TAKING THE SEALS OFF.
Marmaduke Heath came down to Fairburn according to his promise, but it
cost him a great effort. With every stage his spirits seemed to fall and
fail; and when Mrs. Myrtle at last clasped him in her arms--for Master
Marmaduke was ever a great favourite of hers, and the fact of his having
grown up and got married weighed with her not a feather--his wan face
was paler than when she had seen it last, notwithstanding its three
years of happiness and freedom. It was Christmas-time; the Rectory was a
bower of ivy and holly-berries; and just within the threshold, the
locality which the good housekeeper had chosen for her embrace, hung a
huge bough of mistletoe, the finest that could be found in all the
Chase. In the spotless kitchen, so exquisitely clean that you might, as
the phrase goes, "have eaten your dinner off the floor," if it had not
happened to have been a sanded one, there were preparations for
sumptuous feasting; a delightful fragrance, suggestive of mince-pies
with plenty of citron, pervaded Mrs. Myrtle's private parlour, where the
divine mysteries of Apicius were being celebrated. The little larder,
cold and immaculate as a dead sucking-pig ready for the spit, was
victualled with noble meats as for a siege; while monstrous pasties and
plum-puddings, too many for the broad stone slabs, reposed upon the
Dutch tiles that formed its carpet. It was not intended that the
inhabitants of the Rectory should eat all the good things themselves;
but it was a custom of Mr. Long, aided and abetted by Mrs. Myrtle, to
keep open house for about a fortnight at this festive period, and to
entertain certain worthy persons, who were old and indigent, in the
sanded kitchen daily. Attempts to edify the poor in those days were not
made so often as they are at present, but it was held essential by all
good Christian country folk to keep Christmas as a feast, and to see
that others kept it. I suppose Fairburn Hall was the only house in the
county where that blessed time was ignored and taken no account of; Sir
Massingberd had never suffered the slightest honour to be paid to it;
and his worthy deputy and _locum-tenens_, Richard Gilmore, treated it
with the like contumely.
The change from the bright little Rectory, with all its hospitable
preparations, to the gloomy grandeur of the masterless mansion, was
very striking, when we three crossed the road next morning, to take the
seals off, which Mr. Long had placed upon the principal rooms, and so,
as it were, to break the blockade caused by the baronet's disappearance.
The contrast began even with things without. Half one of the globes had
been sliced from its pedestal on one side of the great iron gates; and
in the very centre of the avenue, the grass grew long and rank. The
sun-dial was cracked and gaped in zigzag, an emblem of the uncertainty
that overhung the place. The heraldic beasts at the foot of the
entrance-steps were much more mutilated than when I had seen them last,
and had indeed only one stone fore-paw or claw between them. Disuse is
sister to Abuse, but still how comes it that mere absence should beget,
as it always does, such absolute Ruin? Had the Squire been at home the
last three years, the globe upon the pedestal would have been whole, the
dial flawless, the griffins with at least their larger limbs intact; and
yet no man was ever seen to work this mischief. When the great door
swung reluctantly back to admit the new possessor, he took my hand, and
bade me Welcome, but his tone was far from gay. Every glance he cast
around him evoked, I could see, some unpleasant association, and even,
perhaps, a vague terror.
There is something uncanny in exploring any dwelling the rooms of which
have been locked up and unvisited for years--places that have been once
consecrated to humanity, but have afterwards been given up to Solitude
and slow decay. Memories of their ancient inmates seem to hang gloomily
about them, like the cobweb in their corners; they are eloquent of
desertion and of death. The shriek of the mouse, and the singing of the
blue fly in the pane, have perhaps alone been heard there in the
interim; but there seem to have been other and ghostlier noises, which
cease at our approach. Who knows what eerie deeds our sudden intrusion
may have interrupted!
"What faces glimmered through the doors,
What footsteps trod the upper floors,"
ere we broke in! The peculiar circumstances under which our search was
made intensified these feelings in us three, and even Gilmore, who
accompanied us, was affected by them.
"O'er all there hung the shadow of a fear;
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said, as plain as whisper in the ear,
This place is _worse_ than haunted."
The library was the first room we entered, which, even in the palmiest
days of Fairburn Hall had been a dreary room, because the least in use.
Except Marmaduke himself, no one ever sat there; the wicked books, which
were the only sort read and patronized by Sir Massingberd, were all in
the Squire's private sitting-room, and the gaps in the shelves that
lined the present apartment, revealed that the Heaths had laid in a
considerable stock of them. Old Sir Wentworth, a miser in his old age,
had been a dunce in his youth, and was once heard openly to regret that
circumstance from the fact, that he was unable to peruse the loose
continental literature which his ancestors had provided for his
delectation, free of expense. In the rare cases when the Oak Parlour had
not sufficient accommodation for the guests of the missing Squire, they
had been wont to adjourn to the present apartment, to smoke and lounge
through half the night; but it bore no trace of having been so used.
