the small-sword and pistol, and learned in all the lore of points of honour.

“Can you tell me,” said he, after our greeting, and taking me at the same time by the arm, and drawing me with him, “whether Dick Chadleigh has got into a scrape?”

“What kind of a scrape do you mean?” I asked, evasively.

“Why, he called on me when I was out, not half an hour ago,” he replied, “and left a hurried note, telling me I must go to him without a moment’s delay, on my return, about a little business. Now, there is but one kind of business I understand” – here he raised his arm once or twice significantly, as if balancing a pistol – “and I strongly suspect it must be upon that he has called me to counsel; all my friends make use of me, you know, on such occasions. Have you heard anything of Chadleigh’s being likely to want my services in that way – eh?”

I told him I knew that high words had passed between him and Captain Jennings.

“Jennings – ho, ho!” said he, with a serious air – “a cool hand, I fancy. Egad, from the little I’ve seen of him, I’m inclined to think, if he is the man, it will be a matter of flints and powder – egad, it does look like business.”

I was not at all sorry to comply with Fitzgerald’s suggestion, to the effect that I should await his return in Brown’s coffee-house, and end the evening there in his company. My anxiety to learn the issue of the business was such, that I would gladly have done much more to satisfy it. Accordingly, I dropped into that public resort of idleness, while Fitzgerald, having called a coach, rumbled away to his interview with Chadleigh.

I had sat there for considerably more than an hour, and was beginning to give up all hope of his return, when he entered.

“Well,” said he, when we had established ourselves at a table apart from the rest, “I have had a couple of odd – devilish odd – conversations since I saw you. I don’t know, indeed, whether I am at liberty to tell you the subject of the quarrel.”

I interrupted him by assuring him that I already knew it; and having satisfied him upon this point, he proceeded to detail the particulars, which I shall condense for the benefit of the reader. He had, it seemed, found Chadleigh still much excited, and quite determined upon a hostile meeting; indeed, so resolute upon the point, that he would not so much as hear of anything to the contrary. His directions were peremptory, and amounted simply to this – that arrangements for a meeting were to be completed without a moment’s delay. All details, of course, were left to the direction of his friend; with respect to the quarrel itself, however, he was not invested with any right of diplomacy. Finding Chadleigh thus implacably resolved, Fitzgerald undertook the affair, which for other parties he had so often filled with singular efficiency, and was duly invested with the important functions of a “second” in the affair. Leaving Chadleigh, however, and being still of opinion that, if possible, the matter ought, for every reason, to be quietly adjusted, he resolved, upon his own responsibility, to make one final effort to prevent a catastrophe which, even if unattended by any more tragical consequences, must, at all events, have the effect of irreparably disgracing Miss Chadleigh. His belief was, that there remained one chance, and one only, of saving the unfortunate young lady, and that was, a private marriage with the author of her shame, accomplished without the delay of a single hour, if possible, so that the public might hear of the elopement and the marriage at one and the same time. Filled with this project, Fitzgerald hurried up the stairs of Jennings’ lodgings. The servant announced him as he entered the drawing-room. Jennings had altered his purpose, and determined, after what had passed, to remain at home. He was still in his dressing-gown, and, when his visitor entered, was sitting before his open desk, the candles burning beside him, and what seemed like a miniature in his hands. He was looking intently upon it, with no very loving aspect, when Fitzgerald entered; but he hastily thrust it, face downward, among the open letters, which lay in multitudinous confusion in the profundity of the old-fashioned desk, and shutting all up quickly, he locked it fast, and rose to receive him. Fitzgerald observed, also, that some torn papers were burning on the fire, and Jennings glanced quickly towards, them, to see that they were actually destroyed.

“I have the honour, Captain Jennings, to wait upon you with a communication from Mr. Chadleigh,” said Fitzgerald.

“Pray, sir, take a chair,” said Jennings, coldly, and with a formal bow.

Fitzgerald complied, and resumed—

“I need scarcely, I apprehend, detail the reasons which have induced this step. You have already had an interview with my principal, Mr. Chadleigh.”

“There is certainly no occasion, sir, to say more. I do perfectly understand the nature of your visit, which I have, indeed, been expecting; and have only to say, as Mr. Chadleigh has pushed matters to extremity, I apprehend your instructions are very brief, and that our present business may be quickly arranged; if you will favour me with your card, my friend shall wait upon you at whatever hour you name.”

“To say the truth, Mr. Jennings,” replied Fitzgerald, “you are right in supposing that my instructions have been very brief – in a word, they were those of absolute and unconditional hostility; this, however, is a case of such very peculiar delicacy – a case in which forbearance is so eminently important – so imperatively called for by all the circumstances, that I have resolved to take a responsibility upon myself, and endeavour to arrange this matter amicably, if, indeed, it be possible.”

Jennings continued to regard him with earnest attention, but did not speak.

“In short, as far as my influence goes, I would guarantee such an adjustment, upon one condition, which you can have no possible objection in submitting to – that you repair the dishonour you have done Miss Chadleigh, by marrying her, before her present unhappy position becomes public.”

Jennings grew deadly pale, and his features seemed to contract with the intensity of acute suffering, as he gazed for a few seconds upon the speaker, and then, abruptly rising, with a gesture like wringing his hands, he turned towards the fire, and remained standing for a time with his face averted.

“Well, sir,” exclaimed Fitzgerald, after a pause of considerable surprise – for he had expected a prompt and grateful acceptance of his proffered interposition – “what do you say – what am I to understand?”

Jennings heaved a dreary sigh, and said, gloomily and desperately enough—

“What you propose is absolutely out of the question – impracticable.”

“Then, sir, take the consequences,” said Fitzgerald, with irrepressible indignation; “you have, at least, quieted my scruples in acting against you – there is but one way of settling the matter now.”

“Just so, sir,” said Jennings, who had recovered his haughty coldness; “and, as I must leave details to the discretion of my friend, I have only to ask you at what hour precisely it will be convenient to you to see him?”

Fitzgerald named ten o’clock that night, and placed his card in Jennings’ hand.

“Very good, sir,” replied the latter, having glanced at it; “I presume that both parties are equally anxious to have this affair concluded with all possible despatch; my friend shall attend at the appointed hour.”

With these words they parted.

“I don’t know how it is,” said Fitzgerald, after he had concluded his narrative, “but this thing has put me quite out of spirits – it is a bad affair, a damned bad business; and, mark my words, so sure as you sit there, one or other of them will lose his life by it; they are both of them game – game to the backbone – game every inch, sir; and Chadleigh is in a murderous, black temper, too. Somehow, this is the first business of the sort, I ever had a hand in, that made me mopish; damn me, but it smells all over of death and winding-sheets.”

As the mortal crisis of this strange tragedy approached, my interest in its denouement became more and more intense. At my entreaty, Fitzgerald undertook to let me know, so soon as they were completed, the detailed arrangements for the approaching duel. As he had sundry preparations to make, he was obliged to leave me, and I walked home, in dejected solitude, to my lodgings.

I was no sooner alone in my apartment, than I recollected the paper which had been entrusted to my care by Jennings. He had not only omitted to prohibit its perusal in my case, but had actually told me, in so many words, that I was at liberty to read it. There was, therefore, no impediment to the honourable gratification of my curiosity; and, secure from interruption, I proceeded to examine the document.

It purported to be a statement of certain occurrences, in connection with a clandestine visit made by the deponent, one “Benjamin Cruise, clerk, resident next door to the Cow and Cleaver, in Smithfield, in the city of Dublin;” at the solicitation of Mrs. Martha Keating, at the house of Sir Arthur Chadleigh, in St. Stephen’s-green. The narrative was to the effect, that the reverend gentleman in question was applied to, on or about a certain day, nearly a year preceding the date of the document in question, to attend at the back entrance of the said mansion; where, according to arrangement, he waited until about one o’clock, when he was admitted, and conveyed with great precaution up a back-stair, and into a chamber, where was a young lady, as it seemed, in much agitation; and whom, as he was then and there informed by the old woman, his conductress, he believes to have been Miss Mary Chadleigh; by which name, he was afterwards directed to marry her to a certain young gentleman, whom he now knows to be Captain Jennings, and who, shortly after his, Cruise’s, arrival, joined the party in the said chamber, with like caution; that he, Cruise, had then, at the desire of the party, proceeded to unite Miss Chadleigh and Captain Jennings, according to the ritual of the Church of England; and that a noise in another part of the house having alarmed them, the ceremony was interrupted in the introductory part, and before the giving of the ring; and he and Captain Jennings, were together hurried out from the house the same way; and, that he never before, or since then, saw Miss Mary Chadleigh, and knew not of her having been married by any other clergyman. This statement, which was given with great aggravation of detail, was duly dated, and signed in full, by the reverend gentleman, in those days, a not very creditably-notorious personage.

The perusal of this document impressed me still more unfavourably respecting Jennings. There was something sinister and equivocal about the whole thing. The infamous character of the degraded man who signed it; the industrious detail with which it had been prepared; and, above all, the unaccountable precaution which had suggested the adoption of such a measure, filled me with painful misgivings, to the effect that some gross and horrible delusion had been practised upon poor Miss Chadleigh; and I could not forbear deeply regretting, that I had suffered myself, under conditions of secrecy, to be made the depository of so suspicious a document.

I was pursuing this unsatisfactory train of reflections, when a note was laced in my hand; it was couched in the following terms:

“Dear ———, At seven o’clock tomorrow morning, on the Fifteen Acres.

“Yours in haste,

“Fitzgerald.”

I spent a restless night, and was up long before dawn. Having completed my toilet, I walked some way into town, in the grey twilight of coming morning; and when I had, as I calculated, consumed the greater part of the necessary interval, I got into a hackney-coach, and drove directly to the place of rendezvous. Availing myself of a screen of bushes, I stopped the carriage, and got out, unobserved from the scene of action. As soon as I obtained a view of the ground, I observed there a coach, and a little group of three persons, who were standing, listlessly, close beside it; two or three gentlemen on horseback – mere spectators, of course, like myself – were also on the ground. I walked as near as I decently could to the group I have mentioned, and saw that Chadleigh and Fitzgerald were two of the number. The latter looked at his watch, and mounted the coach-box, to command a more extended view; shading his eyes with his hand, he looked along the skirting of wood which bounds the place, in the direction of the city, and at last his eye seemed to settle upon a distant object. I followed the direction of his gaze, and saw the top of a carriage moving in the distance.

“Here,” I thought, “comes Jennings; which of them is to leave the field unhurt, and which—” I shrank from the inquiry, merely mental as it was, with something like a shudder.

“Poor Mary Chadleigh whichever way it ends, its issue must be, to her, a tragedy.”

Fitzgerald had descended from his post of observation, and recognizing me, he walked up, and shook me by the hand. He looked pale and stern.

“They are coming,” said he, glancing towards the vehicle which was now rapidly approaching.

“Rather late – are they?” I asked – more from want of something to say than any other cause.

“No, no; a quarter past seven was fixed on, subsequently to my note, last night; we should scarcely have had light earlier,” he said.

“The weapons are pistols?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered; “and we may as well begin to make our preparations. Come with me; you’ll not be in the way; I won’t stand on ceremony when the time comes for you to withdraw and leave Major Gurney and myself to our deliberations.”

So saying, he drew me with him to the side of the carriage.

“Take out the case,” he said to the man who stood by the carriage door; “not that – those are the instruments; leave it where Dr. ——— placed it – the flat case – that’s right; just keep it in your hand; and when I beckon to you, bring it over to me quickly; there, don’t shake it.”

We now walked up to Chadleigh, who stood moodily and doggedly, with his surtout buttoned up to the chin; and exchanging, now and then, a brief word or two with his companion – a slim, pale-faced, young surgeon, who was, evidently, but one degree less frightened than if he had been himself a principal. Fitzgerald dropped my arm as he approached, and leaving me at a little distance, observed, consulting his watch—

“Eight minutes before their time.”

Chadleigh nodded.

“They have brought advice, too,” suggested the little surgeon, timidly; “there is a second carriage.”

“There’s no need to waste time,” said Chadleigh; “we had better walk on a little to meet them.”

The steps of the first carriage had, by this time, been let down; and Jennings, followed by a stiff, elderly gentleman, with a red, important face, and a military air, descended upon the turf. After, as it seemed, a few directions to the servants, they began to walk towards us, briskly, followed by an attendant, carrying a pistol case; and with the carriage, which carried their medical friend, a little in the rear.

My heart swelled within me as those two little groups approached one another, in grim silence, over the smooth sward. Gracious God! what an awful account for eternity was to be closed ere they parted!

On they came, briskly and steadily, through the keen and misty morning air – nearer and nearer – until the interposing space became so limited that each party, as it were, by mutual consent, slackening their pace, came slowly to a halt, at some dozen steps apart, and interchanged, in silence, a stern and formal salutation. Fitzgerald stepped forward, and was met about halfway by the grim elderly gentleman whom I have described. After another salutation, as formal, they withdrew a little, and conducted a brief conference, in short, decisive whispers. Meanwhile, those who, either accidentally, or by design, had been spectators of the proceedings, began to gather about the spot on which the combatants were placed.

I had thought, once or twice, that Jennings perceived my presence, and now I was assured of it.

“Mr. ———,” he said, in a low, hurried tone, “I have a request to make.”

“Pray, state it, sir,” I replied, approaching.

“It is just this – should I happen to fall, remain here for a few moments, as I may feel it necessary to make a communication to you of the last importance, not to myself, but to others.”

I undertook to comply with this request, and withdrew.

There was not the slightest perceptible tremor, not the least indication of excitement, in his manner, voice, or aspect, excepting that he was, perhaps, a little paler than usual, and his eyes were unusually dilated. With the restlessness of suspense, I walked to the spot where Chadleigh was standing, and, almost at the same moment, Fitzgerald returned.

“What is the distance?” asked Chadleigh.

“Ten paces,” rejoined Fitzgerald.

“Too much,” said he, gruffly.

“It is the usual thing; you don’t want to have us look bloodthirsty,” retorted Fitzgerald.

“And for that reason, I’d like to have it settled one way or other at the first shot.”

“It will be settled time enough,” said the second, and, unlocking the pistol-case, he proceeded to load the weapons; a silence, hardly broken by a whisper, followed, during which the click of ramrods, and the cramming home of wadded bullets were ominously audible.

“Are you ready, Mr. Fitzgerald?” inquired Jennings’ second; “if so, we had better place our men at once.”

A piece of money was thrown up for choice of ground; Jennings won.

“Luck’s so far with us, sir; I hope it may not turn,” remarked the veteran, with a ghastly jocularity.

Chadleigh disencumbered himself of his surtout, and the combatants took their ground respectively.

“Gentlemen,” said the major, ad dressing the spectators, “have the goodness to draw back a little; some of you may be hurt, else.”

The suggestion was complied with, and a breathless silence followed.

“Are you ready, gentlemen?” inquired the major.

Each answered in the affirmative.

After a brief pause the word “fire” was given, each raised his weapon, but Chadleigh only fired. Jennings must have had a narrow escape, for he shook his head, put his hand to his ear, as if a hornet had stung him, then, quickly raising the pistol, he fired into the air, threw the weapon up, and caught it by the muzzle as it descended.

“Damme, sir, that won’t do,” exclaimed Chadleigh, in a tone of bitter exasperation, “you may throw away your shot, if you will, but I’m cursed if you get out of the business on these terms; it is the act of a poltroon and a scoundrel to sneak out of a quarrel that way; I’ll baulk your scheme, for you—”

“Don’t say a word,” said Jennings, sternly, interrupting Fitzgerald, who was about to interfere, “I call you all to witness I have stood his fire, and without returning it – that’s all; let him take the consequences of his vindictive obstinacy. I’ll not stand to be shot at like a target; I’ve a right to defend myself, and by God I’ll do it.”

“Certainly; ’tis very just and sensible; the very point I was going to put,” said the major, with a brisk approval, that strongly contrasted with the savage intensity of Jennings’ tone.

It was plain that the angry and mortal passions of combat were, in Jennings, at last thoroughly aroused. I heard him say to Major Gurney, once or twice, impatiently, “make haste,” and saw him dart one or two lowering glances at Chadleigh. The preliminaries for a second exchange of shots were completed in a few moments – the signal was given – and both fired so exactly together, that, from the report, one would have believed the explosion a single one. Jennings’ shot was well directed, though accident defeated its aim; it struck the trigger-guard of Chadleigh’s pistol, which was nearly forced from his hand by the shock, and glancing off, the ball buried itself in the sod. Jennings, on the other hand, stood immovable, while one might slowly count three, then staggered a little, dropped his pistol, and fell suddenly to the ground. Chadleigh walked forward a few hesitating steps, checked himself, and, in an agitated voice, said to the surgeon who had accompanied him—

“You may be wanted here – by God, he’s hurt. Fitzgerald, come away – come, I say.”

Meanwhile, amid a babel of conflicting and excited suggestions, the surgeon, ordering the crowd to stand back, had the wounded man raised a little on the carriage cushions, and was proceeding to examine the injury, but Jennings said, faintly—

“Don’t – don’t – it’s all of no use.” He invited me, with a glance and a slight gesture, to approach.

“One word,” he said, speaking with great difficulty. I stooped down, to bring my ear as near him as I could. “It’s all a lie – all that – the paper – see the man, and tell him I said so – poor Mary – I made him do it, but I could not help it – there’s no use in maintaining the cheat any longer – I’m dying. Keep him away,” he continued, faintly turning his gaze for a moment on the surgeon, who was approaching, and then on me, “he can do nothing for me – only listen to me – my last word – that paper is – is a lie – we were married – I can – I can scarcely speak – don’t – don’t – are you going – hold me – oh God!”

I can never forget the look that Jennings fixed on me – the fearful, imploring gaze of his dilated eyes, filled with the wild, deep, awful meaning of death – the strangling effort to speak – the ghastly pallor – and then, the dropping of the jaw – the mouth, through which the breath of life was never more to stir, helplessly agape – the eyes, with the deep earnestness of their awful meaning, fixed forever – and the stern movelessness of the darkened brow. Was this the gay, vain, reckless Jennings? Was this mute but fearful monitor of death, propped up before us, indeed the frivolous, light-hearted, sensual man of the world, among whose dreams and calculations the warning shadow of death had never glided?

“By God! he is dead,” said one of the bystanders, breaking the breathless silence that had followed.

The surgeon kneeled down beside him, placed his hand over the dead man’s heart, raised his arm, and held his pulse for a moment – then replaced the hand by his side in silence. I re member seeing the grass that he had plucked, dropping from the stiffening fingers.

“Lift the body into the carriage, and drive to Kildare-street,” said the physician, addressing the servants.

~   ~   ~   ~

Poor Mary Chadleigh was long held in ignorance of this, her overwhelming catastrophe. At length, however, it could be no longer concealed; and the revelation was followed by a brain-fever, which first threatened her life, and then her reason. She recovered, however, with a mind unimpaired, although with a shattered constitution. With her younger brother and her child, the youthful widow found an asylum for years in England, until the death of Sir Arthur put her in possession of the fortune which his will could not control.

One circumstance connected with the history of Jennings’ fate, however, never reached her ear. I had taken care to procure, though not without considerable difficulty at starting, the fullest evidence of the marriage – and afterwards learned, from the younger brother, whose return had, perhaps, precipitated the catastrophe, a circumstance which accounted for what had, for a time, appeared to me the gratuitous villainy of Jennings, in himself denying, and suborning others to deny, a marriage, whose existence was necessary to protect Miss Chadleigh from the agonizing degradation, the appalling ruin, with which she had been so imminently, though unconsciously, threatened. Jennings, it seemed, had actually married a woman of very equivocal rank, and more than equivocal character, in India. There were circumstances, however, which made the validity of this marriage doubtful, and the woman herself had left him, and formed a vicious connection there; so that he had regarded the marriage as dissolved by mutual consent, and never reckoned upon the remote contingency of her turning up, by any accident. By a fatal coincidence, however, it happened, that, of the few individuals who knew of this connection, his intimate and confidential friend, Captain Chadleigh, had been one. His supposed death had, however, quieted those alarms, which would have precluded the moral possibility of Jennings hazarding the audacious step which ended so fatally for himself, and the unexpected and impending return of Chadleigh was the first event which recalled the reckless and unprincipled man to a sense of his actual position. How often is crime unavailing for its meditated purpose, and effective only for the ruin of him who plans it. While Jennings was stoutly denying his marriage with Mary Chadleigh, to avoid the fancied danger of a prosecution, the poor young lady’s brother was bringing with him tidings of the death (long previous to his marriage with Miss Chadleigh) of the profligate woman, whose claim upon his hand had driven him to the selfish and desperate expedient of denying his union with the too-confiding creature whom his ardent and impetuous pursuit had won to lifelong sorrow. Yet I have lived to see the offspring of this inauspicious marriage, Arthur Chadleigh, a member of parliament, and the sole inheritor of the great Chadleigh estates in Ireland.

“Dublin University Magazine”, Jan. 1848

THE LAST HEIR OF CASTLE CONNOR

(1838)

There is something in the decay of ancient grandeur to interest even the most unconcerned spectator – the evidences of greatness, of power, and of pride that survive the wreck of time, proving, in mournful contrast with present desolation and decay, what was in other days, appeal, with a resistless power, to the sympathies of our nature. And when, as we gaze on the scion of some ruined family, the first impulse of nature that bids us regard his fate with interest and respect is justified by the recollection of great exertions and self-devotion and sacrifices in the cause of a lost country and of a despised religion – sacrifices and efforts made with all the motives of faithfulness and of honour, and terminating in ruin – in such a case respect becomes veneration, and the interest we feel amounts almost to a passion.

It is this feeling which has thrown the magic veil of romance over every roofless castle and ruined turret throughout our country; it is this feeling that, so long as a tower remains above the level of the soil, so long as one scion of a prostrate and impoverished family survives, will never suffer Ireland to yield to the stranger more than the “mouth honour” which fear compels. I who have conversed viva voce et propria persona with those whose recollections could run back so far as the times previous to the confiscations which followed the Revolution of 1688 – whose memory could repeople halls long roofless and desolate, and point out the places where greatness once had been, may feel all this more strongly, and with a more vivid interest, than can those whose sympathies are awakened by the feebler influence of what may be called the picturesque effects of ruin and decay.

There do, indeed, still exist some fragments of the ancient Catholic families of Ireland; but, alas! what very fragments! They linger like the remnants of her aboriginal forests, reft indeed of their strength and greatness, but proud even in decay. Every winter thins their ranks, and strews the ground with the wreck of their loftiest branches; they are at best but tolerated in the land which gave them birth – objects of curiosity, perhaps of pity, to one class, but of veneration to another.

The O’Connors, of Castle Connor, were an ancient Irish family. The name recurs frequently in our history, and is generally to be found in a prominent place whenever periods of tumult or of peril called forth the courage and the enterprise of this country. After the accession of William III., the storm of confiscation which swept over the land made woeful havoc in their broad domains. Some fragments of property, however, did remain to them, and with it the building which had for ages formed the family residence.

