Dinner.
Of the two guests destined for the green chamber, we must be permitted
to make special mention.
General and Lady Jane Lennox had come. The General, a tall, soldier-like
old gentleman, who held his bald and pink, but not very high forehead,
erect, with great grey projecting moustache, twisted up at the corners,
and bristling grey eyebrows to correspond, over his frank round grey
eyes--a gentleman with a decidedly military bearing, imperious but
kindly of aspect, good-natured, prompt, and perhaps a little stupid.
Lady Jane--everybody knows Lady Jane--the most admired of London belles
for a whole season. Golden brown hair, and what young Thrumly of the
Guards called, in those exquisite lines of his, "slumbrous eyes of
blue," under very long lashes and exquisitely-traced eyebrows, such
brilliant lips and teeth, and such a sweet oval face, and above all, so
beautiful a figure and wonderful a waist, might have made one marvel how
a lady so well qualified for a title, with noble blood, though but a
small _dot_, should have wrecked herself on an old general, though with
eight thousand a year. But there were stories and reasons why the
simple old officer, just home from India, who knew nothing about London
lies, and was sure of his knighthood, and it was said of a baronetage,
did not come amiss.
There were people who chose to believe these stories, and people who
chose to discredit them. But General Lennox never had even heard them;
and certainly, it seemed nobody's business to tell him now. It might not
have been quite pleasant to tell the General. He was somewhat muddled of
apprehension, and slow in everything but fighting; and having all the
old-fashioned notions about hair-triggers, and "ten paces," as the
proper ordeal in a misunderstanding, people avoided uncomfortable topics
in his company, and were for the most part disposed to let well alone.
Lady Jane had a will and a temper; but the General held his ground
firmly. As brave men as he have been henpecked; but somehow he was not
of the temperament which will submit to be bullied even by a lady; and
as he was indulgent and easily managed, that tactique was the line she
had adopted. Lady Jane was not a riant beauty. Luxurious, funeste,
sullen, the mystery and melancholy of her face was a relief among the
smirks and simpers of the ball-room, and the novelty of the style
interested for a time even the _blazé_ men of twenty seasons.
Several guests of lesser note there were; and the company had sat down
to dinner, when the Reverend Dives Marlowe, rector of the succulent
family living of Queen's Chorleigh, made his appearance in the parlour,
a little to the surprise of his brother the Baronet, who did not expect
him quite so soon.
The Rector was a tall man and stalwart, who had already acquired that
convex curve which indicates incipient corpulence, and who, though
younger than his brother, looked half a dozen years his senior. With a
broad bald forehead, projecting eyebrows, a large coarse mouth, and with
what I may term the rudiments of a double chin--altogether an ugly and
even repulsive face, but with no lack of energy and decision--one looked
with wonder from this gross, fierce, clerical countenance to the fine
outlines and proportions of the Baronet's face, and wondered how the two
men could really be brothers.
The cleric shook his brother's hand in passing, and smiled and nodded
briefly here and there, right and left, and across the table his
recognition, and chuckled a harsher chuckle than his brother's, as he
took his place, extemporized with the quiet legerdemain of a consummate
butler by Ridley; and answered in a brisk, abrupt voice the smiling
inquiries of friends.
"Hope you have picked up an appetite on the way, Dives," said the
Baronet. Dives generally carried a pretty good one about with him. "Good
air on the way, and pretty good mutton here, too--my friends tell me."
"Capital air--capital mutton--capital fish," replied the ecclesiastic,
in a brisk, business-like tone, while being a man of nerve, he got some
fish, although that esculent had long vanished, and even the entrées had
passed into history, and called over his shoulder for the special
sauces which his soul loved, and talked, and compounded his condiments
with energy and precision.
The Rector was a shrewd and gentlemanlike, though not a very pretty,
apostle, and had made a sufficient toilet before presenting himself, and
snapped and gobbled his fish, in a glossy, single-breasted coat, with
standing collar; a ribbed silk waistcoat, covering his ample chest,
almost like a cassock, and one of those transparent muslin dog-collars
which High Churchmen affect.
"Well, Dives," cried Sir Jekyl, "how do the bells ring? I gave them a
chime, poor devils" (this was addressed to Lady Blunket at his elbow),
"by way of compensation, when I sent them Dives."
"Pretty well; they don't know how to pull 'em, I think, quite," answered
Dives, dabbing a bit of fish in a pool of sauce, and punching it into
shape with his bit of bread. "And how is old Parson Moulders?" continued
the Baronet, pleasantly.
"I haven't heard," said the Hector, and drank off half his glass of
hock.
"Can't believe it, Dives. Here's Lady Blunket knows. He's the aged
incumbent of Droughton. A devilish good living in my gift; and of course
you've been asking how the dear old fellow is."
"I haven't, upon my word; not but I ought, though," said the Rev. Dives
Marlowe, as if he did not see the joke.
"He's very severe on you," simpered fat Lady Blunket, faintly, across
the table, and subsided with a little cough, as if the exertion hurt
her.
"Is he? Egad! I never perceived it." The expression was not clerical,
but the speaker did not seem aware he had uttered it. "How dull I must
be! Have you ever been in this part of the world before, Lady Jane?"
continued he, turning towards General Lennox's wife, who sat beside him.
"I've been to Wardlock, a good many years ago; but that's a long way
from this, and I almost forget it," answered Lady Jane, in her languid,
haughty way.
"In what direction is Wardlock," she asked of Beatrix, raising her
handsome, unfathomable eyes for a moment.