Every chair and sofa were in their appointed place, as though they had
grown up like trees through the dusty carpet. Upon the tables and
mantelpieces, the dust had settled inches thick. The grate was laid
ready for lighting; but over the coals and sticks hung a sort of mildew,
that looked as if it would have defied a pine-torch to set light to it.
These things we remarked gradually, one by one, for the butler had only
opened the shutters of one window, and the extent of the apartment was
prodigious. The shelves were filled almost entirely with quartos--books
were not hand-books in those days--rich with plates, and "meadows of
margin;" you could not have sent a child on an errand to bring one of
them; if he had managed to extricate a tome at all by painfully
loosening it at head and foot, it might have fallen out and brained
him. A fourth of the entire stock was composed of books of Catholic
theology. "Those," observed Mr. Long, "are the most valuable things in
the library. Sir Nicholas is supposed to have won his bride by paying
that costly tribute to her faith. The illuminations are most rare and
splendid. Why, what is this, Gilmore? I can't get this volume down. It
seems stuck to the others."
The butler grinned maliciously. "I think you will find them all like
that, sir. There's nothing but the wood-backs left. The Squire disposed
of these books soon after Mr. Marmaduke left, and got this imitation
stuff put up instead."
Mr. Long broke out into wrathful indignation, but the young heir kept
silence, only smiling bitterly.
"Perhaps he was afraid that their heterodoxy might do his nephew harm,"
remarked I, rather tickled, I confess, by this characteristic fraud.
"No, sir," replied Gilmore, drily; "he merely observed, that, being
theological works, there was as much in them now as before."
"Impious wretch!" exclaimed the Rector. "See, he has bartered the
Fathers of the Church for a set of empty backgammon boards, and lettered
them with their venerable names."
"Here, however, is the Family Bible," said I; "he has not sold that."
The spider had spun his web across the sacred volume, but it opened
readily enough at the only place, perhaps, into which its late owner had
ever looked--the huge yellow fly-leaf, upon which were inscribed the
names of the later generations of the Heaths; Sir Massingberd's birth in
his father's own handwriting, and Sir Wentworth's death in that of his
son's, and only too probably his murderer's. The autograph was bold and
flaring, quite different from the crabbed hand of the parent, is which
the names of Gilbert Heath and Marmaduke's mother were also written, as
likewise that of Marmaduke himself. There was a little space beneath the
last; and the young heir, looking over my shoulder, pointed to it,
significantly; doubtless, it had been hoped by the last possessor of the
volume that this might one day have been filled up by the date of his
nephew's, demise.
We were about to leave the room, when Mr. Long suddenly exclaimed, "Nay,
let us try the secret way. You told me, I remember, that you did not
know of Jacob's ladder, Marmaduke. The spring lies in the index of
Josephus, a wooden volume, which perhaps put this notion of wholesale
'dumbies' into Sir Massingberd's head." This practical satire upon the
unpopularity of the Jewish historian was presently discovered, hidden
away upon one of those ground-floor shelves, which, if the enthusiastic
student investigates at all, it must be upon his knees. After a little
manipulation, the spring obeyed, and with a surly creak, as if in
protest, the whole compartment of shelves above moved slowly outward on
some hidden hinge, and disclosed the narrow stairs that ended in the
shepherdess of the state chamber. The steps were worm-eaten, and the
wall on both sides hung with moth-devoured and ragged tapestry.
Marmaduke shrank back, and gazed upon the aperture with abhorrence and
dismay. To what vile purposes might it not have been used, besides that
of attempting to overthrow a poor child's reason; nay, was it not
possible that what we had sought, yet feared to find for so long, might
be in this very place, where no eye could have looked or thought of
looking! Might it not have hidden there, and been imprisoned alive in
righteous retribution, by the very spring which had ministered to hate
and cruelty? "I went up here," said Mr. Long, divining the young man's
thoughts, "when I searched the house with Gilmore, and put on the seals.
I think we should climb Jacob's ladder, Marmaduke; as you will make the
Hall your home, it is well to leave no spot in it associated with any
unpleasantness, unfamiliar." So saying, the rector led the way, and we
all followed: there was some delay while he opened the door above, and
certainly it was not a cheerful position for us in the meantime, cooped
up in the darkness, with the arras touching us with its ghostly folds on
either side the narrow way; but I think that my tutor's advice was
good, and that his old pupil experienced a feeling of satisfaction when
the thing was done. Once more we stood together in that state bedroom
where Marmaduke had suffered such ghastly terrors when a boy.