About the year 17—, my uncle, a Catholic priest, became acquainted with the inmates of Castle Connor, and after a time introduced me, then a lad of about fifteen, full of spirits, and little dreaming that a profession so grave as his should ever become mine.

The family at that time consisted of but two members, a widow lady and her only son, a young man aged about eighteen. In our early days the progress from acquaintance to intimacy, and from intimacy to friendship is proverbially rapid; and young O’Connor and I became, in less than a month, close and confidential companions – an intercourse which ripened gradually into an attachment ardent, deep, and devoted – such as I believe young hearts only are capable of forming.

He had been left early fatherless, and the representative and heir of his family. His mother’s affection for him was intense in proportion as there existed no other object to divide it – indeed – such love as that she bore him I have never seen elsewhere. Her love was better bestowed than that of mothers generally is, for young O’Connor, not without some of the faults, had certainly many of the most engaging qualities of youth. He had all the frankness and gaiety which attract, and the generosity of heart which confirms friendship; indeed, I never saw a person so universally popular; his very faults seemed to recommend him; he was wild, extravagant, thoughtless, and fearlessly adventurous – defects of character which, among the peasantry of Ireland, are honoured as virtues. The combination of these qualities, and the position which O’Connor occupied as representative of an ancient Irish Catholic family – a peculiarly interesting one to me, one of the old faith – endeared him to me so much that I have never felt the pangs of parting more keenly than when it became necessary, for the finishing of his education, that he should go abroad.

Three years had passed away before I saw him again. During the interval, however, I had frequently heard from him, so that absence had not abated the warmth of our attachment. Who could tell of the rejoicings that marked the evening of his return? The horses were removed from the chaise at the distance of a mile from the castle, while it and its contents were borne rapidly onward almost by the pressure of the multitude, like a log upon a torrent. Bonfires blared far and near – bagpipes roared and fiddles squeaked; and, amid the thundering shouts of thousands, the carriage drew up before the castle.

In an instant young O’Connor was upon the ground, crying, “Thank you, boys – thank you, boys;” while a thousand hands were stretched out from all sides to grasp even a finger of his. Still, amid shouts of “God bless your honour – long may you reign!” and “Make room there, boys! clear the road for the masther!” he reached the threshold of the castle, where stood his mother weeping for joy.

Oh! who could describe that embrace, or the enthusiasm with which it was witnessed? “God bless him to you, my lady – glory to ye both!” and “Oh, but he is a fine young gentleman, God bless him!” resounded on all sides, while hats flew up in volleys that darkened the moon; and when at length, amid the broad delighted grins of the thronging domestics, whose sense of decorum precluded any more boisterous evidence of joy, they reached the parlour, then giving way to the fulness of her joy the widowed mother kissed and blessed him and wept in turn. Well might any parent be proud to claim as son the handsome stripling who now represented the Castle Connor family; but to her his beauty had a peculiar charm, for it bore a striking resemblance to that of her husband, the last O’Connor.

I know not whether partiality blinded me, or that I did no more than justice to my friend in believing that I had never seen so handsome a young man. I am inclined to think the latter. He was rather tall, very slightly and elegantly made; his face was oval, and his features decidedly Spanish in cast and complexion, but with far more vivacity of expression than generally belongs to the beauty of that nation. The extreme delicacy of his features and the varied animation of his countenance made him appear even younger than his years – an illusion which the total absence of everything studied in his manners seemed to confirm. Time had wrought no small change in me, alike in mind and spirits; but in the case of O’Connor it seemed to have lost its power to alter. His gaiety was undamped, his generosity unchilled; and though the space which had intervened between our parting and reunion was but brief, yet at the period of life at which we were, even a shorter interval than that of three years has frequently served to form or deform a character.

Weeks had passed away since the return of O’Connor, and scarce a day had elapsed without my seeing him, when the neighbourhood was thrown into an unusual state of excitement by the announcement of a race-ball to be celebrated at the assembly-room of the town of T———, distant scarcely two miles from Castle Connor.

Young O’Connor, as I had expected, determined at once to attend it; and having directed in vain all the powers of his rhetoric to persuade his mother to accompany him, he turned the whole battery of his logic upon me, who, at that time, felt a reluctance stronger than that of mere apathy to mixing in any of these scenes of noisy pleasure for which for many reasons I felt myself unfitted. He was so urgent and persevering, however, that I could not refuse; and I found myself reluctantly obliged to make up my mind to attend him upon the important night to the spacious but ill-finished building, which the fashion and beauty of the county were pleased to term an assembly-room.

When we entered the apartment, we found a select few, surrounded by a crowd of spectators, busily performing a minuet, with all the congees and flourishes which belonged to that courtly dance; and my companion, infected by the contagion of example, was soon, as I had anticipated, waving his chapeau bras, and gracefully bowing before one of the prettiest girls in the room. I had neither skill nor spirits to qualify me to follow his example; and as the fulness of the room rendered it easy to do so without its appearing singular, I determined to be merely a spectator of the scene which surrounded me, without taking an active part in its amusements.

The room was indeed very much crowded, so that its various groups, formed as design or accident had thrown the parties together, afforded no small fund of entertainment to the contemplative observer. There were the dancers, all gaiety and good-humour; a little further off were the tables at which sat the card-players, some plying their vocation with deep and silent anxiety – for in those days gaming often ran very high in such places – and others disputing with all the vociferous pertinacity of undisguised ill-temper. There, again, were the sallow, blue-nosed, grey-eyed dealers in whispered scandal; and, in short, there is scarcely a group or combination to be met with in the court of kings which might not have found a humble parallel in the assembly-room of T———.

I was allowed to indulge in undisturbed contemplation, for I suppose I was not known to more than five or six in the room. I thus had leisure not only to observe the different classes into which the company had divided itself, but to amuse myself by speculating as to the rank and character of many of the individual actors in the drama.

Among many who have long since passed from my memory, one person for some time engaged my attention, and that person, for many reasons, I shall not soon forget. He was a tall, square-shouldered man, who stood in a careless attitude, leaning with his back to the wall; he seemed to have secluded himself from the busy multitudes which moved noisily and gaily around him, and nobody seemed to observe or to converse with him. He was fashionably dressed, but perhaps rather extravagantly; his face was full and heavy, expressive of sullenness and stupidity, and marked with the lines of strong vulgarity; his age might be somewhere between forty and fifty. Such as I have endeavoured to describe him, he remained motionless, his arms doggedly folded across his broad chest, and turning his sullen eyes from corner to corner of the room, as if eager to detect some object on which to vent his ill-humour.

It is strange, and yet it is true, that one sometimes finds even in the most commonplace countenance an undefinable something, which fascinates the attention, and forces it to recur again and again, while it is impossible to tell whether the peculiarity which thus attracts us lies in feature or in expression, or in both combined, and why it is that our observation should be engrossed by an object which, when analysed, seems to possess no claim to interest or even to notice. This unaccountable feeling I have often experienced, and I believe I am not singular, but never in so remarkable a degree as upon this occasion. My friend O’Connor, having disposed of his fair partner, was crossing the room for the purpose of joining me, in doing which I was surprised to see him exchange a familiar, almost a cordial, greeting with the object of my curiosity. I say I was surprised, for independent of his very questionable appearance, it struck me as strange that though so constantly associated with O’Connor, and, as I thought, personally acquainted with all his intimates, I had never before even seen this individual. I did not fail immediately to ask him who this gentleman was. I thought he seemed slightly embarrassed, but after a moment’s pause he laughingly said that his friend over the way was too mysterious a personage to have his name announced in so giddy a scene as the present; but that on the morrow he would furnish me with all the information which I could desire. There was, I thought, in his affected jocularity a real awkwardness which appeared to me unaccountable, and consequently increased my curiosity; its gratification, however, I was obliged to defer. At length, wearied with witnessing amusements in which I could not sympathise, I left the room, and did not see O’Connor until late in the next day.

I had ridden down towards the castle for the purpose of visiting the O’Connors, and had nearly reached the avenue leading to the mansion, when I met my friend. He was also mounted; and having answered my inquiries respecting his mother, he easily persuaded me to accompany him in his ramble. We had chatted as usual for some time, when, after a pause, O’Connor said:

“By the way, Purcell, you expressed some curiosity respecting the tall, handsome fellow to whom I spoke last night.”

“I certainly did question you about a tall gentleman, but was not aware of his claims to beauty,” replied I.

“Well, that is as it may be,” said he; “the ladies think him handsome, and their opinion upon that score is more valuable than yours or mine. Do you know,” he continued, “I sometimes feel half sorry that I ever made the fellow’s acquaintance: he is quite a marked man here, and they tell stories of him that are anything but reputable, though I am sure without foundation. I think I know enough about him to warrant me in saying so.”

“May I ask his name?” inquired I.

“Oh! did not I tell you his name?” rejoined he. “You should have heard that first; he and his name are equally well known. You will recognise the individual at once when I tell you that his name is – Fitzgerald.”

“Fitzgerald!” I repeated. “Fitzgerald! – can it be Fitzgerald the duellist?”

“Upon my word you have hit it,” replied he, laughing; “but you have accompanied the discovery with a look of horror more tragic than appropriate. He is not the monster you take him for – he has a good deal of old Irish pride; his temper is hasty, and he has been unfortunately thrown in the way of men who have not made allowance for these things. I am convinced that in every case in which Fitzgerald has fought, if the truth could be discovered, he would be found to have acted throughout upon the defensive. No man is mad enough to risk his own life, except when the doing so is an alternative to submitting tamely to what he considers an insult. I am certain that no man ever engaged in a duel under the consciousness that he had acted an intentionally aggressive part.”

“When did you make his acquaintance?” said I.

“About two years ago,” he replied. “I met him in France, and you know when one is abroad it is an ungracious task to reject the advances of one’s countryman, otherwise I think I should have avoided his society – less upon my own account than because I am sure the acquaintance would be a source of continual though groundless uneasiness to my mother. I know, therefore, that you will not unnecessarily mention its existence to her.”

I gave him the desired assurance, and added:

“May I ask you. O’Connor, if, indeed, it be a fair question, whether this Fitzgerald at any time attempted to engage you in anything like gaming?”

This question was suggested by my having frequently heard Fitzgerald mentioned as a noted gambler, and sometimes even as a blackleg. O’Connor seemed, I thought, slightly embarrassed. He answered:

“No, no – I cannot say that he ever attempted anything of the kind. I certainly have played with him, but never lost to any serious amount; nor can I recollect that he ever solicited me – indeed he knows that I have a strong objection to deep play. You must be aware that my finances could not bear much pruning down. I never lost more to him at a sitting than about five pounds, which you know is nothing. No, you wrong him if you imagine that he attached himself to me merely for the sake of such contemptible winnings as those which a broken-down Irish gentleman could afford him. Come, Purcell, you are too hard upon him – you judge only by report; you must see him, and decide for yourself. – Suppose we call upon him now; he is at the inn, in the High Street, not a mile off.”

I declined the proposal drily.

“Your caution is too easily alarmed,” said he. “I do not wish you to make this man your bosom friend: I merely desire that you should see and speak to him, and if you form any acquaintance with him, it must be of that slight nature which can be dropped or continued at pleasure.”

From the time that O’Connor had announced the fact that his friend was no other than the notorious Fitzgerald, a foreboding of something calamitous had come upon me, and it now occurred to me that if any unpleasantness were to be feared as likely to result to O’Connor from their connection, I might find my attempts to extricate him much facilitated by my being acquainted, however slightly, with Fitzgerald. I know not whether the idea was reasonable – it was certainly natural; and I told O’Connor that upon second thoughts I would ride down with him to the town, and wait upon Mr. Fitzgerald.

We found him at home; and chatted with him for a considerable time. To my surprise his manners were perfectly those of a gentleman, and his conversation, if not peculiarly engaging, was certainly amusing. The politeness of his demeanour, and the easy fluency with which he told his stories and his anecdotes, many of them curious, and all more or less entertaining, accounted to my mind at once for the facility with which he had improved his acquaintance with O’Connor; and when he pressed upon us an invitation to sup with him that night, I had almost joined O’Connor in accepting it. I determined, however, against doing so, for I had no wish to be on terms of familiarity with Mr. Fitzgerald; and I knew that one evening spent together as he proposed would go further towards establishing an intimacy between us than fifty morning visits could do. When I arose to depart, it was with feelings almost favourable to Fitzgerald; indeed I was more than half ashamed to acknowledge to my companion how complete a revolution in my opinion respecting his friend half an hour’s conversation with him had wrought. His appearance certainly was against him; but then, under the influence of his manner, one lost sight of much of its ungainliness, and of nearly all its vulgarity; and, on the whole, I felt convinced that report had done him grievous wrong, inasmuch as anybody, by an observance of the common courtesies of society, might easily avoid coming into personal collision with a gentleman so studiously polite as Fitzgerald. At parting, O’Connor requested me to call upon him the next day, as he intended to make trial of the merits of a pair of greyhounds, which he had thoughts of purchasing; adding, that if he could escape in anything like tolerable time from Fitzgerald’s supper-party, he would take the field soon after ten on the next morning. At the appointed hour, or perhaps a little later, I dismounted at Castle Connor; and, on entering the hall, I observed a gentleman issuing from O’Connor’s private room. I recognised him, as he approached, as a Mr. M’Donough, and, being but slightly acquainted with him, was about to pass him with a bow, when he stopped me. There was something in his manner which struck me as odd; he seemed a good deal flurried if not agitated, and said, in a hurried tone:

“This is a very foolish business, Mr. Purcell. You have some influence with my friend O’Connor; I hope you can induce him to adopt some more moderate line of conduct than that he has decided upon. If you will allow me, I will return for a moment with you, and talk over the matter again with O’Connor.”

As M’Donough uttered these words, I felt that sudden sinking of the heart which accompanies the immediate anticipation of something dreaded and dreadful. I was instantly convinced that O’Connor had quarrelled with Fitzgerald, and I knew that if such were the case, nothing short of a miracle could extricate him from the consequences. I signed to M’Donough to lead the way, and we entered the little study together. O’Connor was standing with his back to the fire; on the table lay the breakfast-things in the disorder in which a hurried meal had left them; and on another smaller table, placed near the hearth, lay pen, ink, and paper. As soon as O’Connor saw me, he came forward and shook me cordially by the hand.

“My dear Purcell,” said he, “you are the very man I wanted. I have got into an ugly scrape, and I trust to my friends to get me out of it.”

“You have had no dispute with that man – that Fitzgerald, I hope,” said I, giving utterance to the conjecture whose truth I most dreaded.

“Faith, I cannot say exactly what passed between us,” said he, “inasmuch as I was at the time nearly half seas over; but of this much I am certain, that we exchanged angry words last night. I lost my temper most confoundedly; but, as well as I can recollect, he appeared perfectly cool and collected. What he said was, therefore, deliberately said, and on that account must be resented.”

“My dear O’Connor, are you mad?” I exclaimed. “Why will you seek to drive to a deadly issue a few hasty words, uttered under the influence of wine, and forgotten almost as soon as uttered? A quarrel with Fitzgerald it is twenty chances to one would terminate fatally to you.”

“It is exactly because Fitzgerald is such an accomplished shot,” said he, “that I become liable to the most injurious and intolerable suspicions if I submit to anything from him which could be construed into an affront; and for that reason Fitzgerald is the very last man to whom I would concede an inch in a case of honour.”

“I do not require you to make any, the slightest sacrifice of what you term your honour,” I replied; “but if you have actually written a challenge to Fitzgerald, as I suspect you have done, I conjure you to reconsider the matter before you despatch it. From all that I have heard you say, Fitzgerald has more to complain of in the altercation which has taken place than you. You owe it to your only surviving parent not to thrust yourself thus wantonly upon – I will say it, the most appalling danger. Nobody, my dear O’Connor, can have a doubt of your courage; and if at any time, which God forbid, you shall be called upon thus to risk your life, you should have it in your power to enter the field under the consciousness that you have acted throughout temperately and like a man, and not, as I fear you now would do, having rashly and most causelessly endangered your own life and that of your friend.”

“I believe, Purcell, your are right,” said he. “I believe I have viewed the matter in too decided a light; my note, I think, scarcely allows him an honourable alternative, and that is certainly going a step too far – further than I intended. Mr. M’Donough, I’ll thank you to hand me the note.”

He broke the seal, and, casting his eye hastily over it, he continued:

“It is, indeed, a monument of folly. I am very glad, Purcell, you happened to come in, otherwise it would have reached its destination by this time.”

He threw it into the fire; and, after a moment’s pause, resumed:

“You must not mistake me, however. I am perfectly satisfied as to the propriety, nay, the necessity, of communicating with Fitzgerald. The difficulty is in what tone I should address him. I cannot say that the man directly affronted me – I cannot recollect any one expression which I could lay hold upon as offensive – but his language was ambiguous, and admitted frequently of the most insulting construction, and his manner throughout was insupportably domineering. I know it impressed me with the idea that he presumed upon his reputation as a dead shot, and that would be utterly unendurable.”

“I would now recommend, as I have already done,” said M’Donough, “that if you write to Fitzgerald, it should be in such a strain as to leave him at perfect liberty, without a compromise of honour, in a friendly way, to satisfy your doubts as to his conduct.”

I seconded the proposal warmly, and O’Connor, in a few minutes, finished a note, which he desired us to read. It was to this effect:

“O’Connor, of Castle Connor, feeling that some expressions employed by Mr. Fitzgerald upon last night, admitted of a construction offensive to him, and injurious to his character, requests to know whether Mr. Fitzgerald intended to convey such a meaning.

“Castle Connor, Thursday morning.”

This note was consigned to the care of Mr. M’Donough, who forthwith departed to execute his mission. The sound of his horse’s hoofs, as he rode rapidly away, struck heavily at my heart; but I found some satisfaction in the reflection that M’Donough appeared as averse from extreme measures as I was myself, for I well knew, with respect to the final result of the affair, that as much depended upon the tone adopted by the second, as upon the nature of the written communication.

I have seldom passed a more anxious hour than that which intervened between the departure and the return of that gentleman. Every instant I imagined I heard the tramp of a horse approaching, and every time that a door opened I fancied it was to give entrance to the eagerly expected courier. At length I did hear the hollow and rapid tread of a horse’s hoof upon the avenue. It approached – it stopped – a hurried step traversed the hall – the room door opened, and M’Donough entered.

“You have made great haste,” said O’Connor; “did you find him at home?”

“I did,” replied M’Donough, “and made the greater haste as Fitzgerald did not let me know the contents of his reply.”

At the same time he handed a note to O’Connor, who instantly broke the seal. The words were as follow:

“Mr. Fitzgerald regrets that anything which has fallen from him should have appeared to Mr. O’Connor to be intended to convey a reflection upon his honour (none such having been meant), and begs leave to disavow any wish to quarrel unnecessarily with Mr. O’Connor.

“T——— Inn, Thursday morning.”

I cannot describe how much I felt relieved on reading the above communication. I took O’Connor’s hand and pressed it warmly, but my emotions were deeper and stronger than I cared to show, for I was convinced that he had escaped a most imminent danger. Nobody whose notions upon the subject are derived from the duelling of modern times, in which matters are conducted without any very sanguinary determination upon either side, and with equal want of skill and coolness by both parties, can form a just estimate of the danger incurred by one who ventured to encounter a duellist of the old school. Perfect coolness in the field, and a steadiness and accuracy (which to the unpractised appeared almost miraculous) in the use of the pistol, formed the characteristics of this class; and in addition to this there generally existed a kind of professional pride, which prompted the duellist, in default of any more malignant feeling, from motives of mere vanity, to seek the life of his antagonist. Fitzgerald’s career had been a remarkably successful one, and I knew that out of thirteen duels which he had fought in Ireland, in nine cases he had killed his man. In those days one never heard of the parties leaving the field, as not unfrequently now occurs, without blood having been spilt; and the odds were, of course, in all cases tremendously against a young and unpractised man, when matched with an experienced antagonist. My impression respecting the magnitude of the danger which my friend had incurred was therefore by no means unwarranted.

I now questioned O’Connor more accurately respecting the circumstances of his quarrel with Fitzgerald. It arose from some dispute respecting the application of a rule of piquet, at which game they had been playing, each interpreting it favourably to himself, and O’Connor, having lost considerably, was in no mood to conduct an argument with temper – an altercation ensued, and that of rather a pungent nature, and the result was that he left Fitzgerald’s room rather abruptly, determined to demand an explanation in the most peremptory tone. For this purpose he had sent for M’Donough, and had commissioned him to deliver the note, which my arrival had fortunately intercepted.

As it was now past noon, O’Connor made me promise to remain with him to dinner; and we sat down a party of three, all in high spirits at the termination of our anxieties. It is necessary to mention, for the purpose of accounting for what follows, that Mrs. O’Connor, or, as she was more euphoniously styled, the lady of Castle Connor, was precluded by ill-health from taking her place at the dinner-table, and, indeed, seldom left her room before four o’clock. (It is scarcely necessary to remind the reader, that at the period spoken of, the important hour of dinner occurred very nearly at noon.) We were sitting after dinner sipping our claret, and talking, and laughing, and enjoying ourselves exceedingly, when a servant, stepping into the room, informed his master that a gentleman wanted to speak with him.

“Request him, with my compliments, to walk in,” said O’Connor; and in a few moments a gentleman entered the room.

His appearance was anything but prepossessing. He was a little above the middle size, spare, and rawboned; his face very red, his features sharp and bluish, and his age might be about sixty. His attire savoured a good deal of the shabby-genteel; his clothes, which had much of tarnished and faded pretension about them, did not fit him, and had not improbably fluttered in the stalls of Plunket Street. We had risen on his entrance, and O’Connor had twice requested of him to take a chair at the table, without his hearing, or at least noticing, the invitation; while with a slow pace, and with an air of mingled importance and effrontery, he advanced into the centre of the apartment, and regarding our small party with a supercilious air, he said:

“I take the liberty of introducing myself – I am Captain M’Creagh, formerly of the —— infantry. My business here is with a Mr. O’Connor, and the sooner it is despatched the better.”

“I am the gentleman you name,” said O’Connor; “and as you appear impatient, we had better proceed to your commission without delay.”

“Then, Mr. O’Connor, you will please to read that note,” said the captain, placing a sealed paper in his hand.

O’Connor read it through, and then observed:

“This is very extraordinary indeed. This note appears to me perfectly unaccountable.”

“You are very young, Mr. O’Connor,” said the captain, with vulgar familiarity; “but, without much experience in these matters, I think you might have anticipated something like this. You know the old saying, ‘Second thoughts are best;’ and so they are like to prove, by God!”

“You will have no objection, Captain M’Creagh, on the part of your friend, to my reading this note to these gentlemen; they are both confidential friends of mine, and one of them has already acted for me in this business.”

“I can have no objection,” replied the captain, “to your doing what you please with your own. I have nothing more to do with that note once I put it safe into your hand; and when that is once done, it is all one to me, if you read it to half the world – that’s your concern, and no affair of mine.”

