Concerning two Remarkable Persons who appeared in Wardlock Church.
Lady Alice carried her thin Roman nose some degrees higher; but she
said--
"If I say anything disagreeable, it is not for the pleasure of giving
you pain, Jekyl Marlowe; but I understand that you mean to have old
General Lennox and his artful wife to stay at your house, and if so, I
think it an arrangement that had better be dispensed with. I don't think
her an eligible acquaintance for Beatrix, and you know very well she's
_not_--and it is not a respectable or creditable kind of thing."
"Now, what d--d fool, I beg pardon--but who the plague has been filling
your mind with those ridiculous stories--my dear little mamma? You know
how ready I am to confess; you _might_ at least; I tell you everything;
and I do assure you I _never_ admired her. She's good looking, I know;
but so are fifty pictures and statues I've seen, that don't please me."
"Then it's true, the General and his wife are going on a visit to
Marlowe?" insisted Lady Alice, drily.
"No, they are not. D---- me, I'm not thinking of the General and his
wife, nor of any such d--d trumpery. I'd give something to know who the
devil's taking these cursed liberties with my name."
"Pray, Jekyl Marlowe, command your language. It can't the least signify
who tells me; but you see I do sometimes get a letter."
"Yes, and a precious letter too. Such a pack of lies did any human being
ever hear fired off in a sentence before? I'm _épris_ of Mrs. General
Lennox. Thumper number one! She's a lady of--I beg pardon--easy virtue.
Thumper number two! and I invite her and her husband down to Marlowe, to
make love of course to her, and to fight the old General. Thumper number
three!"
And the Baronet chuckled over the three "thumpers" merrily.
"Don't talk slang, if you please--gentlemen don't, at least in
addressing ladies."
"Well, then, I won't; I'll speak just as you like, only you must not
blow me up any more; for really there is no cause, and we here only two
or three minutes together, you know; and I want to tell you something,
or rather to ask you--do you ever hear anything of those _Deverells_,
you know?"
Lady Alice looked quite startled, and turned quickly half round in her
chair, with her eyes on Sir Jekyl's face. The Baronet's smile subsided,
and he looked with a dark curiosity in hers. A short but dismal silence
followed.
"You've heard from them?"
"No!" said the lady, with little change in the expression of her face.
"Well, _of_ them?"
"No," she repeated; "but _why_ do you ask? It's _very_ strange!"
"_What's_ strange? Come, now, you _have_ something to say; tell me what
it is."
"I wonder, Jekyl, you ask for them, in the first place."
"Well--well, of course; but what next?" murmured the Baronet, eagerly:
"why is it so strange?"
"Only because I've been thinking of them--a great deal--for the last few
days; and it seemed very odd your asking; and in fact I fancy the same
thing has happened to us both."
"Well, may be; but what _is_ it?" demanded the Baronet, with a sinister
smile.
"I have been startled; most painfully and powerfully affected; I have
seen the most extraordinary resemblance to my beautiful, _murdered_
Guy."
She rose, and wept passionately, standing with her face buried in her
handkerchief.
Sir Jekyl frowned with closed eyes and upturned face, waiting like a
patient man bored to death, for the subsidence of the storm which he had
conjured up. Very pale, too, was that countenance, and contracted for a
few moments with intense annoyance.
"I saw the same fellow," said the Baronet, in a subdued tone, so soon as
there was a subsidence, "this evening; he's at that little inn on the
Sterndale Road. Guy Strangways he calls himself; I talked with him for a
few minutes; a gentlemanly young man; and I don't know what to make of
it. So I thought I'd ask you whether _you_ could help me to a guess;
and that's all."
The old lady shook her head.
"And I don't think you need employ quite such hard terms," he said.
"I don't want to speak of it at all," said she; "but if I do I can't say
less; nor I won't--no, never!"
"You see it's very odd, those two names," said Sir Jekyl, not minding;
"and as you say, the likeness so astonishing--I--I--what do _you_ think
of it?"
