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any typographical errors in this edition of the publication.
WILLING TO DIE.
A Novel
BY
J. SHERIDAN LE FANU,
AUTHOR OF
"UNCLE SILAS," "TENANTS OF MALORY,"
"WYLDEN'S HAND," ETC. ETC.
_NEW EDITION._
LONDON:
CHAPMAN AND HALL, 198, PICCADILLY.
1876.
[_All rights reserved._]
SWIFT AND CO., PRINTERS, NEWTON STREET, HIGH HOLBORN, W.C.
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
TO THE READER 1
I.--AN ARRIVAL 6
II.--OUR CURIOSITY IS PIQUED 15
III.--THE THIEF IN THE NIGHT 21
IV.--MY FATHER 26
V.--THE LITTLE BLACK BOOK 34
VI.--A STRANGER APPEARS 41
VII.--TASSO 47
VIII.--THUNDER 53
IX.--AWAKENED 57
X.--A SIGHT FROM THE WINDOWS 61
XI.--CATASTROPHE 66
XII.--OUR GUEST 71
XIII.--MEETING IN THE GARDEN 77
XIV.--THE INTRUDER 81
XV.--A WARNING 87
XVI.--DOUBTS 91
XVII.--LEMUEL BLOUNT 100
XVIII.--IDENTIFIED 108
XIX.--PISTOLS FOR TWO 113
XX.--THE WOOD OF PLAS YLWD 120
XXI.--THE PATIENT AT PLAS YLWD 124
XXII.--THE OUTLAW 129
XXIII.--A JOURNEY 133
XXIV.--ARRIVALS 137
XXV.--THE DOCTOR'S NEWS 143
XXVI.--LADY LORRIMER 149
XXVII.--WHAT CAN SHE MEAN? 155
XXVIII.--A SEMI-QUARREL 159
XXIX.--MY BOUQUET 168
XXX.--THE KNIGHT OF THE BLACK CASTLE 173
XXXI.--RUSTICATION 179
XXXII.--AT THE GEORGE AND DRAGON 187
XXXIII.--NOTICE TO QUIT 194
XXXIV.--SIR HARRY'S ANSWER 199
XXXV.--LADY MARDYKES'S BALL 207
XXXVI.--NEWS OF LADY LORRIMER 213
XXXVII.--A LAST LOOK 221
XXXVIII.--STORM 228
XXXIX.--FAREWELL, MISS WARE 237
XL.--A RAINY DAY 245
XLI.--THE FLITTING 250
XLII.--A FORLORN HOPE 257
XLIII.--COLD STEEL 263
XLIV.--AN OMINOUS VISIT 272
XLV.--CONFIDENTIAL 276
XLVI.--AFTER OFFICE HOURS 285
XLVII.--SIR HARRY SPEAKS 289
XLVIII.--THE OLD LOVE 292
XLIX.--ALONE IN THE WORLD 295
L.--A PROTECTOR 300
LI.--A WARNING 305
LII.--MINE ENEMY 310
LIII.--ONE MORE CHANCE 318
LIV.--DANGEROUS GROUND 327
LV.--MR. CARMEL TAKES HIS LEAVE 332
LVI.--"LOVE TOOK UP THE GLASS OF TIME." 338
LVII.--AN AWKWARD PROPOSAL 342
LVIII.--DANGER 347
LIX.--AN INTRUDER 351
LX.--SIR HARRY'S KEY 355
LXI.--A DISCOVERY 358
LXII.--SIR HARRY WITHDRAWS 363
LXIII.--AT THE THREE NUNS 369
LXIV.--THE WILL 374
LXV.--THE SERPENT'S SMILE 380
LXVI.--LAURA GREY 384
LXVII.--A CHAPTER OF EXPLANATIONS 388
LXVIII.--THE LAST OF THE ROKESTONES 394
LXIX.--SEARCH FOR THE WILL 398
LXX.--A DISAPPOINTMENT 403
LXXI.--A WOMAN'S HEART 408
WILLING TO DIE.
TO THE READER.