O’Connor then read the following:

“Mr. Fitzgerald begs leave to state, that upon re-perusing Mr. O’Connor’s communication of this morning carefully, with an experienced friend, he is forced to consider himself as challenged. His friend, Captain M’Creagh, has been empowered by him to make all the necessary arrangements.

“T——— Inn, Thursday.”

I can hardly describe the astonishment with which I heard this note. I turned to the captain, and said:

“Surely, sir, there is some mistake in all this?”

“Not the slightest, I’ll assure you, sir.” said he, coolly; “the case is a very clear one, and I think my friend has pretty well made up his mind upon it. May I request your answer?” he continued, turning to O’Connor; “time is precious, you know.”

O’Connor expressed his willingness to comply with the suggestion, and in a few minutes had folded and directed the following rejoinder:

“Mr. O’Connor having received a satisfactory explanation from Mr. Fitzgerald, of the language used by that gentleman, feels that there no longer exists any grounds for misunderstanding, and wishes further to state, that the note of which Mr. Fitzgerald speaks was not intended as a challenge.”

With this note the captain departed; and as we did not doubt that the message which he had delivered had been suggested by some unintentional misconstruction of O’Connor’s first billet, we felt assured that the conclusion of his last note would set the matter at rest. In this belief, however, we were mistaken; before we had left the table, and in an incredibly short time, the captain returned. He entered the room with a countenance evidently tasked to avoid expressing the satisfaction which a consciousness of the nature of his mission had conferred; but in spite of all his efforts to look gravely unconcerned, there was a twinkle in the small grey eye, and an almost imperceptible motion in the corner of the mouth, which sufficiently betrayed his internal glee, as he placed a note in the hand of O’Connor. As the young man cast his eye over it, he coloured deeply, and turning to M’Donough, he said:

“You will have the goodness to make all the necessary arrangements for a meeting. Something has occurred to render one between me and Mr. Fitzgerald inevitable. Understand me literally, when I say that it is now totally impossible that this affair should be amicably arranged. You will have the goodness, M’Donough, to let me know as soon as all the particulars are arranged. Purcell,” he continued, “will you have the kindness to accompany me?” and having bowed to M’Creagh, we left the room.

As I closed the door after me, I heard the captain laugh, and thought I could distinguish the words – “By God, I knew Fitzgerald would bring him to his way of thinking before he stopped.”

I followed O’Connor into his study, and on entering, the door being closed, he showed me the communication which had determined him upon hostilities. Its language was grossly impertinent, and it concluded by actually threatening to “post” him, in case he further attempted “to be off.” I cannot describe the agony of indignation in which O’Connor writhed under this insult. He said repeatedly that “he was a degraded and dishonoured man,” that “he was dragged into the field,” that “there was ignominy in the very thought that such a letter should have been directed to him.” It was in vain that I reasoned against this impression; the conviction that he had been disgraced had taken possession of his mind. He said again and again that nothing but his death could remove the stain which his indecision had cast upon the name of his family. I hurried to the hall, on hearing M’Donough and the captain passing, and reached the door just in time to hear the latter say, as he mounted his horse:

“All the rest can be arranged on the spot; and so farewell, Mr. M’Donough – we’ll meet at Philippi, you know;” and with this classical allusion, which was accompanied with a grin and a bow, and probably served many such occasions, the captain took his departure.

M’Donough briefly stated the few particulars which had been arranged. The parties were to meet at the stand-house, in the race-ground, which lay at about an equal distance between Castle Connor and the town of T———. The hour appointed was half-past five on the next morning, at which time the twilight would be sufficiently advanced to afford a distinct view; and the weapons to be employed were pistols – M’Creagh having claimed, on the part of his friend, all the advantages of the challenged party, and having, consequently, insisted upon the choice of “tools,” as he expressed himself; and it was further stipulated that the utmost secrecy should be observed, as Fitzgerald would incur great risk from the violence of the peasantry, in case the affair took wind. These conditions were, of course, agreed upon by O’Connor, and M’Donough left the castle, having appointed four o’clock upon the next morning as the hour of his return, by which time it would be his business to provide everything necessary for the meeting. On his departure, O’Connor requested me to remain with him upon that evening, saying that “he could not bear to be alone with his mother.” It was to me a most painful request, but at the same time one which I could not think of refusing. I felt, however, that the difficulty at least of the task which I had to perform would be in some measure mitigated by the arrival of two relations of O’Connor upon that evening.

“It is very fortunate,” said O’Connor, whose thoughts had been running upon the same subject, “that the O’Gradys will be with us tonight; their gaiety and good-humour will relieve us from a heavy task. I trust that nothing may occur to prevent their coming.” Fervently concurring in the same wish, I accompanied O’Connor into the parlour, there to await the arrival of his mother.

God grant that I may never spend such another evening! The O’Gradys did come, but their high and noisy spirits, so far from relieving me, did but give additional gloom to the despondency, I might say the despair, which filled my heart with misery – the terrible forebodings which I could not for an instant silence, turned their laughter into discord, and seemed to mock the smiles and jests of the unconscious party. When I turned my eyes upon the mother, I thought I never had seen her look so proudly and so lovingly upon her son before – it cut me to the heart – oh, how cruelly I was deceiving her! I was a hundred times on the very point of starting up, and, at all hazards, declaring to her how matters were; but other feelings subdued my better emotions. Oh, what monsters are we made of by the fashions of the world! how are our kindlier and nobler feelings warped or destroyed by their baleful influences! I felt that it would not be honourable, that it would not be etiquette, to betray O’Connor’s secret. I sacrificed a higher and a nobler duty than I have since been called upon to perform, to the dastardly fear of bearing the unmerited censure of a world from which I was about to retire. O Fashion! thou gaudy idol, whose feet are red with the blood of human sacrifice, would I had always felt towards thee as I now do!

O’Connor was not dejected; on the contrary, he joined with loud and lively alacrity in the hilarity of the little party; but I could see in the flush of his cheek, and in the unusual brightness of his eye, all the excitement of fever – he was making an effort almost beyond his strength, but he succeeded – and when his mother rose to leave the room, it was with the impression that her son was the gayest and most light-hearted of the company. Twice or thrice she had risen with the intention of retiring, but O’Connor, with an eagerness which I alone could understand, had persuaded her to remain until the usual hour of her departure had long passed; and when at length she arose, declaring that she could not possibly stay longer, I alone could comprehend the desolate change which passed over his manner; and when I saw them part, it was with the sickening conviction that those two beings, so dear to one another, so loved, so cherished, should meet no more.

O’Connor briefly informed his cousins of the position in which he was placed, requesting them at the same time to accompany him to the field, and this having been settled, we separated, each to his own apartment. I had wished to sit up with O’Connor, who had matters to arrange sufficient to employ him until the hour appointed for M’Donough’s visit; but he would not hear of it, and I was forced, though sorely against my will, to leave him without a companion. I went to my room, and, in a state of excitement which I cannot describe, I paced for hours up and down its narrow precincts. I could not – who could? – analyse the strange, contradictory, torturing feelings which, while I recoiled in shrinking horror from the scene which the morning was to bring, yet forced me to wish the intervening time annihilated; each hour that the clock told seemed to vibrate and tinkle through every nerve; my agitation was dreadful; fancy conjured up the forms of those who filled my thoughts with more than the vividness of reality; things seemed to glide through the dusky shadows of the room. I saw the dreaded form of Fitzgerald – I heard the hated laugh of the captain – and again the features of O’Connor would appear before me, with ghastly distinctness, pale and writhed in death, the gouts of gore clotted in the mouth, and the eyeballs glared and staring. Scared with the visions which seemed to throng with unceasing rapidity and vividness, I threw open the window and looked out upon the quiet scene around. I turned my eyes in the direction of the town; a heavy cloud was lowering darkly about it, and I, in impious frenzy, prayed to God that it might burst in avenging fires upon the murderous wretch who lay beneath. At length, sick and giddy with excess of excitement, I threw myself upon the bed without removing my clothes, and endeavoured to compose myself so far as to remain quiet until the hour for our assembling should arrive.

A few minutes before four o’clock I stole noiselessly downstairs, and made my way to the small study already mentioned. A candle was burning within; and, when I opened the door, O’Connor was reading a book, which, on seeing me, he hastily closed, colouring slightly as he did so. We exchanged a cordial but mournful greeting; and after a slight pause he said, laying his hand upon the volume which he had shut a moment before:

“Purcell, I feel perfectly calm, though I cannot say that I have much hope as to the issue of this morning’s rencounter. I shall avoid half the danger. If I must fall, I am determined I shall not go down to the grave with his blood upon my hands. I have resolved not to fire at Fitzgerald – that is, to fire in such a direction as to assure myself against hitting him. Do not say a word of this to the O’Gradys. Your doing so would only produce fruitless altercation; they could not understand my motives. I feel convinced that I shall not leave the field alive. If I must die today, I shall avoid an awful aggravation of wretchedness. Purcell,” he continued, after a little space, “I was so weak as to feel almost ashamed of the manner in which I was occupied as you entered the room. Yes, I – I who will be, before this evening, a cold and lifeless clod, was ashamed to have spent my last moment of reflection in prayer. God pardon me! God pardon me!” he repeated.

I took his hand and pressed it, but I could not speak. I sought for words of comfort, but they would not come. To have uttered one cheering sentence I must have contradicted every impression of my own mind. I felt too much awed to attempt it. Shortly afterwards, M’Donough arrived. No wretched patient ever underwent a more thrilling revulsion at the first sight of the case of surgical instruments under which he had to suffer, than did I upon beholding a certain oblong flat mahogany box, bound with brass, and of about two feet in length, laid upon the table in the hall. O’Connor, thanking him for his punctuality, requested him to come into his study for a moment, when, with a melancholy collectedness, he proceeded to make arrangements for our witnessing his will. The document was a brief one, and the whole matter was just arranged, when the two O’Gradys crept softly into the room.

“So! last will and testament,” said the elder. “Why, you have a very blue notion of these matters. I tell you, you need not be uneasy. I remember very well, when young Ryan of Ballykealey met M’Neil the duellist, bets ran twenty to one against him. I stole away from school, and had a peep at the fun as well as the best of them. They fired together. Ryan received the ball through the collar of his coat, and M’Neil in the temple; he spun like a top: it was a most unexpected thing, and disappointed his friends damnably. It was admitted, however, to have been very pretty shooting upon both sides. To be sure,” he continued, pointing to the will, “you are in the right to keep upon the safe side of fortune; but then, there is no occasion to be altogether so devilish down in the mouth as you appear to be.”

“You will allow,” said O’Connor, “that the chances are heavily against me.”

“Why, let me see,” he replied, “not so hollow a thing, either. Let me see, we’ll say about four to one against you; you may chance to throw doublets like him I told you of, and then what becomes of the odds I’d like to know? But let things go as they will, I’ll give and take four to one, in pounds and tens of pounds. There, M’Donough, there’s a get for you; damn me, if it is not. Poh! the fellow is stolen away,” he continued, observing that the object of his proposal had left the room; “but damn it, Purcell, you are fond of a soft thing, too, in a quiet way – I’m sure you are – so curse me if I do not make you the same offer – is it a go?”

I was too much disgusted to make any reply, but I believe my looks expressed my feelings sufficiently, for in a moment he said:

“Well, I see there is nothing to be done, so we may as well be stirring. M’Donough, myself, and my brother will saddle the horses in a jiffy, while you and Purcell settle anything which remains to be arranged.”

So saying, he left the room with as much alacrity as if it were to prepare for a foxhunt. Selfish, heartless fool! I have often since heard him spoken of as a cursed good-natured dog and a damn good fellow; but such eulogies as these are not calculated to mitigate the abhorrence with which his conduct upon that morning inspired me.

The chill mists of night were still hovering on the landscape as our party left the castle. It was a raw, comfortless morning – a kind of drizzling fog hung heavily over the scene, dimming the light of the sun, which had now risen, into a pale and even a grey glimmer. As the appointed hour was fast approaching, it was proposed that we should enter the race-ground at a point close to the stand-house – a measure which would save us a ride of nearly two miles, over a broken road; at which distance there was an open entrance into the race-ground. Here, accordingly, we dismounted, and leaving our horses in the care of a country fellow who happened to be stirring at that early hour, we proceeded up a narrow lane, over a side wall of which we were to climb into the open ground where stood the now deserted building, under which the meeting was to take place.

Our progress was intercepted by the unexpected appearance of an old woman, who, in the scarlet cloak which is the picturesque characteristic of the female peasantry of the south, was moving slowly down the avenue to meet us, uttering that peculiarly wild and piteous lamentation well known by the name of “the Irish cry,” accompanied throughout by all the customary gesticulation of passionate grief. This rencounter was more awkward than we had at first anticipated; for, upon a nearer approach, the person proved to be no other than an old attached dependent of the family, and who had herself nursed O’Connor. She quickened her pace as we advanced almost to a run; and, throwing her arms round O’Connor’s neck, she poured forth such a torrent of lamentation, reproach, and endearment, as showed that she was aware of the nature of our purpose, whence and by what means I knew not. It was in vain that he sought to satisfy her by evasion, and gently to extricate himself from her embrace. She knelt upon the ground, and clasped her arms round his legs, uttering all the while such touching supplications, such cutting and passionate expressions of woe, as went to my very heart.

At length, with much difficulty, we passed this most painful interruption; and, crossing the boundary wall, were placed beyond her reach. The O’Gradys damned her for a troublesome hag, and passed on with O’Connor, but I remained behind for a moment. The poor woman looked hopelessly at the high wall which separated her from him she had loved from infancy, and to be with whom at that minute she would have given worlds, she took her seat upon a solitary stone under the opposite wall, and there, in a low, subdued key, she continued to utter her sorrow in words so desolate, yet expressing such a tenderness of devotion as wrung my heart.

“My poor woman,” I said, laying my hand gently upon her shoulder, “you will make yourself ill; the morning is very cold, and your cloak is but a thin defence against the damp and chill. Pray return home and take this; it may be useful to you.”

So saying, I dropped a purse, with what money I had about me, into her lap, but it lay there unheeded; she did not hear me.

“Oh I my child, my child, my darlin’,” she sobbed, “are you gone from me? are you gone from me? Ah, mavourneen, mavourneen, you’ll never come back alive to me again. The crathur that slept on my bosom – the lovin’ crathur that I was so proud of – they’ll kill him, they’ll kill him. Oh, voh! voh!”

The affecting tone, the feeling, the abandonment with which all this was uttered, none can conceive who have not heard the lamentations of the Irish peasantry. It brought tears to my eyes. I saw that no consolation of mine could soothe her grief, so I turned and departed; but as I rapidly traversed the level sward which separated me from my companions, now considerably in advance, I could still hear the wailings of the solitary mourner.

As we approached the stand-house, it was evident that our antagonists had already arrived. Our path lay by the side of a high fence constructed of loose stones, and on turning a sharp angle at its extremity, we found ourselves close to the appointed spot, and within a few yards of a crowd of persons, some mounted and some on foot, evidently awaiting our arrival. The affair had unaccountably taken wind, as the number of the expectants clearly showed; but for this there was now no remedy.

As our little party advanced we were met and saluted by several acquaintances, whom curiosity, if no deeper feeling, had brought to the place. Fitzgerald and the Captain had arrived, and having dismounted, were standing upon the sod. The former, as we approached, bowed slightly and sullenly – while the latter, evidently in high good humour, made his most courteous obeisance. No time was to be lost; and the two seconds immediately withdrew to a slight distance, for the purpose of completing the last minute arrangements. It was a brief but horrible interval – each returned to his principal to communicate the result, which was soon caught up and repeated from mouth to mouth throughout the crowd. I felt a strange and insurmountable reluctance to hear the sickening particulars detailed; and as I stood irresolute at some distance from the principal parties, a topbooted squireen, with a hunting whip in his hand, bustling up to a companion of his, exclaimed:

“Not fire together! – did you ever hear the like? If Fitzgerald gets the first shot all is over. M’Donough sold the pass, by God, and that is the long and the short of it.”

The parties now moved down a little to a small level space, suited to the purpose; and the captain, addressing M’Donough, said:

“Mr. M’Donough, you’ll now have the goodness to toss for choice of ground; as the light comes from the east the line must of course run north and south. Will you be so obliging as to toss up a crown-piece, while I call?”

A coin was instantly chucked into the air. The captain cried, “Harp.” The head was uppermost, and M’Donough immediately made choice of the southern point at which to place his friend – a position which it will be easily seen had the advantage of turning his back upon the light – no trifling superiority of location. The captain turned with a kind of laugh, and said:

“By God, sir, you are as cunning as a dead pig; but you forgot one thing. My friend is a left-handed gunner, though never a bit the worse for that; so you see there is no odds as far as the choice of light goes.”

He then proceeded to measure nine paces in a direction running north and south, and the principals took their ground.

“I must be troublesome to you once again, Mr. M’Donough. One toss more, and everything is complete. We must settle who is to have the first slap.”

A piece of money was again thrown into the air; again the captain lost the toss and M’Donough proceeded to load the pistols. I happened to stand near Fitzgerald, and I overheard the captain, with a chuckle, say something to him in which the word “cravat” was repeated. It instantly occurred to me that the captain’s attention was directed to a bright-coloured muffler which O’Connor wore round his neck, and which would afford his antagonist a distinct and favourable mark. I instantly urged him to remove it, and at length, with difficulty, succeeded. He seemed perfectly careless as to any precaution. Everything was now ready; the pistol was placed in O’Connor’s hand, and he only awaited the word from the captain.

M’Creagh then said:

“Mr. M’Donough, is your principal ready?”

M’Donough replied in the affirmative; and, after a slight pause, the captain, as had been arranged, uttered the words:

“Ready – fire.”

O’Connor fired, but so wide of the mark that someone in the crowd exclaimed:

“Fired in the air.”

“Who says he fired in the air?” thundered Fitzgerald. “By God, he lies, whoever he is.” There was a silence. “But even if he was fool enough to fire in the air, it is not in his power to put an end to the quarrel by that. Damn my soul, if I am come here to be played with like a child, and by the Almighty God you shall hear more of this, each and every one of you, before I’m satisfied.”

A kind of low murmur, or rather groan, was now raised, and a slight motion was observable in the crowd, as if to intercept Fitzgerald’s passage to his horse. M’Creagh, drawing the horse close to the spot where Fitzgerald stood, threatened, with the most awful imprecations, “to blow the brains out of the first man who should dare to press on them.”

O’Connor now interfered, requesting the crowd to forbear, and some degree of order was restored. He then said, “that in firing as he did, he had no intention whatever of waiving his right of firing upon Fitzgerald, and of depriving that gentleman of his right of prosecuting the affair to the utmost – that if any person present imagined that he intended to fire in the air, he begged to set him right; since, so far from seeking to exhort an unwilling reconciliation, he was determined that no power on earth should induce him to concede one inch of ground to Mr. Fitzgerald.”

This announcement was received with a shout by the crowd, who now resumed their places at either side of the plot of ground which had been measured. The principals took their places once more, and M’Creagh proceeded, with the nicest and most anxious care, to load the pistols; and this task being accomplished, Fitzgerald whispered something in the Captain’s ear, who instantly drew his friend’s horse so as to place him within a step of his rider, and then tightened the girths. This accomplished, Fitzgerald proceeded deliberately to remove his coat, which he threw across his horse in front of the saddle; and then, with the assistance of M’Creagh, he rolled the shirt sleeve up to the shoulder, so as to leave the whole of his muscular arm perfectly naked. A cry of “Coward, coward! butcher, butcher!” arose from the crowd. Fitzgerald paused.

“Do you object, Mr. M’Donough? and upon what grounds, if you please?” said he.

“Certainly he does not,” replied O’Connor; and, turning to M’Donough, he added, “pray let there be no unnecessary delay.”

“There is no objection, then,” said Fitzgerald.

“I object,” said the younger of the O’Gradys, “if nobody else will.”

“And who the devil are you, that dares to object?” shouted Fitzgerald; “and what damned presumption prompts you to dare to wag your tongue here?”

“I am Mr. O’Grady, of Castle Blake,” replied the young man, now much enraged; “and by God, you shall answer for your language to me.”

“Shall I, by God? Shall I?” cried he, with a laugh of brutal scorn; “the more the merrier, damn the doubt of it – so now hold your tongue, for I promise you you shall have business enough of your own to think about, and that before long.”

There was an appalling ferocity in his tone and manner which no words could convey. He seemed transformed; he was actually like a man possessed. Was it possible, I thought, that I beheld the courteous gentleman, the gay, good-humoured retailer of amusing anecdote with whom, scarce two days ago, I had laughed and chatted, in the blasphemous and murderous ruffian who glared and stormed before me!

O’Connor interposed, and requested that time should not be unnecessarily lost.

“You have not got a second coat on?” inquired the Captain. “I beg pardon, but my duty to my friend requires that I should ascertain the point.”

O’Connor replied in the negative. The Captain expressed himself as satisfied, adding, in what he meant to be a complimentary strain, “that he knew Mr. O’Connor would scorn to employ padding or any unfair mode of protection.”

There was now a breathless silence. O’Connor stood perfectly motionless; and, excepting the deathlike paleness of his features, he exhibited no sign of agitation. His eye was steady – his lip did not tremble – his attitude was calm. The Captain, having re-examined the priming of the pistols, placed one of them in the hand of Fitzgerald. – M’Donough inquired whether the parties were prepared, and having been answered in the affirmative, he proceeded to give the word, “Ready.” Fitzgerald raised his hand, but almost instantly lowered it again. The crowd had pressed too much forward as it appeared, and his eye had been unsteadied by the flapping of the skirt of a frieze riding-coat worn by one of the spectators.

“In the name of my principal,” said the Captain, “I must and do insist upon these gentlemen moving back a little. We ask but little; fair play, and no favour.”

The crowd moved as requested. M’Donough repeated his former question, and was answered as before. There was a breathless silence. Fitzgerald fixed his eye upon O’Connor. The appointed signal, “Ready, fire!” was given. There was a pause while one might slowly reckon three – Fitzgerald fired – and O’Connor fell helplessly upon the ground.

“There is no time to be lost,” said M’Creagh; “for, by God, you have done for him.”

So saying, he threw himself upon his horse, and was instantly followed at a hard gallop by Fitzgerald.

“Cold-blooded murder, if ever murder was committed,” said O’Grady. “He shall hang for it; damn me, but he shall.”

A hopeless attempt was made to overtake the fugitives; but they were better mounted than any of their pursuers, and escaped with ease. Curses and actual yells of execration followed their course; and as, in crossing the brow of a neighbouring hill, they turned round in the saddle to observe if they were pursued, every gesture which could express fury and defiance was exhausted by the enraged and defeated multitude.

“Clear the way, boys,” said young O’Grady, who with me was kneeling beside O’Connor, while we supported him in our arms; “do not press so close, and be damned; can’t you let the fresh air to him; don’t you see he’s dying?”

On opening his waistcoat we easily detected the wound: it was a little below the chest – a small blue mark, from which oozed a single heavy drop of blood.

