The Green Chamber at Marlowe.
So the Baronet, with a rather dreary chuckle, said:--
"I don't think, to say truth, there is anything in it. I really can't
see why the plague I should bore myself about it. You know your pew in
the middle of the gallery, with that painted hatchment thing, you
know...."
"Respect the dead," said Lady Alice, looking down with a dry severity on
the table.
"Well, yes; I mean, you know, it is so confoundedly conspicuous, I can't
wonder at the two fellows, the old and young, staring a bit at it, and,
perhaps, at _you_, you know," said Sir Jekyl, in his impertinent vein.
"But I agree with you they are no ghosts, and I really shan't trouble my
head about them any more. I wonder I was such a fool--hey? But, as you
say, you know, it is unpleasant to be reminded of--of those things; it
can't be helped now, though."
"Now, nor ever," said Lady Alice, grimly.
"Exactly; neither now, nor ever," repeated Sir Jekyl; "and we both know
it can't possibly be poor--I mean anyone concerned in that transaction;
so the likeness must be accidental, and therefore of no earthly
significance--eh?"
Lady Alice, with elevated brows, fiddled in silence with some crumbs on
the table with the tip of her thin finger.
"I suppose Beatrix is ready; may I ring the bell?"
"Oh! here she is. Now, bid grandmamma good-night," said the Baronet.
So slim and pretty Beatrix, in her cloak, stooped down and placed her
arms about the neck of the old lady, over whose face came a faint flush
of tender sunset, and her old grey eyes looked very kindly on the
beautiful young face that stooped over her, as she said, in a tone that,
however, was stately--
"Good-bye, my dear child; you are warm enough--you are certain?"
"Oh! yes, dear grandmamma--my cloak, and this Cashmere thing."
"Well, darling, good-night. You'll not forget to write--you'll not fail?
Good-night, Beatrix, dear--good-bye."
"Good-night," said the Baronet, taking the tips of her cold fingers
together, and addressing himself to kiss her cheek, but she drew back in
one of her whims, and said, stiffly, "There, not to-night. Good-bye,
Jekyl."
"Well," chuckled he, after his wont, "another time; but mind, you're to
come to Marlowe."
He did not care to listen to what she replied, but he called from the
stairs, as he ran down after his daughter--
"Now, mind, I won't let you off this time; you really must come.
Good-night, _au revoir_--good-night."
I really think that exemplary old lady hated the Baronet, who called her
"little mamma," and invited her every year, without meaning it, most
good-naturedly, to join his party under the ancestral roof-tree. He took
a perverse sort of pleasure in these affectionate interviews, in
fretting her not very placid temper--in patting her, as it were,
wherever there was a raw, and in fondling her against the grain; so that
his caresses were cruel, and their harmony, such as it was, amounted to
no more than a flimsy deference to the scandalous world.
But Sir Jekyl knew that there was nothing in this quarter to be gained
in love by a different tactique; there was a dreadful remembrance, which
no poor lady has ostrich power to digest, in the way; it lay there,
hard, cold, and irreducible; and the morbid sensation it produced was
hatred. He knew that "little mamma," humanly speaking, ought to hate
him. His mother indeed she was not; but only the step-mother of his
deceased wife. Mother-in-law is not always a very sweet relation, but
with the prefix "step" the chances are, perhaps, worse.
There was, however, as you will by-and-by see, a terrible accident, or
something, always remembered, gliding in and out of Wardlock Manor like
the Baronet's double, walking in behind him when he visited her, like
his evil genius, and when they met affectionately, standing by his
shoulder, black and scowling, with clenched fist.
Now pretty Beatrix sat in the right corner of the chariot, and Sir
Jekyl, her father, in the left. The lamps were lighted, and though there
was moonlight, for they had a long stretch of road always dark, because
densely embowered in the forest of Penlake. Tier over tier, file behind
file, nodding together, the great trees bent over like plumed warriors,
and made a solemn shadow always between their ranks.
Marlowe was quite new to Beatrix; but still too distant, twelve miles
away, to tempt her to look out and make observations as she would on a
nearer approach.
"You don't object to my smoking a cigar, Beatrix? The smoke goes out of
the window, you know," said the Baronet, after they had driven about a
mile in silence.
What young lady, so appealed to by a parent, ever did object? The fact
is, Sir Jekyl did not give himself the trouble to listen to her answer,
but was manifestly thinking of something quite different, as he lighted
his match.