"You can see it from the bow-window of your room--I mean that
oddly-shaped hill to the right."
"That's from the green chamber," said the Rector. "I remember the view.
Isn't it?"
"Yes. They have put Lady Jane in the haunted room," said Beatrix,
smiling and nodding to Lady Jane.
"And what fool, pray, told you that," said the Baronet, perhaps just a
little sharply.
"Old Gwynn seems to think so," answered Beatrix, with the surprised and
frightened look of one who fancies she has made a blunder. "I--of course
we know it is all folly."
"You must not say that--you shan't disenchant us," said Lady Jane.
"There's nothing I should so like as a haunted room; it's a charming
idea--isn't it, Arthur?" she inquired of the General.
"We had a haunted room in my quarters at Puttypoor," observed the
General, twiddling the point of one of his moustaches. "It was the
store-room where we kept pickles, and olives, and preserves, and plates,
and jars, and glass bottles. And every night there was a confounded
noise there; jars, and bottles, and things tumbling about, made a devil
of a row, you know. I got Smith--my servant Smith, you know, a very
respectable man--uncommon steady fellow, Smith--to watch, and he did. We
kept the door closed, and Smith outside. I gave him half-a-crown a night
and his supper--very well for Smith, you know. Sometimes he kept a
light, and sometimes I made him sit in the dark with matches ready."
"Was not he very much frightened?" asked Beatrix, who was deeply
interested in the ghost.
"I hope you gave him a smelling-bottle?" inquired Tom Linnett, with a
tender concern.
"Well, I don't suppose he was," said the General, smiling
good-humouredly on pretty Beatrix, while he loftily passed by the
humorous inquiry of the young gentleman. "He was, in fact, on dooty, you
know; and there were occasional noises and damage done in the
store-room--in fact, just the same as if Smith was not there."
"Oh, possibly Smith himself among the bottles!" suggested Linnett.
"He always got in as quick as he could," continued the General; "but
could not see anyone. Things were broken--bottles sometimes."
"How very strange," exclaimed Beatrix, charmed to hear the tale of
wonder.
"We could not make it out; it was very odd, you know," resumed the
narrator.
"_You_ weren't frightened, General?" inquired Linnett.
"_No_, sir," replied the General, who held that a soldier's courage,
like a lady's reputation, was no subject for jesting, and conveyed that
sentiment by a slight pause, and a rather alarming stare from under his
fierce grey eyebrows. "No one was frightened, I suppose; we were all men
in the house, sir."
"At home, I think, we'd have suspected a rat or a cat," threw in the
Rector.
"Some did, sir," replied the General; "and we made a sort of a search;
but it wasn't. There was a capital tiled floor, not a hole you could put
a ramrod in; and no cat, neither--high windows, grated; and the door
always close; and every now and then something broken by night."
"Delightful! That's what Mrs. Crowe, in that charming book, you know,
"The Night Side of Nature," calls, I forget the name; but it's a German
word, I think--the noisy ghost it means. Racket--something, isn't it,
Beet?" (the short for Beatrix). "I do so _devour_ ghosts!" cried sharp
old Miss Blunket, who thought Beatrix's enthusiasm became her; and chose
to exhibit the same pretty fanaticism.
"I didn't _say_ it was a ghost, mind ye," interposed the General, with a
grave regard for his veracity; "only we were puzzled a bit. There _was_
something there we all knew; and something that could reach up to the
high shelves, and break things on the floor too, you see. We had been
watching, off and on, I think, some three or four weeks, and I heard one
night, early, a row in the store-room--a devil of a row it was; but
Smith was on dooty, as we used to say, that night, so I left it to him;
and he could have sung out, you know, if he wanted help--poor fellow!
And in the morning my native fellow told me that poor Smith was dead in
the store-room; and, egad! so he was, poor fellow!"
"How awful!" exclaimed Beatrix.
And Miss Blunket, in girlish horror, covered her fierce black eyes with
her lank fingers.
"A bite of a cobra, by Jove! above the knee, and another on the hand. A
fattish fellow, poor Smith, the natives say they go faster--that sort of
man; but no one can stand a fair bite of a cobra--I defy you. We killed
him after."
"What! _Smith?_" whispered Linnett in his neighbour's ear.
"He lay in a basket; you never saw such a brute," continued the General;
"he was very near killing another of my people."
"So _there_ was your ghost?" said Doocey, archly.
"Worse than a ghost," observed Sir Paul Blunket.
"A dooced deal," acquiesced the General gravely.
"You're very much annoyed with vermin out there in India?" remarked Sir
Paul.
"So we are, sir," agreed the General.
"It's very hard, you see, to meet with a genuine ghost, Miss Marlowe;
they generally turn out impostors," said Doocey.
"I should like to think my room was haunted," said Lady Jane.
"Oh! _dear_ Lady Jane, how _can_ you be so _horribly_ brave?" cried Miss
Blunket.
"We have no cobras here, at all events," said Sir Paul, nodding to Sir
Jekyl, with the gravity becoming such a discovery.
"No," said Sir Jekyl, gloomily. I suppose he was thinking of something
else.
The ladies now floated away like summer clouds, many-tinted, golden,
through the door, which Doocey held gracefully open; and the mere
mortals of the party, the men, stood up in conventional adoration, while
the divinities were translated, as it were, before their eyes, and
hovered out of sight and hearing into the resplendent regions of
candelabra and mirrors, nectar and ambrosia, tea and plum-cake, and
clouds of silken tapestry, and the musical tinkling of their own
celestial small-talk.