“He is bleeding but little – that is a comfort at all events,” said one of the gentlemen who surrounded the wounded man.

Another suggested the expediency of his being removed homeward with as little delay as possible, and recommended, for this purpose, that a door should be removed from its hinges, and the patient, laid upon this, should be conveyed from the field. Upon this rude bier my poor friend was carried from that fatal ground towards Castle Connor. I walked close by his side, and observed every motion of his. He seldom opened his eyes, and was perfectly still, excepting a nervous working of the fingers, and a slight, almost imperceptible twitching of the features, which took place, however, only at intervals. The first word he uttered was spoken as we approached the entrance of the castle itself, when he said; repeatedly, “The back way, the back way.” He feared lest his mother should meet him abruptly and without preparation; but although this fear was groundless, since she never left her room until late in the day, yet it was thought advisable, and, indeed, necessary, to caution all the servants most strongly against breathing a hint to their mistress of the events which had befallen.

Two or three gentlemen had ridden from the field one after another, promising that they should overtake our party before it reached the castle, bringing with them medical aid from one quarter or another; and we determined that Mrs. O’Connor should not know anything of the occurrence until the opinion of some professional man should have determined the extent of the injury which her son had sustained – a course of conduct which would at least have the effect of relieving her from the horrors of suspense. When O’Connor found himself in his own room, and laid upon his own bed, he appeared much revived – so much so, that I could not help admitting a strong hope that all might yet be well.

“After all, Purcell,” said he, with a melancholy smile, and speaking with evident difficulty, “I believe I have got off with a trifling wound. I am sure it cannot be fatal I feel so little pain – almost none.”

I cautioned him against fatiguing himself by endeavouring to speak; and he remained quiet for a little time. At length he said:

“Purcell, I trust this lesson shall not have been given in vain. God has been very merciful to me; I feel – I have an internal confidence that I am not wounded mortally. Had I been fatally wounded – had I been killed upon the spot, only think on it” – and he closed his eyes as if the very thought made him dizzy – “struck down into the grave, unprepared as I am, in the very blossom of my sins, without a moment of repentance or of reflection; I must have been lost – lost for ever and ever.”

I prevailed upon him, with some difficulty, to abstain from such agitating reflections, and at length induced him to court such repose as his condition admitted of, by remaining perfectly silent, and as much as possible without motion.

O’Connor and I only were in the room; he had lain for some time in tolerable quiet, when I thought I distinguished the bustle attendant upon the arrival of someone at the castle, and went eagerly to the window, believing, or at least hoping, that the sounds might announce the approach of the medical man, whom we all longed most impatiently to see.

My conjecture was right; I had the satisfaction of seeing him dismount and prepare to enter the castle, when my observations were interrupted, and my attention was attracted by a smothered, gurgling sound proceeding from the bed in which lay the wounded man. I instantly turned round, and in doing so the spectacle which met my eyes was sufficiently shocking.

I had left O’Connor lying in the bed, supported by pillows, perfectly calm, and with his eyes closed: he was now lying nearly in the same position, his eyes open and almost starting from their sockets, with every feature pale and distorted as death, and vomiting blood in quantities that were frightful. I rushed to the door and called for assistance; the paroxysm, though violent, was brief, and O’Connor sank into a swoon so deep and deathlike, that I feared he should waken no more.

The surgeon, a little, fussy man, but I believe with some skill to justify his pretensions, now entered the room, carrying his case of instruments, and followed by servants bearing basins and water and bandages of linen. He relieved our doubts by instantly assuring us that “the patient” was still living; and at the same time professed his determination to take advantage of the muscular relaxation which the faint had induced to examine the wound – adding that a patient was more easily “handled” when in a swoon than under other circumstances.

After examining the wound in front where the ball had entered, he passed his hand round beneath the shoulder, and after a little pause he shook his head, observing that he feared very much that one of the vertebrae was fatally injured, but that he could not say decidedly until his patient should revive a little. Though his language was very technical, and consequently to me nearly unintelligible, I could perceive plainly by his manner that he considered the case as almost hopeless.

O’Connor gradually gave some signs of returning animation, and at length was so far restored as to be enabled to speak. After some few general questions as to how he felt affected, etc., etc., the surgeon, placing his hand upon his leg and pressing it slightly, asked him if he felt any pressure upon the limb? O’Connor answered in the negative – he pressed harder, and repeated the question; still the answer was the same, till at length, by repeated experiments, he ascertained that all that part of the body which lay behind the wound was paralysed, proving that the spine must have received some fatal injury.

“Well, doctor,” said O’Connor, after the examination of the wound was over; “well, I shall do, shan’t I?”

The physician was silent for a moment, and then, as if with an effort, he replied:

“Indeed, my dear sir, it would not be honest to flatter you with much hope.”

“Eh?” said O’Connor with more alacrity than I had seen him exhibit since the morning; “surely I did not hear you aright; I spoke of my recovery – surely there is no doubt; there can be none – speak frankly, doctor, for God’s sake – am I dying?”

The surgeon was evidently no stoic, and his manner had extinguished in me every hope, even before he had uttered a word in reply.

“You are – you are indeed dying. There is no hope; I should but deceive you if I held out any.”

As the surgeon uttered these terrible words, the hands which O’Connor had stretched towards him while awaiting his reply fell powerless by his side; his head sank forward; it seemed as if horror and despair had unstrung every nerve and sinew; he appeared to collapse and shrink together as a plant might under the influence of a withering spell.

It has often been my fate, since then, to visit the chambers of death and of suffering; I have witnessed fearful agonies of body and of soul; the mysterious shudderings of the departing spirit, and the heart-rending desolation of the survivors; the severing of the tenderest ties, the piteous yearnings of unavailing love – of all these things the sad duties of my profession have made me a witness. But, generally speaking, I have observed in such scenes something to mitigate, if not the sorrows, at least the terrors, of death; the dying man seldom seems to feel the reality of his situation; a dull consciousness of approaching dissolution, a dim anticipation of unconsciousness and insensibility, are the feelings which most nearly border upon an appreciation of his state; the film of death seems to have overspread the mind’s eye, objects lose their distinctness, and float cloudily before it, and the apathy and apparent indifference with which men recognise the sure advances of immediate death, rob that awful hour of much of its terrors, and the deathbed of its otherwise inevitable agonies.

This is a merciful dispensation; but the rule has its exceptions – its terrible exceptions. When a man is brought in an instant, by some sudden accident, to the very verge of the fathomless pit of death, with all his recollections awake, and his perceptions keenly and vividly alive, without previous illness to subdue the tone of the mind as to dull its apprehensions – then, and then only, the deathbed is truly terrible.

Oh, what a contrast did O’Connor afford as he lay in all the abject helplessness of undisguised terror upon his deathbed, to the proud composure with which he had taken the field that morning. I had always before thought of death as of a quiet sleep stealing gradually upon exhausted nature, made welcome by suffering, or, at least, softened by resignation; I had never before stood by the side of one upon whom the hand of death had been thus suddenly laid; I had never seen the tyrant arrayed in his terror till then. Never before or since have I seen horror so intensely depicted. It seemed actually as if O’Connor’s mind had been unsettled by the shock; the few words he uttered were marked with all the incoherence of distraction; but it was not words that marked his despair most strongly, the appalling and heart-sickening groans that came from the terror-stricken and dying man must haunt me while I live; the expression, too, of hopeless, imploring agony with which he turned his eyes from object to object, I can never forget. At length, appearing suddenly to recollect himself, he said, with startling alertness, but in a voice so altered that I scarce could recognise the tones:

“Purcell, Purcell, go and tell my poor mother; she must know all, and then, quick, quick, quick, call your uncle, bring him here; I must have a chance.” He made a violent but fruitless effort to rise, and after a slight pause continued, with deep and urgent solemnity: “Doctor, how long shall I live? Don’t flatter me. Compliments at a deathbed are out of place; doctor, for God’s sake, as you would not have my soul perish with my body, do not mock a dying man; have I an hour to live?”

“Certainly,” replied the surgeon; “if you will but endeavour to keep yourself tranquil; otherwise I cannot answer for a moment.”

“Well, doctor,” said the patient, “I will obey you; now, Purcell, my first and dearest friend, will you inform my poor mother of – of what you see, and return with your uncle; I know you will.”

I took the dear fellow’s hand and kissed it, it was the only answer I could give, and left the room. I asked the first female servant I chanced to meet, if her mistress were yet up, and was answered in the affirmative. Without giving myself time to hesitate, I requested her to lead me to her lady’s room, which she accordingly did; she entered first, I supposed to announce my name, and I followed closely; the poor mother said something, and held out her hands to welcome me; I strove for words; I could not speak, but nature found expression; I threw myself at her feet and covered her hands with kisses and tears. My manner was enough; with a quickness almost preternatural she understood it all; she simply said the words: “O’Connor is killed;” she uttered no more.

How I left the room I know not; I rode madly to my uncle’s residence, and brought him back with me – all the rest is a blank. I remember standing by O’Connor’s bedside, and kissing the cold pallid forehead again and again; I remember the pale serenity of the beautiful features; I remember that I looked upon the dead face of my friend, and I remember no more.

For many months I lay writhing and raving in the frenzy of brain fever; a hundred times I stood tottering at the brink of death, and long after my restoration to bodily health was assured, it appeared doubtful whether I should ever be restored to reason. But God dealt very mercifully with me; His mighty hand rescued me from death and from madness when one or other appeared inevitable. As soon as I was permitted pen and ink, I wrote to the bereaved mother in a tone bordering upon frenzy. I accused myself of having made her childless; I called myself a murderer; I believed myself accursed; I could not find terms strong enough to express my abhorrence of my own conduct. But, oh! what an answer I received, so mild, so sweet, from the desolate, childless mother! its words spoke all that is beautiful in Christianity – it was forgiveness – it was resignation. I am convinced that to that letter, operating as it did upon a mind already predisposed, is owing my final determination to devote myself to that profession in which, for more than half a century, I have been a humble minister.

Years roll away, and we count them not as they pass, but their influence is not the less certain that it is silent; the deepest wounds are gradually healed, the keenest griefs are mitigated, and we, in character, feelings, tastes, and pursuits, become such altered beings, that but for some few indelible marks which past events must leave behind them, which time may soften, but can never efface; our very identity would be dubious. Who has not felt all this at one time or other? Who has not mournfully felt it? This trite, but natural train of reflection filled my mind as I approached the domain of Castle Connor some ten years after the occurrence of the events above narrated. Everything looked the same as when I had left it; the old trees stood as graceful and as grand as ever; no plough had violated the soft green sward; no utilitarian hand had constrained the wanderings of the clear and sportive stream, or disturbed the lichen-covered rocks through which it gushed, or the wild coppice that overshadowed its sequestered nooks – but the eye that looked upon these things was altered, and memory was busy with other days, shrouding in sadness every beauty that met my sight.

As I approached the castle my emotions became so acutely painful that I had almost returned the way I came, without accomplishing the purpose for which I had gone thus far; and nothing but the conviction that my having been in the neighbourhood of Castle Connor without visiting its desolate mistress would render me justly liable to the severest censure, could overcome my reluctance to encountering the heavy task which was before me. I recognised the old servant who opened the door, but he did not know me. I was completely changed; suffering of body and mind had altered me in feature and in bearing, as much as in character. I asked the man whether his mistress ever saw visitors. He answered:

“But seldom; perhaps, however, if she knew that an old friend wished to see her for a few minutes, she would gratify him so far.”

At the same time I placed my card in his hand, and requested him to deliver it to his mistress. He returned in a few moments, saying that his lady would be happy to see me in the parlour, and I accordingly followed him to the door, which he opened. I entered the room, and was in a moment at the side of my early friend and benefactress. I was too much agitated to speak; I could only hold the hands which she gave me, while, spite of every effort, the tears flowed fast and bitterly.

“It was kind, very, very kind of you to come to see me,” she said, with far more composure than I could have commanded; “I see it is very painful to you.”

I endeavoured to compose myself, and for a little time we remained silent; she was the first to speak:

“You will be surprised, Mr. Purcell, when you observe the calmness with which I can speak of him who was dearest to me, who is gone; but my thoughts are always with him, and the recollections of his love” – her voice faltered a little – “and the hope of meeting him hereafter enables me to bear existence.”

I said I know not what; something about resignation, I believe.

“I hope I am resigned; God made me more: so,” she said. “Oh, Mr. Purcell, I have often thought I loved my lost child too well. It was natural – he was my only child – he was—” She could not proceed for a few moments: “It was very natural that I should love him as I did; but it may have been sinful; I have often thought so. I doated upon him – I idolised him – I thought too little of other holier affections; and God may have taken him from me, only to teach me, by this severe lesson, that I owed to heaven a larger share of my heart than to anything earthly. I cannot think of him now without more solemn feelings than if he were with me. There is something holy in our thoughts of the dead; I feel it so.” After a pause, she continued – “Mr. Purcell, do you remember his features well? they were very beautiful.” I assured her that I did. “Then you can tell me if you think this a faithful likeness.” She took from a drawer a case in which lay a miniature. I took it reverently from her hands; it was indeed very like – touchingly like. I told her so; and she seemed gratified.

As the evening was wearing fast, and I had far to go, I hastened to terminate my visit, as I had intended, by placing in her hand a letter from her son to me, written during his sojourn upon the Continent. I requested her to keep it; it was one in which he spoke much of her, and in terms of the tenderest affection. As she read its contents the heavy tears gathered in her eyes, and fell, one by one, upon the page; she wiped them away, but they still flowed fast and silently. It was in vain that she tried to read it; her eyes were filled with tears: so she folded the letter, and placed it in her bosom. I rose to depart, and she also rose.

“I will not ask you to delay your departure,” said she; “your visit here must have been a painful one to you. I cannot find words to thank you for the letter as I would wish, or for all your kindness. It has given me a pleasure greater than I thought could have fallen to the lot of a creature so very desolate as I am; may God bless you for it!” And thus we parted; I never saw Castle Connor or its solitary inmate more.

“Dublin University Magazine”, Jun. 1838

The Purcell Papers: Volume I (1880)

THE BRIDAL OF CARRIGVARAH

(1839)

In a sequestered district of the county of Limerick, there stood my early life, some forty years ago, one of those strong stone buildings, half castle, half farmhouse, which are not unfrequent in the South of Ireland, and whose solid masonry and massive construction seem to prove at once the insecurity and the caution of the Cromwellite settlers who erected them. At the time of which I speak, this building was tenanted by an elderly man, whose starch and puritanic mien and manners might have become the morose preaching parliamentarian captain, who had raised the house and ruled the household more than a hundred years before; but this man, though Protestant by descent as by name, was not so in religion; he was a strict, and in outward observances, an exemplary Catholic; his father had returned in early youth to the true faith, and died in the bosom of the church.

Martin Heathcote was, at the time of which I speak, a widower, but his housekeeping was not on that account altogether solitary, for he had a daughter, whose age was now sufficiently advanced to warrant her father in imposing upon her the grave duties of domestic superintendence.

This little establishment was perfectly isolated, and very little intruded upon by acts of neighbourhood; for the rank of its occupants was of that equivocal kind which precludes all familiar association with those of a decidedly inferior rank, while it is not sufficient to entitle its possessors to the society of established gentility, among whom the nearest residents were the O’Maras of Carrigvarah, whose mansion-house, constructed out of the ruins of an old abbey, whose towers and cloisters had been levelled by the shot of Cromwell’s artillery, stood not half a mile lower upon the river banks.

Colonel O’Mara, the possessor of the estates, was then in a declining state of health, and absent with his lady from the country, leaving at the castle, his son young O’Mara, and a kind of humble companion, named Edward Dwyer, who, if report belied him not, had done in his early days some peculiar services for the Colonel, who had been a gay man – perhaps worse – but enough of recapitulation.

It was in the autumn of the year 17— that the events which led to the catastrophe which I have to detail occurred. I shall run through the said recital as briefly as clearness will permit, and leave you to moralise, if such be your mood, upon the story of real life, which I even now trace at this distant period not without emotion.

It was upon a beautiful autumn evening, at that glad period of the season when the harvest yields its abundance, that two figures were seen sauntering along the banks of the winding river, which I described as bounding the farm occupied by Heathcote; they had been, as the rods and landing-nets which they listlessly carried went to show, plying the gentle, but in this case not altogether solitary craft of the fisherman. One of those persons was a tall and singularly handsome young man, whose dark hair and complexion might almost have belonged to a Spaniard, as might also the proud but melancholy expression which gave to his countenance a character which contrasts sadly, but not uninterestingly, with extreme youth; his air, as he spoke with his companion, was marked by that careless familiarity which denotes a conscious superiority of one kind or other, or which may be construed into a species of contempt; his comrade afforded to him in every respect a striking contrast. He was rather low in stature – a defect which was enhanced by a broad and square-built figure – his face was sallow, and his features had that prominence and sharpness which frequently accompany personal deformity – a remarkably wide mouth, with teeth white as the fangs of a wolf, and a pair of quick, dark eyes, whose effect was heightened by the shadow of a heavy black brow, gave to his face a power of expression, particularly when sarcastic or malignant emotions were to be exhibited, which features regularly handsome could scarcely have possessed.

“Well, sir,” said the latter personage, “I have lived in hall and abbey, town and country, here and abroad for forty years and more, and should know a thing or two, and as I am a living man, I swear I think the girl loves you.”

“You are a fool, Ned,” said the younger.

“I may be a fool,” replied the first speaker, “in matters where my own advantage is staked, but my eye is keen enough to see through the flimsy disguise of a country damsel at a glance; and I tell you, as surely as I hold this rod, the girl loves you.”

“Oh I this is downright headstrong folly,” replied the young fisherman. “Why, Ned, you try to persuade me against my reason, that the event which is most to be deprecated has actually occurred. She is, no doubt, a pretty girl – a beautiful girl – but I have not lost my heart to her; and why should I wish her to be in love with me? Tush, man, the days of romance are gone, and a young gentleman may talk, and walk, and laugh with a pretty country maiden, and never breathe aspirations, or vows, or sighs about the matter; unequal matches are much oftener read of than made, and the man who could, even in thought, conceive a wish against the honour of an unsuspecting, artless girl, is a villain, for whom hanging is too good.”

This concluding sentence was uttered with an animation and excitement, which the mere announcement of an abstract moral sentiment could hardly account for.

“You are, then, indifferent, honestly and in sober earnest, indifferent to the girl?” inquired Dwyer.

“Altogether so,” was the reply.

“Then I have a request to make,” continued Dwyer, “and I may as well urge it now as at any other time. I have been for nearly twenty years the faithful, and by no means useless, servant of your family; you know that I have rendered your father critical and important services—” he paused, and added hastily: “you are not in the mood – I tire you, sir.”

“Nay,” cried O’Mara, “I listen patiently – proceed.”

“For all these services, and they were not, as I have said, few or valueless, I have received little more reward than liberal promises; you have told me often that this should be mended – I’ll make it easily done – I’m not unreasonable – I should be contented to hold Heathcote’s ground, along with this small farm on which we stand, as full quittance of all obligations and promises between us.”

“But how the devil can I effect that for you; this farm, it is true, I, or my father, rather, may lease to you, but Heathcote’s title we cannot impugn; and even if we could, you would not expect us to ruin an honest man, in order to make way for you, Ned.”

“What I am,” replied Dwyer, with the calmness of one who is so accustomed to contemptuous insinuations as to receive them with perfect indifference, “is to be attributed to my devotedness to your honourable family – but that is neither here nor there. I do not ask you to displace Heathcote, in order to made room for me. I know it is out of your power to do so. Now hearken to me for a moment; Heathcote’s property, that which he has set out to tenants, is worth, say in rents, at most, one hundred pounds: half of this yearly amount is assigned to your father, until payment be made of a bond for a thousand pounds, with interest and so-forth. Hear me patiently for a moment and I have done. Now go you to Heathcote, and tell him your father will burn the bond, and cancel the debt, upon one condition – that when I am in possession of this farm, which you can lease to me on what terms you think suitable, he will convey over his property to me, reserving what life-interest may appear fair, I engaging at the same time to marry his daughter, and make such settlements upon her as shall be thought fitting – he is not a fool – the man will close with the offer.”

O’Mara turned shortly upon Dwyer, and gazed upon him for a moment with an expression of almost unmixed resentment.

“How,” said he at length, “you contract to marry Ellen Heathcote? the poor, innocent, confiding, light-hearted girl. No, no, Edward Dwyer, I know you too well for that – your services, be they what they will, must not, shall not go unrewarded – your avarice shall be appeased – but not with a human sacrifice! Dwyer, I speak to you without disguise; you know me to be acquainted with your history, and what’s more, with your character. Now tell me frankly, were I to do as you desire me, in cool blood, should I not prove myself a more uncompromising and unfeeling villain than humanity even in its most monstrous shapes has ever yet given birth to?”

Dwyer met this impetuous language with the unmoved and impenetrable calmness which always marked him when excitement would have appeared in others; he even smiled as he replied: (and Dwyer’s smile, for I have seen it, was characteristically of that unfortunate kind which implies, as regards the emotions of others, not sympathy but derision).

“This eloquence goes to prove Ellen Heathcote something nearer to your heart than your great indifference would have led me to suppose.”

There was something in the tone, perhaps in the truth of the insinuation, which at once kindled the quick pride and the anger of O’Mara, and he instantly replied:

“Be silent, sir, this is insolent folly.”

Whether it was that Dwyer was more keenly interested in the success of his suit, or more deeply disappointed at its failure than he cared to express, or that he was in a less complacent mood than was his wont, it is certain that his countenance expressed more emotion at this direct insult than it had ever exhibited before under similar circumstances; for his eyes gleamed for an instant with savage and undisguised ferocity upon the young man, and a dark glow crossed his brow, and for the moment he looked about to spring at the throat of his insolent patron; but the impulse whatever it might be, was quickly suppressed, and before O’Mara had time to detect the scowl, it had vanished.

“Nay, sir,” said Dwyer, “I meant no offence, and I will take none, at your hands at least. I will confess I care not, in love and so-forth, a single bean for the girl; she was the mere channel through which her father’s wealth, if such a pittance deserves the name, was to have flowed into my possession – ’twas in respect of your family finances the most economical provision for myself which I could devise – a matter in which you, not I, are interested. As for women, they are all pretty much alike to me. I am too old myself to make nice distinctions, and too ugly to succeed by Cupid’s arts; and when a man despairs of success, he soon ceases to care for it. So, if you know me, as you profess to do, rest satisfied ‘caeteris paribus;’ the money part of the transaction being equally advantageous, I should regret the loss of Ellen Heathcote just as little as I should the escape of a minnow from my landing-net.”

They walked on for a few minutes in silence, which was not broken till Dwyer, who had climbed a stile in order to pass a low stone wall which lay in their way, exclaimed:

“By the rood, she’s here – how like a philosopher you look.”

The conscious blood mounted to O’Mara’s cheek; he crossed the stile, and, separated from him only by a slight fence and a gate, stood the subject of their recent and somewhat angry discussion.