"Of course it's an accident," said the old lady.
"I'm glad you think so," said he, abruptly.
"Why, what could it be? you don't believe in apparitions?" she replied,
with an odd sort of dryness.
"I rather think not," said he; "I meant he left no very near relation,
and I fancied those Deverell people might have contrived some trick, or
intended some personation, or something, and I thought that you,
perhaps, had heard something of their movements."
"Nothing--what could they have done, or why should they have sought to
make any such impression? I don't understand it. It is very
extraordinary. But the likeness in church amazed and shocked me, and
made me ill."
"In church, you say?" repeated Sir Jekyl.
"Yes, in church," and she told him in her own way, what I shall tell in
mine, as follows:--
Last Sunday she had driven, in her accustomed state, with Beatrix, to
Wardlock church. The church was hardly five hundred yards away, and the
day bright and dry. But Lady Alice always arrived and departed in the
coach, and sat in the Redcliffe seat, in the centre of the gallery. She
and Beatrix sat face to face at opposite sides of the pew.
As Lady Alice looked with her cold and steady glance over the
congregation in the aisle, during the interval of silence that precedes
the commencement of the service, a tall and graceful young man, with an
air of semi-foreign fashion, entered the church, accompanied by an
elderly gentleman, of whom she took comparatively little note.
The young man and his friend were ushered into a seat confronting the
gallery. Lady Alice gazed and gazed transfixed with astonishment and
horror. The enamelled miniature on her bosom was like; but there, in
that clear, melancholy face, with its large eyes and wavy hair, was a
resurrection. In that animated sculpture were delicate tracings and
touches of nature's chisel, which the artist had failed to represent,
which even memory had neglected to fix, but which all now returned with
the startling sense of identity in a moment.
She had put on her gold spectacles, as she always did on taking her
seat, and opened her "Morning Service," bound in purple Russia, with its
golden clasp and long ribbons fringed with the same precious metal, with
the intent to mark the proper psalms and lessons at her haughty leisure.
She therefore saw the moving image of her dead son before her, with an
agonizing distinctness that told like a blight of palsy on her face.
She saw his elderly companion also distinctly. A round-shouldered man,
with his short caped cloak still on. A grave man, with a large, high,
bald forehead, a heavy, hooked nose, and great hanging moustache and
beard. A dead and ominous face enough, except for the piercing glance of
his full eyes, under very thick brows, and just the one you would have
chosen out of a thousand portraits, for a plotting high-priest or an old
magician.
This magus fixed his gaze on Lady Alice, not with an ostentation of
staring, but sternly from behind the dark embrasure of his brows; and
leaning a little sideways, whispered something in the ear of his young
companion, whose glance at the same moment was turned with a dark and
fixed interest upon the old lady.
It was a very determined stare on both sides, and of course ill-bred,
but mellowed by distance. The congregation were otherwise like other
country congregations, awaiting the offices of their pastor, decent,
listless, while this great stare was going on, so little becoming the
higher associations and solemn aspect of the place. It was, with all its
conventional screening, a fierce, desperate scrutiny, cutting the dim
air with a steady congreve fire that crossed and glared unintermittent
by the ears of deceased gentlemen in ruffs and grimy doublets, at their
posthumous devotions, and brazen knights praying on their backs, and
under the eyes of all the gorgeous saints, with glories round their
foreheads, in attitudes of benediction or meekness, who edified
believers from the eastern window.
Lady Alice drew back in her pew. Beatrix was in a young-lady reverie,
and did not observe what was going on. There was nothing indeed to make
it very conspicuous. But when she looked at Lady Alice, she was shocked
at her appearance, and instantly crossed, and said--
"I am afraid you are ill, grandmamma; shall we come away?"
The old lady made no answer, but got up and took the girl's arm, and
left the seat very quietly. She got down the gallery stairs, and halted
at the old window on the landing, and sate there a little, ghastly and
still mute.