When he threw his last stump out of the window they were driving through
Penlake Forest, and the lamplight gleamed on broken rows of wrinkled
trunks and ivy.
"I suppose she told you all about it?" said he, suddenly pursuing his
own train of thought.
"Who?" inquired Beatrix.
"I never was a particular favourite of her's, you know--grandmamma's, I
mean. She does not love me, poor old woman! And she has a knack of
making herself precious disagreeable, in which I try to imitate her,
for peace' sake, you know; for, by George, if I was not uncivil now and
then, we could never get on at all."
Sir Jekyl chuckled after his wont, as it were, between the bars of this
recitative, and he asked--
"What were the particulars--the adventure on Sunday--that young fellow,
you know?"
Miss Beatrix had heard no such interrogatory from her grandmamma, whose
observations in the church-aisle were quite as unknown to her; and thus
far the question of Sir Jekyl was a shock.
"Did not grandmamma tell you about it?" he pursued.
"About what, papa?" asked Beatrix, who was glad that it was dark.
"About her illness--a young fellow in a pew down in the aisle staring at
her. By Jove! one would have fancied that sort of thing pretty well
over. Tell me all about it."
The fact was that this was the first she had heard of it.
"Grandmamma told me nothing of it," said she.
"And did not you see what occurred? Did not you see him staring?" asked
he.
Beatrix truly denied.
"You young ladies are always thinking of yourselves. So you saw nothing,
and have nothing to tell? That will do," said Sir Jekyl, drily; and
silence returned.
Beatrix was relieved on discovering that her little adventure was
unsuspected. Very little was there in it, and nothing to reflect blame
upon her. From her exaggeration of its importance, and her quailing as
she fancied her father was approaching it, I conclude that the young
gentleman had interested her a little.
And now, as Sir Jekyl in one corner of the rolling chariot brooded in
the dark over his disappointed conjectures, so did pretty Beatrix in the
other speculate on the sentences which had just fallen from his lips,
and long to inquire some further particulars, but somehow dared not.
Could that tall and handsome young man, who had come to her rescue so
unaccountably--the gentleman with those large, soft, dark eyes, which
properly belong to heroes--have been the individual whose gaze had so
mysteriously affected her grandmamma? What could the associations have
been that were painful enough so to overcome that grim, white woman? Was
he a relation? Was he an outcast member of that proud family? Or, was he
that heir-at-law, or embodied Nemesis, that the yawning sea or grave
will sometimes yield up to plague the guilty or the usurper?
For all or any of these parts he seemed too young. Yet Beatrix fancied
instinctively that he could be no other than the basilisk who had
exercised so strange a spell over her grim, but withal kind old
kinswoman.
Was there not, she thought, something peculiar in the look he threw
across the windows of old stone-fronted Wardlock manor--reserved,
curious, half-smiling--as if he looked on an object which he had often
heard described, and had somehow, from personal associations or
otherwise, an interest in? It was but a momentary glance just as he took
his leave; but there was, she thought, that odd character in it.
By this time the lamps were flashing on the village windows and
shop-fronts; and at the end of the old gabled street, under a canopy of
dark trees, stood the great iron gate of Marlowe.
Sir Jekyl rubbed the glass and looked out when they halted at the gate.
The structures of his fancy had amused him, rather fearfully indeed, and
he was surprised to find that they were entering the grounds of Marlowe
so soon.
He did not mind looking out, or speaking to the old gamekeeper, who
pulled open the great barriers, but lay back in his corner sullenly, in
the attitude of a gentleman taking a nap.
Beatrix, however, looked out inquisitively, and saw by the misty
moonlight a broad level studded with majestic timber--singly, in clumps,
and here and there in solemn masses; and soon rose the broad-fronted
gabled house before them, with its steep roofs and its hospitable clumps
of twisted chimneys showing black against the dim sky.
Miss Marlowe's maid, to whom the scene was quite as new as to her
mistress, descended from the back seat, in cloaks and mufflers, and
stood by the hall-door steps, that shone white in the moonlight, before
their summons had been answered.
Committing his daughter to her care, the Baronet--who was of a bustling
temperament, and never drank tea except from motives of
gallantry--called for Mrs. Gwynn, the housekeeper, who presently
appeared.
She was an odd-looking woman--some years turned of fifty, thin, with a
longish face and a fine, white, glazed skin. There was something queer
about her eyes: you soon discovered it to arise from their light colour
and something that did not quite match in their pupils.