“God save you, Miss Heathcote,” cried Dwyer, approaching the gate.

The salutation was cheerfully returned, and before anything more could pass, O’Mara had joined the party.

My friend, that you may understand the strength and depth of those impetuous passions, that you may account for the fatal infatuation which led to the catastrophe which I have to relate, I must tell you, that though I have seen the beauties of cities and of courts, with all the splendour of studied ornament about them to enhance their graces, possessing charms which had made them known almost throughout the world, and worshipped with the incense of a thousand votaries, yet never, nowhere did I behold a being of such exquisite and touching beauty, as that possessed by the creature of whom I have just spoken. At the moment of which I write, she was standing near the gate, close to which several brown-armed, rosy-cheeked damsels were engaged in milking the peaceful cows, who stood picturesquely grouped together. She had just thrown back the hood which is the graceful characteristic of the Irish girl’s attire, so that her small and classic head was quite uncovered, save only by the dark-brown hair, which with graceful simplicity was parted above her forehead. There was nothing to shade the clearness of her beautiful complexion; the delicately-formed features, so exquisite when taken singly, so indescribable when combined, so purely artless, yet so meet for all expression. She was a thing so very beautiful, you could not look on her without feeling your heart touched as by sweet music. Whose lightest action was a grace – whose lightest word a spell – no limner’s art, though ne’er so perfect, could shadow forth her beauty; and do I dare with feeble words try to make you see it? Providence is indeed no respecter of persons, its blessings and its inflictions are apportioned with an undistinguishing hand, and until the race is over, and life be done, none can know whether those perfections, which seemed its goodliest gifts, many not prove its most fatal; but enough of this.

Dwyer strolled carelessly onward by the banks of the stream, leaving his young companion leaning over the gate in close and interesting parlance with Ellen Heathcote; as he moved on, he half thought, half uttered words to this effect:

“Insolent young spawn of ingratitude and guilt, how long must I submit to be trod upon thus; and yet why should I murmur – his day is even now declining – and if I live a year, I shall see the darkness cover him and his forever. Scarce half his broad estates shall save him – but I must wait – I am but a pauper now – a beggar’s accusation is always a libel – they must reward me soon – and were I independent once, I’d make them feel my power, and feel it so, that I should die the richest or the best avenged servant of a great man that has ever been heard of – yes, I must wait – I must make sure of something at least – I must be able to stand by myself – and then – and then—” He clutched his fingers together, as if in the act of strangling the object of his hatred. “But one thing shall save him – but one thing only – he shall pay me my own price – and if he acts liberally, as no doubt he will do, upon compulsion, why he saves his reputation – perhaps his neck – the insolent young whelp yonder would speak in an humbler key if he but knew his father’s jeopardy – but all in good time.”

He now stood upon the long, steep, narrow bridge, which crossed the river close to Carrigvarah, the family mansion of the O’Maras; he looked back in the direction in which he had left his companion, and leaning upon the battlement, he ruminated long and moodily. At length he raised himself and said:

“He loves the girl, and will love her more – I have an opportunity of winning favour, of doing service, which shall bind him to me; yes, he shall have the girl, if I have art to compass the matter. I must think upon it.”

He entered the avenue and was soon lost in the distance.

Days and weeks passed on, and young O’Mara daily took his rod and net, and rambled up the river; and scarce twelve hours elapsed in which some of those accidents, which invariably bring lovers together, did not secure him a meeting of longer or shorter duration, with the beautiful girl whom he so fatally loved.

One evening, after a long interview with her, in which he had been almost irresistibly prompted to declare his love, and had all but yielded himself up to the passionate impulse, upon his arrival at home he found a letter on the table awaiting his return; it was from his father to the following effect:

To Richard O’Mara.

September, 17—,
L———m, England.

My dear son, – I have just had a severe attack of my old and almost forgotten enemy, the gout. This I regard as a good sign; the doctors telling me that it is the safest development of peccant humours; and I think my chest is less tormenting and oppressed than I have known it for some years. My chief reason for writing to you now, as I do it not without difficulty, is to let you know my pleasure in certain matters, in which I suspect some shameful, and, indeed, infatuated neglect on your part, ‘quem perdere vult deus prius dementat:’ how comes it that you have neglected to write to Lady Emily or any of that family? the understood relation subsisting between you is one of extreme delicacy, and which calls for marked and courteous, nay, devoted attention upon your side. Lord ——— is already offended; beware what you do; for as you will find, if this match be lost by your fault or folly, by God, I will cut you off with a shilling. I am not in the habit of using threats when I do not mean to fulfil them, and that you well know; however I do not think you have much real cause for alarm in this case. Lady Emily, who, by the way, looks if possible more charming than ever, is anything but hardhearted, at least when YOU solicit; but do as I desire, and lose no time in making what excuse you may, and let me hear from you when you can fix a time to join me and your mother here. “Your sincere well-wisher and father,

Richard O’Mara.

In this letter was enclosed a smaller one, directed to Dwyer, and containing a cheque for twelve pounds, with the following words:

Make use of the enclosed, and let me hear if Richard is upon any wild scheme at present: I am uneasy about him, and not without reason; report to me speedily the result of your vigilance.

R. O’Mara.

Dwyer just glanced through this brief, but not unwelcome, epistle; and deposited it and its contents in the secret recesses of his breeches pocket, and then fixed his eyes upon the face of his companion, who sat opposite, utterly absorbed in the perusal of his father’s letter, which he read again and again, pausing and muttering between whiles, and apparently lost in no very pleasing reflections. At length he very abruptly exclaimed:

“A delicate epistle, truly – and a politic – would that my tongue had been burned through before I assented to that doubly-cursed contract. Why, I am not pledged yet – I am not; there is neither writing, nor troth, nor word of honour, passed between us. My father has no right to pledge me, even though I told him I liked the girl, and would wish the match. ’Tis not enough that my father offers her my heart and hand; he has no right to do it; a delicate woman would not accept professions made by proxy. Lady Emily! Lady Emily! with all the tawdry frippery, and finery of dress and demeanour – compare her with – Pshaw! Ridiculous! How blind, how idiotic I have been.”

He relapsed into moody reflections, which Dwyer did not care to disturb, and some ten minutes might have passed before he spoke again. When he did, it was in the calm tone of one who has irrevocably resolved upon some decided and important act.

“Dwyer,” he said, rising and approaching that person, “whatever god or demon told you, even before my own heart knew it, that I loved Ellen Heathcote, spoke truth. I love her madly – I never dreamed till now how fervently, how irrevocably, I am hers – how dead to me all other interests are. Dwyer, I know something of your disposition, and you no doubt think it strange that I should tell to you, of all persons, such a secret; but whatever be your faults, I think you are attached to our family. I am satisfied you will not betray me. I know—”

“Pardon me,” said Dwyer, “if I say that great professions of confidence too frequently mark distrust. I have no possible motive to induce me to betray you; on the contrary, I would gladly assist and direct whatever plans you may have formed. Command me as you please; I have said enough.”

“I will not doubt you, Dwyer,” said O’Mara; “I have taken my resolution – I have, I think, firmness to act up to it. To marry Ellen Heathcote, situated as I am, were madness; to propose anything else were worse, were villainy not to be named. I will leave the country tomorrow, cost what pain it may, for England. I will at once break off the proposed alliance with Lady Emily, and will wait until I am my own master, to open my heart to Ellen. My father may say and do what he likes; but his passion will not last. He will forgive me; and even were he to disinherit me, as he threatens, there is some property which must descend to me, which his will cannot affect. He cannot ruin my interests; he shall not ruin my happiness. Dwyer, give me pen and ink; I will write this moment.”

This bold plan of proceeding for many reasons appeared inexpedient to Dwyer, and he determined not to consent to its adoption without a struggle.

“I commend your prudence,” said he, “in determining to remove yourself from the fascinating influence which has so long bound you here; but beware of offending your father. Colonel O’Mara is not a man to forgive an act of deliberate disobedience, and surely you are not mad enough to ruin yourself with him by offering an outrageous insult to Lady Emily and to her family in her person; therefore you must not break off the understood contract which subsists between you by any formal act – hear me out patiently. You must let Lady Emily perceive, as you easily may, without rudeness or even coldness of manner, that she is perfectly indifferent to you; and when she understands this to be the case, it she possesses either delicacy or spirit, she will herself break off the engagement. Make what delay it is possible to effect; it is very possible that your father, who cannot, in all probability, live many months, may not live as many days if harassed and excited by such scenes as your breaking off your engagement must produce.”

“Dwyer,” said O’Mara, “I will hear you out – proceed.”

“Besides, sir, remember,” he continued, “the understanding which we have termed an engagement was entered into without any direct sanction upon your part; your father has committed himself, not you, to Lord ———. Before a real contract can subsist, you must be an assenting party to it. I know of no casuistry subtle enough to involve you in any engagement whatever, without such an ingredient. Tush! you have an easy card to play.”

“Well,” said the young man, “I will think on what you have said; in the meantime, I will write to my father to announce my immediate departure, in order to join him.”

“Excuse me,” said Dwyer, “but I would suggest that by hastening your departure you but bring your dangers nearer. While you are in this country a letter now and then keeps everything quiet; but once across the Channel and with the colonel, you must either quarrel with him to your own destruction, or you must dance attendance upon Lady Emily with such assiduity as to commit yourself as completely as if you had been thrice called with her in the parish church. No, no; keep to this side of the Channel as long as you decently can. Besides, your sudden departure must appear suspicious, and will probably excite inquiry. Every good end likely to be accomplished by your absence will be effected as well by your departure for Dublin, where you may remain for three weeks or a month without giving rise to curiosity or doubt of an unpleasant kind; I would therefore advise you strongly to write immediately to the colonel, stating that business has occurred to defer your departure for a month, and you can then leave this place, if you think fit, immediately, that is, within a week or so.”

Young O’Mara was not hard to be persuaded. Perhaps it was that, unacknowledged by himself, any argument which recommended his staying, even for an hour longer than his first decision had announced, in the neighbourhood of Ellen Heathcote, appeared peculiarly cogent and convincing; however this may have been, it is certain that he followed the counsel of his cool-headed follower, who retired that night to bed with the pleasing conviction that he was likely soon to involve his young patron in all the intricacies of disguise and intrigue – a consummation which would leave him totally at the mercy of the favoured confidant who should possess his secret.

Young O’Mara’s reflections were more agitating and less satisfactory than those of his companion. He resolved upon leaving the country before two days had passed. He felt that he could not fairly seek to involve Ellen Heathcote in his fate by pledge or promise, until he had extricated himself from those trammels which constrained and embarrassed all his actions. His determination was so far prudent; but, alas! he also resolved that it was but right, but necessary, that he should see her before his departure. His leaving the country without a look or a word of parting kindness interchanged, must to her appear an act of cold and heartless caprice; he could not bear the thought.

“No,” said he, “I am not child enough to say more than prudence tells me ought to say; this cowardly distrust of my firmness I should and will contemn. Besides, why should I commit myself? It is possible the girl may not care for me. No, no; I need not shrink from this interview. I have no reason to doubt my firmness – none – none. I must cease to be governed by impulse. I am involved in rocks and quicksands; and a collected spirit, a quick eye, and a steady hand, alone can pilot me through. God grant me a safe voyage!”

The next day came, and young O’Mara did not take his fishing-rod as usual, but wrote two letters; the one to his father, announcing his intention of departing speedily for England; the other to Lady Emily, containing a cold but courteous apology for his apparent neglect. Both these were despatched to the post-office that evening, and upon the next morning he was to leave the country.

Upon the night of the momentous day of which we have just spoken, Ellen Heathcote glided silently and unperceived from among the busy crowds who were engaged in the gay dissipation furnished by what is in Ireland commonly called a dance (the expenses attendant upon which, music, etc., are defrayed by a subscription of one halfpenny each), and having drawn her mantle closely about her, was proceeding with quick steps to traverse the small field which separated her from her father’s abode. She had not walked many yards when she became aware that a solitary figure, muffled in a cloak, stood in the pathway. It approached; a low voice whispered:

“Ellen.”

“Is it you, Master Richard?” she replied.

He threw back the cloak which had concealed his features.

“It is I, Ellen,” he said; “I have been watching for you. I will not delay you long.”

He took her hand, and she did not attempt to withdraw it; for she was too artless to think any evil, too confiding to dread it.

“Ellen,” he continued, even now unconsciously departing from the rigid course which prudence had marked out; “Ellen, I am going to leave the country; going tomorrow. I have had letters from England. I must go; and the sea will soon be between us.”

He paused, and she was silent.

“There is one request, one entreaty I have to make,” he continued; “I would, when I am far away, have something to look at which belonged to you. Will you give me – do not refuse it – one little lock of your beautiful hair?”

With artless alacrity, but with trembling hand, she took the scissors, which in simple fashion hung by her side, and detached one of the long and beautiful locks which parted over her forehead. She placed it in his hand.

Again he took her hand, and twice he attempted to speak in vain; at length he said:

“Ellen, when I am gone – when I am away – will you sometimes remember, sometimes think of me?”

Ellen Heathcote had as much, perhaps more, of what is noble in pride than the haughtiest beauty that ever trod a court; but the effort was useless; the honest struggle was in vain; and she burst into floods of tears, bitterer than she had ever shed before.

I cannot tell how passions rise and fall; I cannot describe the impetuous words of the young lover, as pressing again and again to his lips the cold, passive hand, which had been resigned to him, prudence, caution, doubts, resolutions, all vanished from his view, and melted into nothing. ’Tis for me to tell the simple fact, that from that brief interview they both departed promised and pledged to each other forever.

Through the rest of this story events follow one another rapidly.

A few nights after that which I have just mentioned, Ellen Heathcote disappeared; but her father was not left long in suspense as to her fate, for Dwyer, accompanied by one of those mendicant friars who traversed the country then even more commonly than they now do, called upon Heathcote before he had had time to take any active measures for the recovery of his child, and put him in possession of a document which appeared to contain satisfactory evidence of the marriage of Ellen Heathcote with Richard O’Mara, executed upon the evening previous, as the date went to show; and signed by both parties, as well as by Dwyer and a servant of young O’Mara’s, both these having acted as witnesses; and further supported by the signature of Peter Nicholls, a brother of the order of St. Francis, by whom the ceremony had been performed, and whom Heathcote had no difficulty in recognising in the person of his visitant.

This document, and the prompt personal visit of the two men, and above all, the known identity of the Franciscan, satisfied Heathcote as fully as anything short of complete publicity could have done. And his conviction was not a mistaken one.

Dwyer, before he took his leave, impressed upon Heathcote the necessity of keeping the affair so secret as to render it impossible that it should reach Colonel O’Mara’s ears, an event which would have been attended with ruinous consequences to all parties. He refused, also, to permit Heathcote to see his daughter, and even to tell him where she was, until circumstances rendered it safe for him to visit her.

Heathcote was a harsh and sullen man; and though his temper was anything but tractable, there was so much to please, almost to dazzle him, in the event, that he accepted the terms which Dwyer imposed upon him without any further token of disapprobation than a shake of the head, and a gruff wish that “it might prove all for the best.”

Nearly two months had passed, and young O’Mara had not yet departed for England. His letters had been strangely few and far between; and in short, his conduct was such as to induce Colonel O’Mara to hasten his return to Ireland, and at the same time to press an engagement, which Lord ———, his son Captain N———, and Lady Emily had made to spend some weeks with him at his residence in Dublin.

A letter arrived for young O’Mara, stating the arrangement, and requiring his attendance in Dublin, which was accordingly immediately afforded.

He arrived, with Dwyer, in time to welcome his father and his distinguished guests. He resolved to break off his embarrassing connection with Lady Emily, without, however, stating the real motive, which he felt would exasperate the resentment which his father and Lord ——— would no doubt feel at his conduct.

He strongly felt how dishonourably he would act if, in obedience to Dwyer’s advice, he seemed tacitly to acquiesce in an engagement which it was impossible for him to fulfil. He knew that Lady Emily was not capable of anything like strong attachment; and that even if she were, he had no reason whatever to suppose that she cared at all for him.

He had not at any time desired the alliance; nor had he any reason to suppose the young lady in any degree less indifferent. He regarded it now, and not without some appearance of justice, as nothing more than a kind of understood stipulation, entered into by their parents, and to be considered rather as a matter of business and calculation than as involving anything of mutual inclination on the part of the parties most nearly interested in the matter.

He anxiously, therefore, watched for an opportunity of making known his feelings to Lord ———, as he could not with propriety do so to Lady Emily; but what at a distance appeared to be a matter of easy accomplishment, now, upon a nearer approach, and when the immediate impulse which had prompted the act had subsided, appeared so full of difficulty and almost inextricable embarrassments, that he involuntarily shrunk from the task day after day.

Though it was a source of indescribable anxiety to him, he did not venture to write to Ellen, for he could not disguise from himself the danger which the secrecy of his connection with her must incur by his communicating with her, even through a public office, where their letters might be permitted to lie longer than the gossiping inquisitiveness of a country town would warrant him in supposing safe.

It was about a fortnight after young O’Mara had arrived in Dublin, where all things, and places, and amusements; and persons seemed thoroughly stale, flat, and unprofitable, when one day, tempted by the unusual fineness of the weather, Lady Emily proposed a walk in the College Park, a favourite promenade at that time. She therefore with young O’Mara, accompanied by Dwyer (who, by-the-by, when he pleased, could act the gentleman sufficiently well), proceeded to the place proposed, where they continued to walk for some time.

“Why, Richard,” said Lady Emily, after a tedious and unbroken pause of some minutes, “you are becoming worse and worse every day. You are growing absolutely intolerable; perfectly stupid! not one good thing have I heard since I left the house.”

O’Mara smiled, and was seeking for a suitable reply, when his design was interrupted, and his attention suddenly and painfully arrested, by the appearance of two figures, who were slowly passing the broad walk on which he and his party moved; the one was that of Captain N———, the other was the form of – Martin Heathcote!

O’Mara felt confounded, almost stunned; the anticipation of some impending mischief – of an immediate and violent collision with a young man whom he had ever regarded as his friend, were apprehensions which such a juxtaposition could not fail to produce.

“Is Heathcote mad?” thought he. “What devil can have brought him here?”

Dwyer having exchanged a significant glance with O’Mara, said slightly to Lady Emily:

“Will your ladyship excuse me for a moment? I have a word to say to Captain N———, and will, with your permission, immediately rejoin you.”

He bowed, and walking rapidly on, was in a few moments beside the object of his and his patron’s uneasiness.

Whatever Heathcote’s object might be, he certainly had not yet declared the secret, whose safety O’Mara had so naturally desired, for Captain N——— appeared in good spirits; and on coming up to his sister and her companion, he joined them for a moment, telling O’Mara, laughingly, that an old quiz had come from the country for the express purpose of telling tales, as it was to be supposed, of him (young O’Mara), in whose neighbourhood he lived.

During this speech it required all the effort which it was possible to exert to prevent O’Mara’s betraying the extreme agitation to which his situation gave rise. Captain N———, however, suspected nothing, and passed on without further delay.

Dinner was an early meal in those days, and Lady Emily was obliged to leave the Park in less than half an hour after the unpleasant meeting which we have just mentioned.

Young O’Mara and Dwyer having escorted the lady to the door of Colonel O’Mara’s house, pretended an engagement, and departed together.

Richard O’Mara instantly questioned his comrade upon the subject of his anxiety; but Dwyer had nothing to communicate of a satisfactory nature. He had only time, while the captain had been engaged with Lady Emily and her companion, to say to Heathcote:

“Be secret, as you value your existence: everything will be right, if you be but secret.”

To this Heathcote had replied: “Never fear me; I understand what I am about.”

This was said in such an ambiguous manner that it was impossible to conjecture whether he intended or not to act upon Dwyer’s exhortation. The conclusion which appeared most natural, was by no means an agreeable one.

It was much to be feared that Heathcote having heard some vague report of O’Mara’s engagement with Lady Emily, perhaps exaggerated, by the repetition, into a speedily approaching marriage, had become alarmed for his daughter’s interest, and had taken this decisive step in order to prevent, by a disclosure of the circumstances of his clandestine union with Ellen, the possibility of his completing a guilty alliance with Captain N———’s sister. If he entertained the suspicions which they attributed to him, he had certainly taken the most effectual means to prevent their being realised. Whatever his object might be, his presence in Dublin, in company with Captain N———, boded nothing good to O’Mara.

They entered ———’s tavern, in Dame Street, together; and there, over a hasty and by no means a comfortable meal, they talked over their plans and conjectures. Evening closed in, and found them still closeted together, with nothing to interrupt, and a large tankard of claret to sustain their desultory conversation.

Nothing had been determined upon, except that Dwyer and O’Mara should proceed under cover of the darkness to search the town for Heathcote, and by minute inquiries at the most frequented houses of entertainment, to ascertain his place of residence, in order to procure a full and explanatory interview with him. They had each filled their last glass, and were sipping it slowly, seated with their feet stretched towards a bright cheerful fire; the small table which sustained the flagon of which we have spoken, together with two pair of wax candles, placed between them, so as to afford a convenient resting-place for the long glasses out of which they drank.

“One good result, at all events, will be effected by Heathcote’s visit,” said O’Mara. “Before twenty-four hours I shall do that which I should have done long ago. I shall, without reserve, state everything. I can no longer endure this suspense – this dishonourable secrecy – this apparent dissimulation. Every moment I have passed since my departure from the country has been one of embarrassment, of pain, of humiliation. Tomorrow I will brave the storm, whether successfully or not is doubtful; but I had rather walk the high roads a beggar, than submit a day longer to be made the degraded sport of every accident – the miserable dependent upon a successful system of deception. Though passive deception, it is still unmanly, unworthy, unjustifiable deception. I cannot bear to think of it. I despise myself, but I will cease to be the despicable thing I have become. Tomorrow sees me free, and this harassing subject forever at rest.”

He was interrupted here by the sound of footsteps heavily but rapidly ascending the tavern staircase. The room door opened, and Captain N———, accompanied by a fashionably-attired young man, entered the room.

Young O’Mara had risen from his seat on the entrance of their unexpected visitants; and the moment Captain N——— recognised his person, an evident and ominous change passed over his countenance. He turned hastily to withdraw, but, as it seemed, almost instantly changed his mind, for he turned again abruptly.

“This chamber is engaged, sir,” said the waiter.

“Leave the room, sir,” was his only reply.

“The room is engaged, sir,” repeated the waiter, probably believing that his first suggestion had been unheard.

“Leave the room, or go to hell!” shouted Captain N———; at the same time seizing the astounded waiter by the shoulder, he hurled him headlong into the passage, and flung the door to with a crash that shook the walls. “Sir,” continued he, addressing himself to O’Mara, “I did not hope to have met you until tomorrow. Fortune has been kind to me – draw, and defend yourself.”

At the same time he drew his sword, and placed himself in an attitude of attack.

“I will not draw upon you,” said O’Mara. “I have, indeed, wronged you. I have given you just cause for resentment; but against your life I will never lift my hand.”