The cold air circulating upward from the porch revived her.
"I am better, child," said she, faintly.
"Thank Heaven," said the girl, whose terror at her state proved how
intensely agitated the old lady must have been.
Mrs. Wrattles, the sextoness, emerging at that moment with repeated
courtesies, and whispered condolence and inquiries, Lady Alice, with a
stiff condescension, prayed her to call her woman, Mason, to her.
So Lady Alice, leaning slenderly on Mason's stout arm, insisted that
Beatrix should return and sit out the service; and she herself, for the
first time within the memory of man, returned from Wardlock church on
foot, instead of in her coach. Beatrix waited until the congregation had
nearly disgorged itself and dispersed, before making her solitary
descent.
When she came down, without a chaperon, at the close of the rector's
discourse, the floured footman in livery, with his gold-headed cane,
stood as usual at the coach door only to receive her, and convey the
order to the coachman, "home."
The churchyard gate, as is usual, I believe, in old places of that kind,
opens at the south side, and the road to Wardlock manor leads along the
churchyard wall and round the corner of it at a sharp angle just at the
point where the clumsy old stone mausoleum or vault of the Deverell
family overlooks the road, with its worn pilasters and beetle-browed
cornice.
Now that was a Sunday of wonders. It had witnessed Lady Alice's
pedestrian return from church, an act of humiliation, almost of penance,
such as the memory of Wardlock could furnish no parallel to; and now it
was to see another portent, for her ladyship's own gray horses, fat and
tranquil beasts, who had pulled her to and from church for I know not
how many years, under the ministration of the careful coachman, with
exemplary sedateness, on this abnormal Sabbath took fright at a musical
performance of two boys, one playing the Jew's harp and the other
drumming tambourine-wise on his hat, and _suadente diabolo_ and so
forth, set off at a gallop, to the terror of all concerned, toward home.
Making the sharp turn of the road, where the tomb of the Deverells
overhangs it from the churchyard, the near-gray came down, and his
off-neighbour reared and plunged frightfully.
The young lady did not scream, but, very much terrified, she made
voluble inquiries of the air and hedges from the window, while the
purple coachman pulled hard from the box, and spoke comfortably to his
horses, and the footman, standing out of reach of danger, talked also in
his own vein.
Simultaneously with all this, as if emerging from the old mausoleum,
there sprang over the churchyard fence, exactly under its shadow, that
young man who had excited emotions so various in the Baronet and in Lady
Alice, and seized the horse by the head with both hands, and so
cooperated that in less than a minute the two horses were removed from
the carriage, and he standing, hat in hand, before the window, to assure
the young lady that all was quite safe now.
So she descended, and the grave footman, with the Bible and Prayer-book,
followed her steps with his gold-headed rod of office, while the lithe
and handsome youth, his hat still in air which stirred his rich curls,
walked beside her with something of that romantic deference which in one
so elegant and handsome has an inexpressible sentiment of the tender in
it.
He walked to the door of Wardlock Manor, and I purposely omit all he
said, because I doubt whether it would look as well in this
unexceptionable type as it sounded from his lips in Beatrix Marlowe's
pretty ear.
If the speaker succeed with his audience, what more can oratory do for
him? Well! he was gone. There remained in Beatrix's ear a music; in her
fancy a heaven-like image--a combination of tint, and outline, and
elegance, which made every room and scene without it lifeless, and every
other object homely. These little untold impressions are of course
liable to fade and vanish pretty quickly in absence, and to be
superseded even sooner. Therefore it would be unwarranted to say that
she was in love, although I can't deny that she was haunted by that
slightly foreign young gentleman.
This latter portion of the adventure was not divulged by old Lady Alice,
because Beatrix, I suppose, forgot to tell her, and she really knew
nothing about it. All the rest, her own observation and experience, she
related with a grim and candid particularity.