"Shall I ever forget those nights!" muttered he with a shudder. "Can
this room ever be otherwise than hateful to me! It was here, as I sat
weak and ill in that arm-chair, that my uncle struck me for losing----.
Stay, now I remember it all. Remove this skirting-board, Gilmore; take
the poker; do not spare the rotting wood. Ay, there it is." A yellow
something lay amid the dust and rubbish, which on inspection turned out
to be a gold pencil-case. "That was lent me by my uncle, a dozen years
ago," said Marmaduke musing, "and he chastised me for losing it. It had
rolled under yonder skirting-board, but I was too terrified at the time
to recollect the fact. I wish I could forget things now. Undo the other
shutters, Richard. Light, more light."
And thus we let the blessed sunlight into all the shuttered rooms. It
glanced in galleries on knights in all their panoply, and smote the
steel upon their visors, as though the flame of battle once more darted
from their eyes; it made their tattered pennons blush again, and tipped
their rusted spears with sudden fire. It flashed upon the stern
ancestral faces on the wall, and through their dust evoked a look of
life. That winter sun had not the power to warm, however; all things
struck cold. The dark oak-pannels chilled us from their waveless depths;
the cumbrous organ, carved with fruit and flowers, kept frozen silence;
while in the chapel, Sir Nicholas in stone and mildew struck to our
marrow. His lady opposite, upon her knees in her "devout oratory," gave
us cold looks, as though we had interrupted her devotions. In vain the
painted windows, high and triple arched, cast down "warm gules" upon her
marble breast, and filled the sacred place with glorious hues. In vain
the gilded scroll, "Praie for hys Soule," appealed to us through dust
and damp, and his memorial pane blushed scarlet in its endeavour to
perpetuate his infamy. All things seemed cursed in that accursed house;
the hallowed places desecrated, and those where hospitality and good
fellowship were meant to reign, solitary and barren. There was one
apartment still which had been left by common consent to be visited last
of all--Sir Massingberd's oak parlour. There he might have been said to
have lived, for it was the only sitting-room he used from early
morning--and he was no great sleeper--until very late at night. There,
as we have seen, he had held his audiences, and dined, and sometimes
slept after any deep debauch. By all the household, except Gilmore, it
was held as a Bluebeard's chamber, and would not have been entered upon
any account, even had it not had the rector's seal upon it. It was here
that the lost baronet had passed his last hours within the house, and
thither he had intended to return--if he had meant to return at
all--before he retired for the night. The butler entered it first, and
let the light in; then Mr. Long, then I, then Marmaduke. Although I had
been there once before, I scarcely recognized the place, for upon that
occasion the squire himself had occupied it, and I had had no eyes
except for him. It was doubtless a comfortable room enough when the
fire was shining on its polished walls, and the red curtains snugly
drawn over the windows; but with that thin December light--for it was
afternoon by this time--creeping coldly in upon the three-year-old ashes
of the burnt-out fire, and on the panels, smeared with spots and stains,
it was very cheerless:
"There was no sign of life, save one:
The subtle spider, that from overhead
Hung like a spy on human guilt and error,
Suddenly turned, and up its slender thread,
Ran with a nimble terror."
This insect had woven its webs in every nook and cranny, in readiness
for the prey that rarely came, and the slanting pillars of motes and
light that streamed into the gloom seemed almost as palpable as they. A
door led up by three or four steps into Sir Massingberd's bedroom--a
bare unfurnished place, where skins of wild animals, instead of carpet,
were spread for a banquet to the moth. His shooting-boots stood up
still stiff and strong beside the empty grate, although they were white
with mildew, and his night-gear lay folded upon the rotting pillow, in
preparation for his rest. The sitting-room, however, bore the more
striking vestiges of its late proprietor.
The huge arm-chair stood a little aside from the fender, where he had
pushed it back as he rose to leave the room; and the book which he had
been reading lay open with its face to the table, ready for him to
resume its perusal upon his return. A spirit-case with the stoppers in,
the couple of cigars which it had been Sir Massingberd's invariable
custom to smoke before going to bed, and a few fly-blown lumps of sugar,
were set out in hideous travesty of creature-comfort. The rector took up
the volume, and with one involuntary glance towards the fire-place,
tore the wrinkled and blue-spotted leaves to fragments. A scurrilous
French novel had engaged the last hours of the wretched old man, ere he
went forth--to his doom.