“You are a coward, sir,” replied Captain N———, with almost frightful vehemence, “as every trickster and swindler is. You are a contemptible dastard – a despicable, damned villain! Draw your sword, sir, and defend your life, or every post and pillar in this town shall tell your infamy.”

“Perhaps,” said his friend, with a sneer, “the gentleman can do better without his honour than without his wife.”

“Yes,” shouted the captain, “his wife – a trull – a common ———”

“Silence, sir!” cried O’Mara, all the fierceness of his nature roused by this last insult – “your object is gained; your blood be upon your own head.” At the same time he sprang across a bench which stood in his way, and pushing aside the table which supported the lights, in an instant their swords crossed, and they were engaged in close and deadly strife.

Captain N——— was far the stronger of the two; but, on the other hand, O’Mara possessed far more skill in the use of the fatal weapon which they employed. But the narrowness of the room rendered this advantage hardly available.

Almost instantly O’Mara received a slight wound upon the forehead, which, though little more than a scratch, bled so fast as to obstruct his sight considerably.

Those who have used the foil can tell how slight a derangement of eye or of hand is sufficient to determine a contest of this kind; and this knowledge will prevent their being surprised when I say, that, spite of O’Mara’s superior skill and practice, his adversary’s sword passed twice through and through his body, and he fell heavily and helplessly upon the floor of the chamber.

Without saying a word, the successful combatant quitted the room along with his companion, leaving Dwyer to shift as best he might for his fallen comrade.

With the assistance of some of the wondering menials of the place, Dwyer succeeded in conveying the wounded man into an adjoining room, where he was laid upon a bed, in a state bordering upon insensibility – the blood flowing, I might say welling, from the wounds so fast as to show that unless the bleeding were speedily and effectually stopped, he could not live for half an hour.

Medical aid was, of course, instantly procured, and Colonel O’Mara, though at the time seriously indisposed, was urgently requested to attend without loss of time. He did so; but human succour and support were all too late. The wound had been truly dealt – the tide of life had ebbed; and his father had not arrived five minutes when young O’Mara was a corpse. His body rests in the vaults of Christ Church, in Dublin, without a stone to mark the spot.

The counsels of the wicked are always dark, and their motives often beyond fathoming; and strange, unaccountable, incredible as it may seem, I do believe, and that upon evidence so clear as to amount almost to demonstration, that Heathcote’s visit to Dublin – his betrayal of the secret – and the final and terrible catastrophe which laid O’Mara in the grave, were brought about by no other agent than Dwyer himself.

I have myself seen the letter which induced that visit. The handwriting is exactly what I have seen in other alleged specimens of Dwyer’s penmanship. It is written with an affectation of honest alarm at O’Mara’s conduct, and expresses a conviction that if some of Lady Emily’s family be not informed of O’Mara’s real situation, nothing could prevent his concluding with her an advantageous alliance, then upon the tapis, and altogether throwing off his allegiance to Ellen – a step which, as the writer candidly asserted, would finally conduce as inevitably to his own disgrace as it immediately would to her ruin and misery.

The production was formally signed with Dwyer’s name, and the postscript contained a strict injunction of secrecy, asserting that if it were ascertained that such an epistle had been despatched from such a quarter, it would be attended with the total ruin of the writer.

It is true that Dwyer, many years after, when this letter came to light, alleged it to be a forgery, an assertion whose truth, even to his dying hour, and long after he had apparently ceased to feel the lash of public scorn, he continued obstinately to maintain. Indeed this matter is full of mystery, for, revenge alone excepted, which I believe, in such minds as Dwyer’s, seldom overcomes the sense of interest, the only intelligible motive which could have prompted him to such an act was the hope that since he had, through young O’Mara’s interest, procured from the colonel a lease of a small farm upon the terms which he had originally stipulated, he might prosecute his plan touching the property of Martin Heathcote, rendering his daughter’s hand free by the removal of young O’Mara. This appears to me too complicated a plan of villainy to have entered the mind even of such a man as Dwyer. I must, therefore, suppose his motives to have originated out of circumstances connected with this story which may not have come to my ear, and perhaps never will.

Colonel O’Mara felt the death of his son more deeply than I should have thought possible; but that son had been the last being who had continued to interest his cold heart. Perhaps the pride which he felt in his child had in it more of selfishness than of any generous feeling. But, be this as it may, the melancholy circumstances connected with Ellen Heathcote had reached him, and his conduct towards her proved, more strongly than anything else could have done, that he felt keenly and justly, and, to a certain degree, with a softened heart, the fatal event of which she had been, in some manner, alike the cause and the victim.

He evinced not towards her, as might have been expected, any unreasonable resentment. On the contrary, he exhibited great consideration, even tenderness, for her situation; and having ascertained where his son had placed her, he issued strict orders that she should not be disturbed, and that the fatal tidings, which had not yet reached her, should be withheld until they might be communicated in such a way as to soften as much as possible the inevitable shock.

These last directions were acted upon too scrupulously and too long; and, indeed, I am satisfied that had the event been communicated at once, however terrible and overwhelming the shock might have been, much of the bitterest anguish, of sickening doubts, of harassing suspense, would have been spared her, and the first tempestuous burst of sorrow having passed over, her chastened spirit might have recovered its tone, and her life have been spared. But the mistaken kindness which concealed from her the dreadful truth, instead of relieving her mind of a burden which it could not support, laid upon it a weight of horrible fears and doubts as to the affection of O’Mara, compared with which even the certainty of his death would have been tolerable.

One evening I had just seated myself beside a cheerful turf fire, with that true relish which a long cold ride through a bleak and shelterless country affords, stretching my chilled limbs to meet the genial influence, and imbibing the warmth at every pore, when my comfortable meditations were interrupted by a long and sonorous ringing at the doorbell evidently effected by no timid hand.

A messenger had arrived to request my attendance at the Lodge – such was the name which distinguished a small and somewhat antiquated building, occupying a peculiarly secluded position among the bleak and heathy hills which varied the surface of that not altogether uninteresting district, and which had, I believe, been employed by the keen and hardy ancestors of the O’Mara family as a convenient temporary residence during the sporting season.

Thither my attendance was required, in order to administer to a deeply distressed lady such comforts as an afflicted mind can gather from the sublime hopes and consolations of Christianity.

I had long suspected that the occupant of this sequestered, I might say desolate, dwelling-house was the poor girl whose brief story we are following; and feeling a keen interest in her fate – as who that had ever seen her did not? – I started from my comfortable seat with more eager alacrity than, I will confess it, I might have evinced had my duty called me in another direction.

In a few minutes I was trotting rapidly onward, preceded by my guide, who urged his horse with the remorseless rapidity of one who seeks by the speed of his progress to escape observation. Over roads and through bogs we splashed and clattered, until at length traversing the brow of a wild and rocky hill, whose aspect seemed so barren and forbidding that it might have been a lasting barrier alike to mortal sight and step, the lonely building became visible, lying in a kind of swampy flat, with a broad reedy pond or lake stretching away to its side, and backed by a farther range of monotonous sweeping hills, marked with irregular lines of grey rock, which, in the distance, bore a rude and colossal resemblance to the walls of a fortification.

Riding with undiminished speed along a kind of wild horse-track, we turned the corner of a high and somewhat ruinous wall of loose stones, and making a sudden wheel we found ourselves in a small quadrangle, surmounted on two sides by dilapidated stables and kennels, on another by a broken stone wall, and upon the fourth by the front of the lodge itself.

The whole character of the place was that of dreary desertion and decay, which would of itself have predisposed the mind for melancholy impressions. My guide dismounted, and with respectful attention held my horse’s bridle while I got down; and knocking at the door with the handle of his whip, it was speedily opened by a neatly-dressed female domestic, and I was admitted to the interior of the house, and conducted into a small room, where a fire in some degree dispelled the cheerless air, which would otherwise have prevailed to a painful degree throughout the place.

I had been waiting but for a very few minutes when another female servant, somewhat older than the first, entered the room. She made some apology on the part of the person whom I had come to visit, for the slight delay which had already occurred, and requested me further to wait for a few minutes longer, intimating that the lady’s grief was so violent, that without great effort she could not bring herself to speak calmly at all. As if to beguile the time, the good dame went on in a highly communicative strain to tell me, amongst much that could not interest me, a little of what I had desired to hear. I discovered that the grief of her whom I had come to visit was excited by the sudden death of a little boy, her only child, who was then lying dead in his mother’s chamber.

“And the mother’s name?” said I, inquiringly.

The woman looked at me for a moment, smiled, and shook her head with the air of mingled mystery and importance which seems to say, “I am unfathomable.” I did not care to press the question, though I suspected that much of her apparent reluctance was affected, knowing that my doubts respecting the identity of the person whom I had come to visit must soon be set at rest, and after a little pause the worthy Abigail went on as fluently as ever. She told me that her young mistress had been, for the time she had been with her – that was, for about a year and a half – in declining health and spirits, and that she had loved her little child to a degree beyond expression – so devotedly that she could not, in all probability, survive it long.

While she was running on in this way the bell rang, and signing me to follow, she opened the room door, but stopped in the hall, and taking me a little aside, and speaking in a whisper, she told me, as I valued the life of the poor lady, not to say one word of the death of young O’Mara. I nodded acquiescence, and ascending a narrow and ill-constructed staircase, she stopped at a chamber door and knocked.

“Come in,” said a gentle voice from within, and, preceded by my conductress, I entered a moderately-sized, but rather gloomy chamber.

There was but one living form within it – it was the light and graceful figure of a young woman. She had risen as I entered the room; but owing to the obscurity of the apartment, and to the circumstance that her face, as she looked towards the door, was turned away from the light, which found its way in dimly through the narrow windows, I could not instantly recognise the features.

“You do not remember me, sir?” said the same low, mournful voice. “I am – I was – Ellen Heathcote.”

“I do remember you, my poor child,” said I, taking her hand; “I do remember you very well. Speak to me frankly – speak to me as a friend. Whatever I can do or say for you, is yours already; only speak.”

“You were always very kind, sir, to those – to those that wanted kindness.”

The tears were almost overflowing, but she checked them; and as if an accession of fortitude had followed the momentary weakness, she continued, in a subdued but firm tone, to tell me briefly the circumstances of her marriage with O’Mara. When she had concluded the recital, she paused for a moment; and I asked again:

“Can I aid you in any way – by advice or otherwise?”

“I wish, sir, to tell you all I have been thinking about,” she continued. “I am sure, sir, that Master Richard loved me once – I am sure he did not think to deceive me; but there were bad, hardhearted people about him, and his family were all rich and high, and I am sure he wishes now that he had never, never seen me. Well, sir, it is not in my heart to blame him. What was I that I should look at him? – an ignorant, poor, country girl – and he so high and great, and so beautiful. The blame was all mine – it was all my fault; I could not think or hope he would care for me more than a little time. Well, sir, I thought over and over again that since his love was gone from me forever, I should not stand in his way, and hinder whatever great thing his family wished for him. So I thought often and often to write him a letter to get the marriage broken, and to send me home; but for one reason, I would have done it long ago: there was a little child, his and mine – the dearest, the loveliest.” She could not go on for a minute or two. “The little child that is lying there, on that bed; but it is dead and gone, and there is no reason now why I should delay any more about it.”

She put her hand into her breast, and took out a letter, which she opened. She put it into my hands. It ran thus:

Dear Master Richard,

My little child is dead, and your happiness is all I care about now. Your marriage with me is displeasing to your family, and I would be a burden to you, and in your way in the fine places, and among the great friends where you must be. You ought, therefore, to break the marriage, and I will sign whatever YOU wish, or your family. I will never try to blame you, Master Richard – do not think it – for I never deserved your love, and must not complain now that I have lost it; but I will always pray for you, and be thinking of you while I live.”

While I read this letter, I was satisfied that so far from adding to the poor girl’s grief, a full disclosure of what had happened would, on the contrary, mitigate her sorrow, and deprive it of its sharpest sting.

“Ellen,” said I solemnly, “Richard O’Mara was never unfaithful to you; he is now where human reproach can reach him no more.”

As I said this, the hectic flush upon her cheek gave place to a paleness so deadly, that I almost thought she would drop lifeless upon the spot.

“Is he – is he dead, then?” said she, wildly.

I took her hand in mine, and told her the sad story as best I could. She listened with a calmness which appeared almost unnatural, until I had finished the mournful narration. She then arose, and going to the bedside, she drew the curtain and gazed silently and fixedly on the quiet face of the child: but the feelings which swelled at her heart could not be suppressed; the tears gushed forth, and sobbing as if her heart would break, she leant over the bed and took the dead child in her arms.

She wept and kissed it, and kissed it and wept again, in grief so passionate, so heart-rending, as to draw bitter tears from my eyes. I said what little I could to calm her – to have sought to do more would have been a mockery; and observing that the darkness had closed in, I took my leave and departed, being favoured with the services of my former guide.

I expected to have been soon called upon again to visit the poor girl; but the Lodge lay beyond the boundary of my parish, and I felt a reluctance to trespass upon the precincts of my brother minister, and a certain degree of hesitation in intruding upon one whose situation was so very peculiar, and who would, I had no doubt, feel no scruple in requesting my attendance if she desired it.

A month, however, passed away, and I did not hear anything of Ellen. I called at the Lodge, and to my inquiries they answered that she was very much worse in health, and that since the death of the child she had been sinking fast, and so weak that she had been chiefly confined to her bed. I sent frequently to inquire, and often called myself, and all that I heard convinced me that she was rapidly sinking into the grave.

Late one night I was summoned from my rest, by a visit from the person who had upon the former occasion acted as my guide; he had come to summon me to the deathbed of her whom I had then attended. With all celerity I made my preparations, and, not without considerable difficulty and some danger, we made a rapid night-ride to the Lodge, a distance of five miles at least. We arrived safely, and in a very short time – but too late.

I stood by the bed upon which lay the once beautiful form of Ellen Heathcote. The brief but sorrowful trial was past – the desolate mourner was gone to that land where the pangs of grief, the tumults of passion, regrets and cold neglect, are felt no more. I leant over the lifeless face, and scanned the beautiful features which, living, had wrought such magic on all that looked upon them. They were, indeed, much wasted; but it was impossible for the fingers of death or of decay altogether to obliterate the traces of that exquisite beauty which had so distinguished her. As I gazed on this most sad and striking spectacle, remembrances thronged fast upon my mind, and tear after tear fell upon the cold form that slept tranquilly and for ever.

A few days afterwards I was told that a funeral had left the Lodge at the dead of night, and had been conducted with the most scrupulous secrecy. It was, of course, to me no mystery.

Heathcote lived to a very advanced age, being of that hard mould which is not easily impressionable. The selfish and the hardhearted survive where nobler, more generous, and, above all, more sympathising natures would have sunk forever.

Dwyer certainly succeeded in extorting, I cannot say how, considerable and advantageous leases from Colonel O’Mara; but after his death he disposed of his interest in these, and having for a time launched into a sea of profligate extravagance, he became bankrupt, and for a long time I totally lost sight of him.

The rebellion of ’98, and the events which immediately followed, called him forth from his lurking-places, in the character of an informer; and I myself have seen the hoary-headed, paralytic perjurer, with a scowl of derision and defiance, brave the hootings and the execrations of the indignant multitude.

“Dublin University Magazine”, Apr. 1839

The Purcell Papers: Volume II (1880)

AN ADVENTURE OF HARDRESS FITZGERALD,
A ROYALIST CAPTAIN

(1840)

The following brief narrative contains a faithful account of one of the many strange incidents which chequered the life of Hardress Fitzgerald – one of the now-forgotten heroes who flourished during the most stirring and, though the most disastrous, by no means the least glorious period of our eventful history.

He was a captain of horse in the army of James, and shared the fortunes of his master, enduring privations, encountering dangers, and submitting to vicissitudes the most galling and ruinous, with a fortitude and a heroism which would, if coupled with his other virtues have rendered the unhappy monarch whom he served, the most illustrious among unfortunate princes.

I have always preferred, where I could do so with any approach to accuracy, to give such relations as the one which I am about to submit to you, in the first person, and in the words of the original narrator, believing that such a form of recitation not only gives freshness to the tale, but in this particular instance, by bringing before me and steadily fixing in my mind’s eye the veteran royalist who himself related the occurrence which I am about to record, furnishes an additional stimulant to my memory, and a proportionate check upon my imagination.

As nearly as I can recollect then, his statement was as follows:

~   ~   ~   ~

After the fatal battle of the Boyne, I came up in disguise to Dublin, as did many in a like situation, regarding the capital as furnishing at once a good central position of observation, and as secure a lurking-place as I cared to find.

I would not suffer myself to believe that the cause of my royal master was so desperate as it really was; and while I lay in my lodgings, which consisted of the garret of a small dark house, standing in the lane which runs close by Audoen’s Arch, I busied myself with continual projects for the raising of the country, and the recollecting of the fragments of the defeated army – plans, you will allow, sufficiently magnificent for a poor devil who dared scarce show his face abroad in the daylight.

I believe, however, that I had not much reason to fear for my personal safety, for men’s minds in the city were greatly occupied with public events, and private amusements and debaucheries, which were, about that time, carried to an excess which our country never knew before, by reason of the raking together from all quarters of the empire, and indeed from most parts of Holland, the most dissolute and desperate adventurers who cared to play at hazard for their lives; and thus there seemed to be but little scrutiny into the characters of those who sought concealment.

I heard much at different times of the intentions of King James and his party, but nothing with certainty.

Some said that the king still lay in Ireland; others, that he had crossed over to Scotland, to encourage the Highlanders, who, with Dundee at their head, had been stirring in his behoof; others, again, said that he had taken ship for France, leaving his followers to shift for themselves, and regarding his kingdom as wholly lost, which last was the true version, as I afterwards learned.

Although I had been very active in the wars in Ireland, and had done many deeds of necessary but dire severity, which have often since troubled me much to think upon, yet I doubted not but that I might easily obtain protection for my person and property from the Prince of Orange, if I sought it by the ordinary submissions; but besides that my conscience and my affections resisted such time-serving concessions, I was resolved in my own mind that the cause of the royalist party was by no means desperate, and I looked to keep myself unimpeded by any pledge or promise given to the usurping Dutchman, that I might freely and honourably take a share in any struggle which might yet remain to be made for the right.

I therefore lay quiet, going forth from my lodgings but little, and that chiefly under cover of the dusk, and conversing hardly at all, except with those whom I well knew.

I had like once to have paid dearly for relaxing this caution; for going into a tavern one evening near the Tholsel, I had the confidence to throw off my hat, and sit there with my face quite exposed, when a fellow coming in with some troopers, they fell a-boozing, and being somewhat warmed, they began to drink “Confusion to popery,” and the like, and to compel the peaceable persons who happened to sit there, to join them in so doing.

Though I was rather hot-blooded, I was resolved to say nothing to attract notice; but, at the same time, if urged to pledge the toasts which they were compelling others to drink, to resist doing so.

With the intent to withdraw myself quietly from the place, I paid my reckoning, and putting on my hat, was going into the street, when the countryman who had come in with the soldiers called out:

“Stop that popish tomcat!”

And running across the room, he got to the door before me, and, shutting it, placed his back against it, to prevent my going out.

Though with much difficulty, I kept an appearance of quietness, and turning to the fellow, who, from his accent, I judged to be northern, and whose face I knew – though, to this day, I cannot say where I had seen him before – I observed very calmly:

“Sir, I came in here with no other design than to refresh myself, without offending any man. I have paid my reckoning, and now desire to go forth. If there is anything within reason that I can do to satisfy you, and to prevent trouble and delay to myself, name your terms, and if they be but fair, I will frankly comply with them.”

He quickly replied:

“You are Hardress Fitzgerald, the bloody popish captain, that hanged the twelve men at Derry.”

I felt that I was in some danger, but being a strong man, and used to perils of all kinds, it was not easy to disconcert me.

I looked then steadily at the fellow, and, in a voice of much confidence, I said:

“I am neither a Papist, a Royalist, nor a Fitzgerald, but an honester Protestant, mayhap, than many who make louder professions.”

“Then drink the honest man’s toast,” said he. “Damnation to the pope, and confusion to skulking Jimmy and his runaway crew.”

“Yourself shall hear me,” said I, taking the largest pewter pot that lay within my reach. “Tapster, fill this with ale; I grieve to say I can afford nothing better.”

I took the vessel of liquor in my hand, and walking up to him, I first made a bow to the troopers who sat laughing at the sprightliness of their facetious friend, and then another to himself, when saying, “God damn yourself and your cause!” I flung the ale straight into his face; and before he had time to recover himself, I struck him with my whole force and weight with the pewter pot upon the head, so strong a blow, that he fell, for aught I know, dead upon the floor, and nothing but the handle of the vessel remained in my hand.

I opened the door, but one of the dragoons drew his sabre, and ran at me to avenge his companion. With my hand I put aside the blade of the sword, narrowly escaping what he had intended for me, the point actually tearing open my vest. Without allowing him time to repeat his thrust, I struck him in the face with my clenched fist so sound a blow that he rolled back into the room with the force of a tennis ball.

It was well for me that the rest were half drunk, and the evening dark; for otherwise my folly would infallibly have cost me my life. As it was, I reached my garret in safety, with a resolution to frequent taverns no more until better times.

My little patience and money were well-nigh exhausted, when, after much doubt and uncertainty, and many conflicting reports, I was assured that the flower of the Royalist army, under the Duke of Berwick and General Boisleau, occupied the city of Limerick, with a determination to hold that fortress against the prince’s forces; and that a French fleet of great power, and well freighted with arms, ammunition, and men, was riding in the Shannon, under the walls of the town. But this last report was, like many others then circulated, untrue; there being, indeed, a promise and expectation of such assistance, but no arrival of it till too late.

The army of the Prince of Orange was said to be rapidly approaching the town, in order to commence the siege.

On hearing this, and being made as certain as the vagueness and unsatisfactory nature of my information, which came not from any authentic source, would permit; at least, being sure of the main point, which all allowed – namely, that Limerick was held for the king – and being also naturally fond of enterprise, and impatient of idleness, I took the resolution to travel thither, and, if possible, to throw myself into the city, in order to lend what assistance I might to my former companions in arms, well knowing that any man of strong constitution and of some experience might easily make himself useful to a garrison in their straitened situation.

When I had taken this resolution, I was not long in putting it into execution; and, as the first step in the matter, I turned half of the money which remained with me, in all about seventeen pounds, into small wares and merchandise such as travelling traders used to deal in; and the rest, excepting some shillings which I carried home for my immediate expenses, I sewed carefully in the lining of my breeches waistband, hoping that the sale of my commodities might easily supply me with subsistence upon the road.

I left Dublin upon a Friday morning in the month of September, with a tolerably heavy pack upon my back.

I was a strong man and a good walker, and one day with another travelled easily at the rate of twenty miles in each day, much time being lost in the towns of any note on the way, where, to avoid suspicion, I was obliged to make some stay, as if to sell my wares.

I did not travel directly to Limerick, but turned far into Tipperary, going near to the borders of Cork.