On entering the hall, where the Baronet had lighted a candle, having
thrown his hat on the table, and merely loosed his muffler and one or
two buttons of his outside coat, she smiled a chill gleam of welcome
with her pale lips, and dropped two sharp little courtesies.
"Well, old Donica, and how do ye do?" said the Baronet, smiling, with a
hand on each thin grey silk shoulder. "Long time since I saw you. But,
egad! you grow younger and younger, you pretty old rogue;" and he gave
her pale, thin cheek a playful tap with his fingers.
"Pretty well, please, Sir Jekyl, thank ye," she replied, receding a
little with dry dignity. "Very welcome, sir, to Marlowe. Miss Beatrix
looks very well, I am happy to see; and you, sir, also."
"And you're glad to see us, I know?"
"Certainly, sir, glad to see you," said Mrs. Gwynn, with another short
courtesy.
"The servants not all come? No, nor Ridley with the plate. He'll arrive
to-morrow; and--and we shall have the house full in little more than a
week. Let us go up and look at the rooms; I forget them almost, by
Jove--I really do--it's so long since. Light you another, and we'll do
very well."
"You'll see them better by daylight, sir. I kept everything well aired
and clean. The house looks wonderful--it do," replied Mrs. Gwynn,
accompanying the Baronet up the broad oak stairs.
"If it looks as fresh as you, Donica, it's a miracle of a house--egad!
you're a wonder. How you skip by my side, with your little taper, like a
sylph in a ballet, egad!"
"You wear pretty well yourself, Sir Jekyl," drily remarked the
white-faced sylph, who had a sharp perpendicular line between her
eyebrows, indicative of temper.
"So they tell me, by Jove. We're pretty well on though, Donnie--eh?
Everyone knows my age--printed, you know, in the red book. You've the
advantage of me there--eh, Don?"
"I'm just fifty-six, sir, and I don't care if all the world knewd it."
"All the world's curious, I dare say, on the point; but I shan't tell
them, old Gwynn," said Sir Jekyl.
"Curious or no, sir, it's just the truth, and I don't care to hide it.
Past that folly now, sir, and I don't care if I wor seventy, and a
steppin' like a--"
"A sylph," supplied he.
"Yes--a sylph--into my grave. It's a bad world, and them that's suffered
in it soon tires on it, sir."
"_You_ have not had a great deal to trouble you. Neither chick, nor
child, nor husband, egad! So here we are."
They were now standing on the gallery, at the head of the great
staircase.
"These are the rooms your letter says are not furnished--eh? Let us come
to the front gallery."
So, first walking down the gallery in which they were, to the right, and
then entering a passage by a turn on the left, they reached the front
gallery which runs parallel to that at the head of the stairs.
"Where have you put Beatrix?"
"She wished the room next mine, please, sir, up-stairs," answered the
housekeeper.
"Near the front--eh?"
"The left side, please, sir, as you look from the front," replied she.
"_From_ the front?" he repeated.
"From the front," she reiterated.
"Over there, then?" he said, pointing upward to the left.
"That will be about it, sir," she answered.
"How many rooms have we here in a row?" he asked, facing down the
gallery, with its file of doors at each side.
"Four bed-rooms and three dressing-rooms at each side."
"Ay, well now, I'll tell you who's coming, and how to dispose of them."
So Sir Jekyl quartered his friends, as he listed, and then said he--
"And the large room at the other end, here to the right--come along."
And Sir Jekyl marched briskly in the direction indicated.
"Please, sir," said the slim, pale housekeeper, with the odd leer in her
eye, overtaking him quietly.
"Ay, here it is," said he, not minding her, and pushing open the door of
a dressing-room at the end of the gallery. "Inside this, I remember."
"But that's the green chamber, sir," continued Mrs. Gwynn, gliding
beside him as he traversed the floor.
"The room we call Sir Harry's room, I know--capital room--eh?"
"I don't suppose," began the pale lady, with a sinister sharpness.
"Well?" he demanded, looking down in her face a little grimly.
"It's the green chamber, sir," she said, with a hard emphasis.
"You said so before, eh?" he replied.
"And I did not suppose, sir, you'd think of putting anyone there," she
continued.
"Then you're just as green as the chamber," said Sir Jekyl, with a
chuckle.
And he entered the room, holding the candle high in air, and looking
about him a little curiously, the light tread and sharp pallid face of
Donica Gwynn following him.