Upon the sixth day after my departure from Dublin I learned, certainly, from some fellows who were returning from trafficking with the soldiers, that the army of the prince was actually encamped before Limerick, upon the south side of the Shannon.

In order, then, to enter the city without interruption, I must needs cross the river, and I was much in doubt whether to do so by boat from Kerry, which I might have easily done, into the Earl of Clare’s land, and thus into the beleaguered city, or to take what seemed the easier way, one, however, about which I had certain misgivings – which, by the way, afterwards turned out to be just enough. This way was to cross the Shannon at O’Brien’s Bridge, or at Killaloe, into the county of Clare.

I feared, however, that both these passes were guarded by the prince’s forces, and resolved, if such were the case, not to essay to cross, for I was not fitted to sustain a scrutiny, having about me, though pretty safely secured, my commission from King James – which, though a dangerous companion, I would not have parted from but with my life.

I settled, then, in my own mind, that if the bridges were guarded I would walk as far as Portumna, where I might cross, though at a considerable sacrifice of time; and, having determined upon this course, I turned directly towards Killaloe.

I reached the foot of the mountain, or rather high hill, called Keeper – which had been pointed out to me as a landmark – lying directly between me and Killaloe, in the evening, and, having ascended some way, the darkness and fog overtook me.

The evening was very chilly, and myself weary, hungry, and much in need of sleep, so that I preferred seeking to cross the hill, though at some risk, to remaining upon it throughout the night. Stumbling over rocks and sinking into bog-mire, as the nature of the ground varied, I slowly and laboriously plodded on, making very little way in proportion to the toil it cost me.

After half an hour’s slow walking, or rather rambling, for, owing to the dark, I very soon lost my direction, I at last heard the sound of running water, and with some little trouble reached the edge of a brook, which ran in the bottom of a deep gully. This I knew would furnish a sure guide to the low grounds, where I might promise myself that I should speedily meet with some house or cabin where I might find shelter for the night.

The stream which I followed flowed at the bottom of a rough and swampy glen, very steep and making many abrupt turns, and so dark, owing more to the fog than to the want of the moon (for, though not high, I believe it had risen at the time), that I continually fell over fragments of rock and stumbled up to my middle into the rivulet, which I sought to follow.

In this way, drenched, weary, and with my patience almost exhausted, I was toiling onward, when, turning a sharp angle in the winding glen, I found myself within some twenty yards of a group of wild-looking men, gathered in various attitudes round a glowing turf fire.

I was so surprised at this rencontre that I stopped short, and for a time was in doubt whether to turn back or to accost them.

A minute’s thought satisfied me that I ought to make up to the fellows, and trust to their good faith for whatever assistance they could give me.

I determined, then, to do this, having great faith in the impulses of my mind, which, whenever I have been in jeopardy, as in my life I often have, always prompted me aright.

The strong red light of the fire showed me plainly enough that the group consisted, not of soldiers, but of Irish kernes, or countrymen, most of them wrapped in heavy mantles, and with no other covering for their heads than that afforded by their long, rough hair.

There was nothing about them which I could see to intimate whether their object were peaceful or warlike; but I afterwards found that they had weapons enough, though of their own rude fashion.

There were in all about twenty persons assembled around the fire, some sitting upon such blocks of stone as happened to lie in the way; others stretched at their length upon the ground.

“God save you, boys!” said I, advancing towards the party.

The men who had been talking and laughing together instantly paused, and two of them – tall and powerful fellows – snatched up each a weapon, something like a short halberd with a massive iron head, an instrument which they called among themselves a rapp, and with two or three long strides they came up with me, and laying hold upon my arms, drew me, not, you may easily believe, making much resistance, towards the fire.

When I reached the place where the figures were seated, the two men still held me firmly, and some others threw some handfuls of dry fuel upon the red embers, which, blazing up, cast a strong light upon me.

When they had satisfied themselves as to my appearance, they began to question me very closely as to my purpose in being upon the hill at such an unseasonable hour, asking me what was my occupation, where I had been, and whither I was going.

These questions were put to me in English by an old half-military looking man, who translated into that language the suggestions which his companions for the most part threw out in Irish.

I did not choose to commit myself to these fellows by telling them my real character and purpose, and therefore I represented myself as a poor travelling chapman who had been at Cork, and was seeking his way to Killaloe, in order to cross over into Clare and thence to the city of Galway.

My account did not seem fully to satisfy the men.

I heard one fellow say in Irish, which language I understood, “Maybe he is a spy.”

They then whispered together for a time, and the little man who was their spokesman came over to me and said:

“Do you know what we do with spies? we knock their brains out, my friend.”

He then turned back to them with whom he had been whispering, and talked in a low tone again with them for a considerable time.

I now felt very uncomfortable, not knowing what these savages – for they appeared nothing better – might design against me.

Twice or thrice I had serious thoughts of breaking from them, but the two guards who were placed upon me held me fast by the arms; and even had I succeeded in shaking them off, I should soon have been overtaken, encumbered as I was with a heavy pack, and wholly ignorant of the lie of the ground; or else, if I were so exceedingly lucky as to escape out of their hands, I still had the chance of falling into those of some other party of the same kind.

I therefore patiently awaited the issue of their deliberations, which I made no doubt affected me nearly.

I turned to the men who held me, and one after the other asked them, in their own language, “Why they held me?” adding, “I am but a poor pedlar, as you see. I have neither money nor money’s worth, for the sake of which you should do me hurt. You may have my pack and all that it contains, if you desire it – but do not injure me.”

To all this they gave no answer, but savagely desired me to hold my tongue.

I accordingly remained silent, determined, if the worst came, to declare to the whole party, who, I doubted not, were friendly, as were all the Irish peasantry in the south, to the Royal cause, my real character and design; and if this avowal failed me, I was resolved to make a desperate effort to escape, or at least to give my life at the dearest price I could.

I was not kept long in suspense, for the little veteran who had spoken to me at first came over, and desiring the two men to bring me after him, led the way along a broken path, which wound by the side of the steep glen.

I was obliged willy nilly to go with them, and, half-dragging and half-carrying me, they brought me by the path, which now became very steep, for some hundred yards without stopping, when suddenly coming to a stand, I found myself close before the door of some house or hut, I could not see which, through the planks of which a strong light was streaming.

At this door my conductor stopped, and tapping gently at it, it was opened by a stout fellow, with buff-coat and jack-boots, and pistols stuck in his belt, as also a long cavalry sword by his side.

He spoke with my guide, and to my no small satisfaction, in French, which convinced me that he was one of the soldiers whom Louis had sent to support our king, and who were said to have arrived in Limerick, though, as I observed above, not with truth.

I was much assured by this circumstance, and made no doubt but that I had fallen in with one of those marauding parties of native Irish, who, placing themselves under the guidance of men of courage and experience, had done much brave and essential service to the cause of the king.

The soldier entered an inner door in the apartment, which opening disclosed a rude, dreary, and dilapidated room, with a low plank ceiling, much discoloured by the smoke which hung suspended in heavy masses, descending within a few feet of the ground, and completely obscuring the upper regions of the chamber.

A large fire of turf and heath was burning under a kind of rude chimney, shaped like a large funnel, but by no means discharging the functions for which it was intended. Into this inauspicious apartment was I conducted by my strange companions. In the next room I heard voices employed, as it seemed, in brief questioning and answer; and in a minute the soldier re-entered the room, and having said, “Votre prisonnier – le general veut le voir,” he led the way into the inner room, which in point of comfort and cleanliness was not a whit better than the first.

Seated at a clumsy plank table, placed about the middle of the floor, was a powerfully built man, of almost colossal stature – his military accoutrements, cuirass and rich regimental clothes, soiled, deranged, and spattered with recent hard travel; the flowing wig, surmounted by the cocked hat and plume, still rested upon his head. On the table lay his sword-belt with its appendage, and a pair of long holster pistols, some papers, and pen and ink; also a stone jug, and the fragments of a hasty meal. His attitude betokened the languor of fatigue. His left hand was buried beyond the lace ruffle in the breast of his cassock, and the elbow of his right rested upon the table, so as to support his head. From his mouth protruded a tobacco-pipe, which as I entered he slowly withdrew.

A single glance at the honest, good-humoured, comely face of the soldier satisfied me of his identity, and removing my hat from my head I said, “God save General Sarsfield!”

The general nodded

“I am a prisoner here under strange circumstances,” I continued, “I appear before you in a strange disguise. You do not recognise Captain Hardress Fitzgerald!”

“Eh, how’s this?” said he, approaching me with the light.

“I am that Hardress Fitzgerald,” I repeated, “who served under you at the Boyne, and upon the day of the action had the honour to protect your person at the expense of his own.” At the same time I turned aside the hair which covered the scar which you well know upon my forehead, and which was then much more remarkable than it is now.

The general on seeing this at once recognised me, and embracing me cordially, made me sit down, and while I unstrapped my pack, a tedious job, my fingers being nearly numbed with cold, sent the men forth to procure me some provision.

The general’s horse was stabled in a corner of the chamber where we sat, and his war-saddle lay upon the floor. At the far end of the room was a second door, which stood half open; a bogwood fire burned on a hearth somewhat less rude than the one which I had first seen, but still very little better appointed with a chimney, for thick wreaths of smoke were eddying, with every fitful gust, about the room. Close by the fire was strewed a bed of heath, intended, I supposed, for the stalwart limbs of the general.

“Hardress Fitzgerald,” said he, fixing his eyes gravely upon me, while he slowly removed the tobacco-pipe from his mouth, “I remember you, strong, bold and cunning in your warlike trade; the more desperate an enterprise, the more ready for it, you. I would gladly engage you, for I know you trustworthy, to perform a piece of duty requiring, it may be, no extraordinary quality to fulfil; and yet perhaps, as accidents may happen, demanding every attribute of daring and dexterity which belongs to you.”

Here he paused for some moments.

I own I felt somewhat flattered by the terms in which he spoke of me, knowing him to be but little given to compliments; and not having any plan in my head, farther than the rendering what service I might to the cause of the king, caring very little as to the road in which my duty might lie, I frankly replied:

“Sir, I hope, if opportunity offers, I shall prove to deserve the honourable terms in which you are pleased to speak of me. In a righteous cause I fear not wounds or death; and in discharging my duty to my God and my king, I am ready for any hazard or any fate. Name the service you require, and if it lies within the compass of my wit or power, I will fully and faithfully perform it. Have I said enough?”

“That is well, very well, my friend; you speak well, and manfully,” replied the general. “I want you to convey to the hands of General Boisleau, now in the city of Limerick, a small written packet; there is some danger, mark me, of your falling in with some outpost or straggling party of the prince’s army. If you are taken unawares by any of the enemy you must dispose of the packet inside your person, rather than let it fall into their hands – that is, you must eat it. And if they go to question you with thumbscrews, or the like, answer nothing; let them knock your brains out first.” In illustration, I suppose, of the latter alternative, he knocked the ashes out of his pipe upon the table as he uttered it.

“The packet,” he continued, “you shall have tomorrow morning. Meantime comfort yourself with food, and afterwards with sleep; you will want, mayhap, all your strength and wits on the morrow.”

I applied myself forthwith to the homely fare which they had provided, and I confess that I never made a meal so heartily to my satisfaction.

It was a beautiful, clear, autumn morning, and the bright beams of the early sun were slanting over the brown heath which clothed the sides of the mountain, and glittering in the thousand bright drops which the melting hoarfrost had left behind it, and the white mists were lying like broad lakes in the valleys, when, with my pedlar’s pack upon my back, and General Sarsfield’s precious despatch in my bosom, I set forth, refreshed and courageous.

As I descended the hill, my heart expanded and my spirits rose under the influences which surrounded me. The keen, clear, bracing air of the morning, the bright, slanting sunshine, the merry songs of the small birds, and the distant sounds of awakening labour that floated up from the plains, all conspired to stir my heart within me, and more like a madcap boy, broken loose from school, than a man of sober years upon a mission of doubt and danger, I trod lightly on, whistling and singing alternately for very joy.

As I approached the object of my early march, I fell in with a countryman, eager, as are most of his kind, for news.

I gave him what little I had collected, and professing great zeal for the king, which, indeed, I always cherished, I won upon his confidence so far, that he became much more communicative than the peasantry in those quarters are generally wont to be to strangers.

From him I learned that there was a company of dragoons in William’s service, quartered at Willaloe; but he could not tell whether the passage of the bridge was stopped by them or not. With a resolution, at all events, to make the attempt to cross, I approached the town. When I came within sight of the river, I quickly perceived that it was so swollen with the recent rains, as, indeed, the countryman had told me, that the fords were wholly impassable.

I stopped then, upon a slight eminence overlooking the village, with a view to reconnoitre and to arrange my plans in case of interruption. While thus engaged, the wind blowing gently from the west, in which quarter Limerick lay, I distinctly heard the explosion of the cannon, which played from and against the city, though at a distance of eleven miles at the least.

I never yet heard the music that had for me half the attractions of that sullen sound, and as I noted again and again the distant thunder that proclaimed the perils, and the valour, and the faithfulness of my brethren, my heart swelled with pride, and the tears rose to my eyes; and lifting up my hands to heaven, I prayed to God that I might be spared to take a part in the righteous quarrel that was there so bravely maintained.

I felt, indeed, at this moment a longing, more intense than I have the power to describe, to be at once with my brave companions in arms, and so inwardly excited and stirred up as if I had been actually within five minutes’ march of the field of battle.

It was now almost noon, and I had walked hard since morning across a difficult and broken country, so that I was a little fatigued, and in no small degree hungry. As I approached the hamlet, I was glad to see in the window of a poor hovel several large cakes of meal displayed, as if to induce purchasers to enter.

I was right in regarding this exhibition as an intimation that entertainment might be procured within, for upon entering and inquiring, I was speedily invited by the poor woman, who, it appeared, kept this humble house of refreshment, to lay down my pack and seat myself by a ponderous table, upon which she promised to serve me with a dinner fit for a king; and indeed, to my mind, she amply fulfilled her engagement, supplying me abundantly with eggs, bacon, and wheaten cakes, which I discussed with a zeal which almost surprised myself.

Having disposed of the solid part of my entertainment, I was proceeding to regale myself with a brimming measure of strong waters, when my attention was arrested by the sound of horses’ hoofs in brisk motion upon the broken road, and evidently approaching the hovel in which I was at that moment seated.

The ominous clank of sword scabbards and the jingle of brass accoutrements announced, unequivocally, that the horsemen were of the military profession.

“The red-coats will stop here undoubtedly,” said the old woman, observing, I suppose, the anxiety of my countenance; “they never pass us without coming in for half an hour to drink or smoke. If you desire to avoid them, I can hide you safely; but don’t lose a moment. They will be here before you can count a hundred.”

I thanked the good woman for her hospitable zeal; but I felt a repugnance to concealing myself as she suggested, which was enhanced by the consciousness that if by any accident I were detected while lurking in the room, my situation would of itself inevitably lead to suspicions, and probably to discovery.

I therefore declined her offer, and awaited in suspense the entrance of the soldiers.

I had time before they made their appearance to move my seat hurriedly from the table to the hearth, where, under the shade of the large chimney, I might observe the coming visitors with less chance of being myself remarked upon.

As my hostess had anticipated, the horsemen drew up at the door of the hut, and five dragoons entered the dark chamber where I awaited them.

Leaving their horses at the entrance, with much noise and clatter they proceeded to seat themselves and call for liquor.

Three of these fellows were Dutchmen, and, indeed, all belonged, as I afterwards found, to a Dutch regiment, which had been recruited with Irish and English, as also partly officered from the same nations.

Being supplied with pipes and drink they soon became merry; and not suffering their smoking to interfere with their conversation, they talked loud and quickly, for the most part in a sort of barbarous language, neither Dutch nor English, but compounded of both.

They were so occupied with their own jocularity that I had very great hopes of escaping observation altogether, and remained quietly seated in a corner of the chimney, leaning back upon my seat as if asleep.

My taciturnity and quiescence, however, did not avail me, for one of these fellows coming over to the hearth to light his pipe, perceived me, and looking me very hard in the face, he said:

“What countryman are you, brother, that you sit with a covered head in the room with the prince’s soldiers?”

At the same time he tossed my hat off my head into the fire. I was not fool enough, though somewhat hot-blooded, to suffer the insolence of this fellow to involve me in a broil so dangerous to my person and ruinous to my schemes as a riot with these soldiers must prove. I therefore, quietly taking up my hat and shaking the ashes out of it, observed:

“Sir, I crave your pardon if I have offended you. I am a stranger in these quarters, and a poor, ignorant, humble man, desiring only to drive my little trade in peace, so far as that may be done in these troublous times.”

“And what may your trade be?” said the same fellow.

“I am a travelling merchant,” I replied; “and sell my wares as cheap as any trader in the country.”

“Let us see them forthwith,” said he; “mayhap I or my comrades may want something which you can supply. Where is thy chest, friend? Thou shalt have ready money” (winking at his companions), “ready money, and good weight, and sound metal; none of your rascally pinchbeck. Eh, my lads? Bring forth the goods, and let us see.”

Thus urged, I should have betrayed myself had I hesitated to do as required; and anxious, upon any terms, to quiet these turbulent men of war, I unbuckled my pack and exhibited its contents upon the table before them.

“A pair of lace ruffles, by the Lord!” said one, unceremoniously seizing upon the articles he named.

“A phial of perfume,” continued another, tumbling over the farrago which I had submitted to them, “washballs, combs, stationery, slippers, small knives, tobacco; by God, this merchant is a prize! Mark me, honest fellow, the man who wrongs thee shall suffer – ’fore Gad he shall; thou shalt be fairly dealt with” (this he said while in the act of pocketing a small silver tobacco-box, the most valuable article in the lot). “You shall come with me to headquarters; the captain will deal with you, and never haggle about the price. I promise thee his good will, and thou wilt consider me accordingly. You’ll find him a profitable customer – he has money without end, and throws it about like a gentleman. If so be as I tell thee, I shall expect, and my comrades here, a piece or two in the way of a compliment – but of this anon. Come, then, with us; buckle on thy pack quickly, friend.”

There was no use in my declaring my willingness to deal with themselves in preference to their master; it was clear that they had resolved that I should, in the most expeditious and advantageous way, turn my goods into money, that they might excise upon me to the amount of their wishes.

The worthy who had taken a lead in these arrangements, and who by his stripes I perceived to be a corporal, having insisted on my taking a dram with him to cement our newly-formed friendship, for which, however, he requested me to pay, made me mount behind one of his comrades; and the party, of which I thus formed an unwilling member, moved at a slow trot towards the quarters of the troop.

They reined up their horses at the head of the long bridge, which at this village spans the broad waters of the Shannon connecting the opposite counties of Tipperary and Clare.

A small tower, built originally, no doubt, to protect and to defend this pass, occupied the near extremity of the bridge, and in its rear, but connected with it, stood several straggling buildings rather dilapidated.

A dismounted trooper kept guard at the door, and my conductor having, dismounted, as also the corporal, the latter inquired:

“Is the captain in his quarters?”

“He is,” replied the sentinel.

And without more ado my companion shoved me into the entrance of the small dark tower, and opening a door at the extremity of the narrow chamber into which we had passed from the street, we entered a second room in which were seated some half-dozen officers of various ranks and ages, engaged in drinking, and smoking, and play.

I glanced rapidly from man to man, and was nearly satisfied by my inspection, when one of the gentlemen whose back had been turned towards the place where I stood, suddenly changed his position and looked towards me.

As soon as I saw his face my heart sank within me, and I knew that my life or death was balanced, as it were, upon a razor’s edge.

The name of this man whose unexpected appearance thus affected me was Hugh Oliver, and good and strong reason had I to dread him, for so bitterly did he hate me, that to this moment I do verily believe he would have compassed my death if it lay in his power to do so, even at the hazard of his own life and soul, for I had been – though God knows with many sore strugglings and at the stern call of public duty – the judge and condemner of his brother; and though the military law, which I was called upon to administer, would permit no other course or sentence than the bloody one which I was compelled to pursue, yet even to this hour the recollection of that deed is heavy at my breast.

As soon as I saw this man I felt that my safety depended upon the accident of his not recognising me through the disguise which I had assumed, an accident against which were many chances, for he well knew my person and appearance.

It was too late now to destroy General Sarsfield’s instructions; any attempt to do so would ensure detection. All then depended upon a cast of the die.

When the first moment of dismay and heart-sickening agitation had passed, it seemed to me as if my mind acquired a collectedness and clearness more complete and intense than I had ever experienced before.

I instantly perceived that he did not know me, for turning from me to the soldier with all air of indifference, he said,

“Is this a prisoner or a deserter? What have you brought him here for, sirra?”

“Your wisdom will regard him as you see fit, may it please you,” said the corporal. “The man is a travelling merchant, and, overtaking him upon the road, close by old Dame MacDonagh’s cot, I thought I might as well make a sort of prisoner of him that your honour might use him as it might appear most convenient; he has many commododies which are not unworthy of price in this wilderness, and some which you may condescend to make use of yourself. May he exhibit the goods he has for sale, an’t please you?”

“Aye, let us see them,” said he.

“Unbuckle your pack,” exclaimed the corporal, with the same tone of command with which, at the head of his guard, he would have said “Recover your arms.” “Unbuckle your pack, fellow, and show your goods to the captain – here, where you are.”

The conclusion of his directions was suggested by my endeavouring to move round in order to get my back towards the windows, hoping, by keeping my face in the shade, to escape detection.

In this manoeuvre, however, I was foiled by the imperiousness of the soldier; and inwardly cursing his ill-timed interference, I proceeded to present my merchandise to the loving contemplation of the officers who thronged around me, with a strong light from an opposite window full upon my face.

As I continued to traffic with these gentlemen, I observed with no small anxiety the eyes of Captain Oliver frequently fixed upon me with a kind of dubious inquiring gaze.

“I think, my honest fellow,” he said at last, “that I have seen you somewhere before this. Have you often dealt with the military?”

“I have traded, sir,” said I, “with the soldiery many a time, and always been honourably treated. Will your worship please to buy a pair of lace ruffles? – very cheap, your worship.”

“Why do you wear your hair so much over your face, sir?” said Oliver, without noticing my suggestion. “I promise you, I think no good of thee; throw back your hair, and let me see thee plainly. Hold up your face, and look straight at me; throw back your hair, sir.”

I felt that all chance of escape was at an end; and stepping forward as near as the table would allow me to him, I raised my head, threw back my hair, and fixed my eyes sternly and boldly upon his face.

I saw that he knew me instantly, for his countenance turned as pale as ashes with surprise and hatred. He started up, placing his hand instinctively upon his sword-hilt, and glaring at me with a look so deadly, that I thought every moment he would strike his sword into my heart. He said in a kind of whisper: “Hardress Fitzgerald?”

“Yes;” said I, boldly, for the excitement of the scene had effectually stirred my blood, “Hardress Fitzgerald is before you. I know you well, Captain Oliver. I know how you hate me. I know how you thirst for my blood; but in a good cause, and in the hands of God, I defy you.”

“You are a desperate villain, sir,” said Captain Oliver; “a rebel and a murderer! Holloa, there! guard, seize him!”

As the soldiers entered, I threw my eyes hastily round the room, and observing a glowing fire upon the hearth, I suddenly drew General Sarsfield’s packet from my bosom, and casting it upon the embers, planted my foot upon it.

“Secure the papers!” shouted the captain; and almost instantly I was laid prostrate and senseless upon the floor, by a blow from the butt of a carbine.

I cannot say how long I continued in a state of torpor; but at length, having slowly recovered my senses, I found myself lying firmly handcuffed upon the floor of a small chamber, through a narrow loophole in one of whose walls the evening sun was shining. I was chilled with cold and damp, and drenched in blood, which had flowed in large quantities from the wound on my head. By a strong effort I shook off the sick drowsiness which still hung upon me, and, weak and giddy, I rose with pain and difficulty to my feet.

The chamber, or rather cell, in which I stood was about eight feet square, and of a height very disproportioned to its other dimensions; its altitude from the floor to the ceiling being not less than twelve or fourteen feet. A narrow slit placed high in the wall admitted a scanty light, but sufficient to assure me that my prison contained nothing to render the sojourn of its tenant a whit less comfortless than my worst enemy could have wished.

My first impulse was naturally to examine the security of the door, the loophole which I have mentioned being too high and too narrow to afford a chance of escape. I listened attentively to ascertain if possible whether or not a guard had been placed upon the outside.

Not a sound was to be heard. I now placed my shoulder to the door, and sought with all my combined strength and weight to force it open. It, however, resisted all my efforts, and thus baffled in my appeal to mere animal power, exhausted and disheartened, I threw myself on the ground.

It was not in my nature, however, long to submit to the apathy of despair, and in a few minutes I was on my feet again.

With patient scrutiny I endeavoured to ascertain the nature of the fastenings which secured the door.

The planks, fortunately, having been nailed together fresh, had shrunk considerably, so as to leave wide chinks between each and its neighbour.

By means of these apertures I saw that my dungeon was secured, not by a lock, as I had feared, but by a strong wooden bar, running horizontally across the door, about midway upon the outside.

“Now,” thought I, “if I can but slip my fingers through the opening of the planks, I can easily remove the bar, and then—”

My attempts, however, were all frustrated by the manner in which my hands were fastened together, each embarrassing the other, and rendering my efforts so hopelessly clumsy, that I was obliged to give them over in despair.

I turned with a sigh from my last hope, and began to pace my narrow prison floor, when my eye suddenly encountered an old rusty nail or holdfast sticking in the wall.

All the gold of Plutus would not have been so welcome as that rusty piece of iron.

I instantly wrung it from the wall, and inserting the point between the planks of the door into the bolt, and working it backwards and forwards, I had at length the unspeakable satisfaction to perceive that the beam was actually yielding to my efforts, and gradually sliding into its berth in the wall.

I have often been engaged in struggles where great bodily strength was required, and every thew and sinew in the system taxed to the uttermost; but, strange as it may appear, I never was so completely exhausted and overcome by any labour as by this comparatively trifling task.

Again and again was I obliged to desist, until my cramped finger-joints recovered their power; but at length my perseverance was rewarded, for, little by little, I succeeded in removing the bolt so far as to allow the door to open sufficiently to permit me to pass.

With some squeezing I succeeded in forcing my way into a small passage, upon which my prison-door opened.

This led into a chamber somewhat more spacious than my cell, but still containing no furniture, and affording no means of escape to one so crippled with bonds as I was.

At the far extremity of this room was a door which stood ajar, and, stealthily passing through it, I found myself in a room containing nothing but a few raw hides, which rendered the atmosphere nearly intolerable.

Here I checked myself, for I heard voices in busy conversation in the next room.

I stole softly to the door which separated the chamber in which I stood from that from which the voices proceeded.

A moment served to convince me that any attempt upon it would be worse than fruitless, for it was secured upon the outside by a strong lock, besides two bars, all which I was enabled to ascertain by means of the same defect in the joining of the planks which I have mentioned as belonging to the inner door.

I had approached this door very softly, so that, my proximity being wholly unsuspected by the speakers within, the conversation continued without interruption.

Planting myself close to the door, I applied my eye to one of the chinks which separated the boards, and thus obtained a full view of the chamber and its occupants.

It was the very apartment into which I had been first conducted. The outer door, which faced the one at which I stood, was closed, and at a small table were seated the only tenants of the room – two officers, one of whom was Captain Oliver. The latter was reading a paper, which I made no doubt was the document with which I had been entrusted.

“The fellow deserves it, no doubt” said the junior officer. “But, methinks, considering our orders from headquarters, you deal somewhat too hastily.”

“Nephew, nephew,” said Captain Oliver, “you mistake the tenor of our orders. We were directed to conciliate the peasantry by fair and gentle treatment, but not to suffer spies and traitors to escape. This packet is of some value, though not, in all its parts, intelligible to me. The bearer has made his way hither under a disguise, which, along with the other circumstances of his appearance here, is sufficient to convict him as a spy.”

There was a pause here, and after a few minutes the younger officer said:

“Spy is a hard term, no doubt, uncle; but it is possible – nay, likely, that this poor devil sought merely to carry the parcel with which he was charged in safety to its destination. Pshaw! he is sufficiently punished if you duck him, for ten minutes or so, between the bridge and the mill-dam.”

“Young man,” said Oliver, somewhat sternly, “do not obtrude your advice where it is not called for; this man, for whom you plead, murdered your own father!”

I could not see how this announcement affected the person to whom it was addressed, for his back was towards me; but I conjectured, easily, that my last poor chance was gone, for a long silence ensued. Captain Oliver at length resumed:

“I know the villain well. I know him capable of any crime; but, by God, his last card is played, and the game is up. He shall not see the moon rise tonight.”

There was here another pause.

Oliver rose, and going to the outer door, called:

“Hewson! Hewson!”

A grim looking corporal entered.

“Hewson, have your guard ready at eight o’clock, with their carbines clean, and a round of ball-cartridge each. Keep them sober; and, further, plant two upright posts at the near end of the bridge, with a cross one at top, in the manner of a gibbet. See to these matters, Hewson: I shall be with you speedily.”

The corporal made his salutations, and retired.

Oliver deliberately folded up the papers with which I had been commissioned, and placing them in the pocket of his vest, he said:

“Cunning, cunning Master Hardress Fitzgerald hath made a false step; the old fox is in the toils. Hardress Fitzgerald, Hardress Fitzgerald, I will blot you out.”

He repeated these words several times, at the same time rubbing his finger strongly upon the table, as if he sought to erase a stain:

“I will blot you out!”

There was a kind of glee in his manner and expression which chilled my very heart.

“You shall be first shot like a dog, and then hanged like a dog: shot tonight, and hung tomorrow; hung at the bridgehead – hung, until your bones drop asunder!”

It is impossible to describe the exultation with which he seemed to dwell upon, and to particularise the fate which he intended for me.

I observed, however, that his face was deadly pale, and felt assured that his conscience and inward convictions were struggling against his cruel resolve. Without further comment the two officers left the room, I suppose to oversee the preparations which were being made for the deed of which I was to be the victim.

A chill, sick horror crept over me as they retired, and I felt, for the moment, upon the brink of swooning. This feeling, however, speedily gave place to a sensation still more terrible. A state of excitement so intense and tremendous as to border upon literal madness, supervened; my brain reeled and throbbed as if it would burst; thoughts the wildest and the most hideous flashed through my mind with a spontaneous rapidity that scared my very soul; while, all the time, I felt a strange and frightful impulse to burst into uncontrolled laughter.

Gradually this fearful paroxysm passed away. I kneeled and prayed fervently, and felt comforted and assured; but still I could not view the slow approaches of certain death without an agitation little short of agony.

I have stood in battle many a time when the chances of escape were fearfully small. I have confronted foemen in the deadly breach. I have marched, with a constant heart, against the cannon’s mouth. Again and again has the beast which I bestrode been shot under me; again and again have I seen the comrades who walked beside me in an instant laid forever in the dust; again and again have I been in the thick of battle, and of its mortal dangers, and never felt my heart shake, or a single nerve tremble: but now, helpless, manacled, imprisoned, doomed, forced to watch the approaches of an inevitable fate – to wait, silent and moveless, while death as it were crept towards me, human nature was taxed to the uttermost to bear the horrible situation.

I returned again to the closet in which I had found myself upon recovering from the swoon.

The evening sunshine and twilight was fast melting into darkness, when I heard the outer door, that which communicated with the guardroom in which the officers had been amusing themselves, opened and locked again upon the inside.

A measured step then approached, and the door of the wretched cell in which I lay being rudely pushed open, a soldier entered, who carried something in his hand; but, owing to the obscurity of the place, I could not see what.

“Art thou awake, fellow?” said he, in a gruff voice. “Stir thyself; get upon thy legs.”

His orders were enforced by no very gentle application of his military boot.

“Friend,” said I, rising with difficulty, “you need not insult a dying man. You have been sent hither to conduct me to death. Lead on! My trust is in God, that He will forgive me my sins, and receive my soul, redeemed by the blood of His Son.”

There here intervened a pause of some length, at the end of which the soldier said, in the same gruff voice, but in a lower key:

“Look ye, comrade, it will be your own fault if you die this night. On one condition I promise to get you out of this hobble with a whole skin; but if you go to any of your damned gammon, by God, before two hours are passed, you will have as many holes in your carcase as a target.”

“Name your conditions,” said I, “and if they consist with honour, I will never baulk at the offer.”

“Here they are: you are to be shot tonight, by Captain Oliver’s orders. The carbines are cleaned for the job, and the cartridges served out to the men. By God, I tell you the truth!”

Of this I needed not much persuasion, and intimated to the man my conviction that he spoke the truth.

“Well, then,” he continued, “now for the means of avoiding this ugly business. Captain Oliver rides this night to headquarters, with the papers which you carried. Before he starts he will pay you a visit, to fish what he can out of you with all the fine promises he can make. Humour him a little, and when you find an opportunity, stab him in the throat above the cuirass.”

“A feasible plan, surely,” said I, raising my shackled hands, “for a man thus completely crippled and without a weapon.”

“I will manage all that presently for you,” said the soldier. “When you have thus dealt with him, take his cloak and hat, and so forth, and put them on; the papers you will find in the pocket of his vest, in a red leather case. Walk boldly out. I am appointed to ride with Captain Oliver, and you will find me holding his horse and my own by the door. Mount quickly, and I will do the same, and then we will ride for our lives across the bridge. You will find the holster-pistols loaded in case of pursuit; and, with the devil’s help, we shall reach Limerick without a hair hurt. My only condition is, that when you strike Oliver, you strike home, and again and again, until he is finished; and I trust to your honour to remember me when we reach the town.”

I cannot say whether I resolved right or wrong, but I thought my situation, and the conduct of Captain Oliver, warranted me in acceding to the conditions propounded by my visitant, and with alacrity I told him so, and desired him to give me the power, as he had promised to do, of executing them.

With speed and promptitude he drew a small key from his pocket, and in an instant the manacles were removed from my hands.

How my heart bounded within me as my wrists were released from the iron grip of the shackles! The first step toward freedom was made – my self-reliance returned, and I felt assured of success.

“Now for the weapon,” said I.

“I fear me, you will find it rather clumsy,” said he; “but if well handled, it will do as well as the best Toledo. It is the only thing I could get, but I sharpened it myself; it has an edge like a skean.”

He placed in my hand the steel head of a halberd. Grasping it firmly, I found that it made by no means a bad weapon in point of convenience; for it felt in the hand like a heavy dagger, the portion which formed the blade or point being crossed nearly at the lower extremity by a small bar of metal, at one side shaped into the form of an axe, and at the other into that of a hook. These two transverse appendages being muffled by the folds of my cravat, which I removed for the purpose, formed a perfect guard or hilt, and the lower extremity formed like a tube, in which the pike-handle had been inserted, afforded ample space for the grasp of my hand; the point had been made as sharp as a needle, and the metal he assured me was good.

Thus equipped he left me, having observed, “The captain sent me to bring you to your senses, and give you some water that he might find you proper for his visit. Here is the pitcher; I think I have revived you sufficiently for the captain’s purpose.”

With a low savage laugh he left me to my reflections.

Having examined and adjusted the weapon, I carefully bound the ends of the cravat, with which I had secured the cross part of the spear-head, firmly round my wrist, so that in case of a struggle it might not easily be forced from my hand; and having made these precautionary dispositions, I sat down upon the ground with my back against the wall, and my hands together under my coat, awaiting my visitor.

The time wore slowly on; the dusk became dimmer and dimmer, until it nearly bordered on total darkness.

“How’s this?” said I, inwardly; “Captain Oliver, you said I should not see the moon rise tonight. Methinks you are somewhat tardy in fulfilling your prophecy.”

As I made this reflection, a noise at the outer door announced the entrance of a visitant. I knew that the decisive moment was come, and letting my head sink upon my breast, and assuring myself that my hands were concealed, I waited, in the attitude of deep dejection, the approach of my foe and betrayer.

As I had expected, Captain Oliver entered the room where I lay. He was equipped for instant duty, as far as the imperfect twilight would allow me to see; the long sword clanked upon the floor as he made his way through the lobbies which led to my place of confinement; his ample military cloak hung upon his arm; his cocked hat was upon his head, and in all points he was prepared for the road.

This tallied exactly with what my strange informant had told me.

I felt my heart swell and my breath come thick as the awful moment which was to witness the death-struggle of one or other of us approached.

Captain Oliver stood within a yard or two of the place where I sat, or rather lay; and folding his arms, he remained silent for a minute or two, as if arranging in his mind how he should address me.

“Hardress Fitzgerald,” he began at length, “are you awake? Stand up, if you desire to hear of matters nearly touching your life or death. Get up, I say.”

I arose doggedly, and affecting the awkward movements of one whose hands were bound,

“Well,” said I, “what would you of me? Is it not enough that I am thus imprisoned without a cause, and about, as I suspect, to suffer a most unjust and violent sentence, but must I also be disturbed during the few moments left me for reflection and repentance by the presence of my persecutor? What do you want of me?”

“As to your punishment, sir,” said he, “your own deserts have no doubt suggested the likelihood of it to your mind; but I now am with you to let you know that whatever mitigation of your sentence you may look for, must be earned by your compliance with my orders. You must frankly and fully explain the contents of the packet which you endeavoured this day to destroy; and further, you must tell all that you know of the designs of the popish rebels.”

“And if I do this I am to expect a mitigation of my punishment – is it not so?”

Oliver bowed.

“And what is this mitigation to be? On the honour of a soldier, what is it to be?” inquired I.

“When you have made the disclosure required,” he replied, “you shall hear. ’Tis then time to talk of indulgences.”

“Methinks it would then be too late,” answered I. “But a chance is a chance, and a drowning man will catch at a straw. You are an honourable man, Captain Oliver. I must depend, I suppose, on your good faith. Well, sir, before I make the desired communication I have one question more to put. What is to befall me in case that I, remembering the honour of a soldier and a gentleman, reject your infamous terms, scorn your mitigations, and defy your utmost power?”

“In that case,” replied he, coolly, “before half an hour you shall be a corpse.”

“Then God have mercy on your soul!” said I; and springing forward, I dashed the weapon which I held at his throat.

I missed my aim, but struck him full in the mouth with such force that most of his front teeth were dislodged, and the point of the spear-head passed out under his jaw, at the ear.

My onset was so sudden and unexpected that he reeled back to the wall, and did not recover his equilibrium in time to prevent my dealing a second blow, which I did with my whole force. The point unfortunately struck the cuirass, near the neck, and glancing aside it inflicted but a flesh wound, tearing the skin and tendons along the throat.

He now grappled with me, strange to say, without uttering any cry of alarm; being a very powerful man, and if anything rather heavier and more strongly built than I, he succeeded in drawing me with him to the ground. We fell together with a heavy crash, tugging and straining in what we were both conscious was a mortal struggle. At length I succeeded in getting over him, and struck him twice more in the face; still he struggled with an energy which nothing but the tremendous stake at issue could have sustained.

I succeeded again in inflicting several more wounds upon him, any one of which might have been mortal. While thus contending he clutched his hands about my throat, so firmly that I felt the blood swelling the veins of my temples and face almost to bursting. Again and again I struck the weapon deep into his face and throat, but life seemed to adhere in him with an almost insect tenacity.

My sight now nearly failed, my senses almost forsook me; I felt upon the point of suffocation when, with one desperate effort, I struck him another and a last blow in the face. The weapon which I wielded had lighted upon the eye, and the point penetrated the brain; the body quivered under me, the deadly grasp relaxed, and Oliver lay upon the ground a corpse!

As I arose and shook the weapon and the bloody cloth from my hand, the moon which he had foretold I should never see rise, shone bright and broad into the room, and disclosed, with ghastly distinctness, the mangled features of the dead soldier; the mouth, full of clotting blood and broken teeth, lay open; the eye, close by whose lid the fatal wound had been inflicted, was not, as might have been expected, bathed in blood, but had started forth nearly from the socket, and gave to the face, by its fearful unlikeness to the other glazing orb, a leer more hideous and unearthly than fancy ever saw. The wig, with all its rich curls, had fallen with the hat to the floor, leaving the shorn head exposed, and in many places marked by the recent struggle; the rich lace cravat was drenched in blood, and the gay uniform in many places soiled with the same.

It is hard to say, with what feelings I looked upon the unsightly and revolting mass which had so lately been a living and a comely man. I had not any time, however, to spare for reflection; the deed was done – the responsibility was upon me, and all was registered in the book of that God who judges rightly.

With eager haste I removed from the body such of the military accoutrements as were necessary for the purpose of my disguise. I buckled on the sword, drew off the military boots, and donned them myself, placed the brigadier wig and cocked hat upon my head, threw on the cloak, drew it up about my face, and proceeded, with the papers which I found as the soldier had foretold me, and the key of the outer lobby, to the door of the guardroom; this I opened, and with a firm and rapid tread walked through the officers, who rose as I entered, and passed without question or interruption to the street door. Here I was met by the grim looking corporal, Hewson, who, saluting me, said:

“How soon, captain, shall the file be drawn out and the prisoner despatched?”

“In half an hour,” I replied, without raising my voice.

The man again saluted, and in two steps I reached the soldier who held the two horses, as he had intimated.

“Is all right?” said he, eagerly.

“Aye,” said I, “which horse am I to mount?”

He satisfied me upon this point, and I threw myself into the saddle; the soldier mounted his horse, and dashing the spurs into the flanks of the animal which I bestrode, we thundered along the narrow bridge. At the far extremity a sentinel, as we approached, called out, “Who goes there? stand, and give the word!” Heedless of the interruption, with my heart bounding with excitement, I dashed on, as did also the soldier who accompanied me.

“Stand, or I fire! give the word!” cried the sentry.

“God save the king, and to hell with the prince!” shouted I, flinging the cocked hat in his face as I galloped by.

The response was the sharp report of a carbine, accompanied by the whiz of a bullet, which passed directly between me and my comrade, now riding beside me.

“Hurrah!” I shouted; “try it again, my boy.”

And away we went at a gallop, which bid fair to distance anything like pursuit.

Never was spur more needed, however, for soon the clatter of horses’ hoofs, in full speed, crossing the bridge, came sharp and clear through the stillness of the night.

Away we went, with our pursuers close behind; one mile was passed, another nearly completed. The moon now shone forth, and, turning in the saddle, I looked back upon the road we had passed.

One trooper had headed the rest, and was within a hundred yards of us.

I saw the fellow throw himself from his horse upon the ground.

I knew his object, and said to my comrade:

“Lower your body – lie flat over the saddle; the fellow is going to fire.”

I had hardly spoken when the report of a carbine startled the echoes, and the ball, striking the hind leg of my companion’s horse, the poor animal fell headlong upon the road, throwing his rider head-foremost over the saddle.

My first impulse was to stop and share whatever fate might await my comrade; but my second and wiser one was to spur on, and save myself and my despatch.

I rode on at a gallop, turning to observe my comrade’s fate. I saw his pursuer, having remounted, ride rapidly up to him, and, on reaching the spot where the man and horse lay, rein in and dismount.

He was hardly upon the ground, when my companion shot him dead with one of the holster-pistols which he had drawn from the pipe; and, leaping nimbly over a ditch at the side of the road, he was soon lost among the ditches and thornbushes which covered that part of the country.

Another mile being passed, I had the satisfaction to perceive that the pursuit was given over, and in an hour more I crossed Thomond Bridge, and slept that night in the fortress of Limerick, having delivered the packet, the result of whose safe arrival was the destruction of William’s great train of artillery, then upon its way to the besiegers.

Years after this adventure, I met in France a young officer, who I found had served in Captain Oliver’s regiment; and he explained what I had never before understood – the motives of the man who had wrought my deliverance. Strange to say, he was the foster-brother of Oliver, whom he thus devoted to death, but in revenge for the most grievous wrong which one man can inflict upon another!

“Dublin University Magazine”, Feb. 1840

The Purcell Papers: Volume III (1880)

INDEX OF TITLES

A

An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street

An Adventure Of Hardress Fitzgerald

An Authentic Narrative of a Haunted House

B
The Banshee
Billy Malowney’s Taste of Love and Glory
Borrhomeo the Astrologer
The Bridal of Carrigvarah
C
Carmilla
A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family
The Child that Went with the Fairies
D
The Dead Sexton
Dickon the Devil
The Dream
The Drunkard’s Dream
E
The Earl’s Hall   [aka The Little Red Man]
The Evil Guest
F
The Familiar
The Fatal Bride
Footsteps in the Lobby
The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh
G
The Ghost and the Bone Setter
The Ghost of a Hand
Ghost Stories of Chapelizod
Ghost Stories of the Tiled House
The Governess’s Dream
Green Tea
H
The Haunted Baronet
A Haunted House
The Haunted House at Westminster
The House on Aungier Street
J
Jim Sulivan’s Adventures in the Great Snow
L
The Last Heir Of Castle Connor
Laura Silver Bell
The Legend of Dunblane
The Little Red Man   [The Earl’s Hall]
M
Madam Crowl’s Ghost
The Magician Earl
Moll Rial’s Adventure
Mr. Justice Harbottle
The Murdered Cousin
My Aunt Margaret’s Adventure
The Mysterious Lodger
N
Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand
A Night in the Bell Inn
P

Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess

Q
The Quare Gander
R
The Room in the Dragon Volant
S
Schalken the Painter
Schalken the Painter   [EARLY VERSION]
The Sexton’s Adventure
Sir Dominick’s Bargain

Some Account of the Latter Days of the Honourable Richard Marston of Dunoran

Spalatro
The Specter Lovers
Squire Toby’s Will

A Strange Adventure in the Life of Miss Laura Mildmay

Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter

Stories of Lough Guir
U
Ultor De Lacy
V
The Village Bully
The Vision of Tom Chuff
W
The White Cat of Drumgunniol
Wicked Captain Walshawe, of Wauling