First, I must tell you how I intend to relate my story. Having never
before undertaken to write a long narrative, I have considered and laid
down a few rules which I shall observe. Some of these are unquestionably
good; others, I daresay, offend against the canons of composition; but I
adopt them, because they will enable me to tell my story better than,
with my imperfect experience, better rules possibly would. In the first
place, I shall represent the people with whom I had to deal quite
fairly. I have met some bad people, some indifferent, and some who at
this distance of time seem to me like angels in the unchanging light of
heaven.
My narrative shall be arranged in the order of the events; I shall not
recapitulate or anticipate.
What I have learned from others, and did not witness, that which I
narrate, in part, from the hints of living witnesses, and, in part,
conjecturally, I shall record in the historic third person; and I shall
write it down with as much confidence and particularity as if I had
actually seen it; in that respect imitating, I believe, all great
historians, modern and ancient. But the scenes in which I have been an
actor, that which my eyes have seen, and my ears heard, I will relate
accordingly. If I can be clear and true, my clumsiness and irregularity,
I hope, will be forgiven me.
* * * * *
My name is Ethel Ware.
I am not an interesting person by any means. You shall judge. I shall be
forty-two my next birthday. That anniversary will occur on the first of
May, 1873; and I am unmarried.
I don't look quite the old maid I am, they tell me. They say I don't
look five-and-thirty, and I am conscious, sitting before the glass, that
there is nothing sour or peevish in my features. What does it matter,
even to me? I shall, of course, never marry; and, honestly, I don't care
to please any one. If I cared twopence how I looked, I should probably
look worse than I do.
I wish to be honest. I have looked in the glass since I wrote that
sentence. I have just seen the faded picture of what may have been a
pretty, at least what is called a piquant face; a forehead broad and
well-formed, over which the still dark-brown hair grows low; large and
rather good grey eyes and features, with nothing tragic, nothing
classic--just fairly good.
I think there was always energy in my face! I think I remember, long
ago, something at times comic; at times, also, something sad and tender,
and even dreamy, as I fixed flowers in my hair or talked to my image in
the glass. All that has been knocked out of me pretty well. What I do
see there now is resolution.
There are processes of artificial hatching in use, if I remember
rightly, in Egypt, by which you may, at your discretion, make the bird
all beak, or all claw, all head, or all drumstick, as you please to
develope it, before the shell breaks, by a special application of heat.
It is a chick, no doubt, but a monstrous chick; and something like such
a chick was I. Circumstances, in my very early days, hatched my
character altogether out of equilibrium.
The caloric had been applied quite different in my mother's case, and
produced a prodigy of quite another sort.
I loved my mother with a very warm, but, I am now conscious, with a
somewhat contemptuous affection. It never was an angry nor an arrogant
contempt; a very tender one, on the contrary. She loved me, I am sure,
as well as she was capable of loving a child--better than she ever loved
my sister--and I would have laid down my life for her; but, with all my
love, I looked down upon her, although I did not know it, till I thought
my life over in the melancholy honesty of solitude.
I am not romantic. If I ever was it is time I should be cured of all
that. I can laugh heartily, but I think I sigh more than most people.
I am not a bit shy, but I like solitude; partly because I regard my kind
with not unjust suspicion.
I am speaking very frankly. I enjoy, perhaps you think cynically, this
hard-featured self-delineation. I don't spare myself; I need not spare
any one else. But I am not a cynic. There is vacillation and timidity in
that ironical egotism. It is something deeper with me. I don't delight
in that sordid philosophy. I have encountered magnanimity and
self-devotion on earth. It is not true that there is neither nobility
nor beauty in human nature, that is not also more or less shabby and
grotesque.
I have an odd story to tell. On my father's side I am the grand-daughter
of a viscount; on my mother's, the grand-daughter of a baronet. I have
had my early glimpses of the great world, and a wondrous long stare
round the dark world beneath it.
When I lower my hand, and in one of the momentary reveries that tempt a
desultory writer tickle my cheek slowly with the feathered end of my
pen--for I don't incise my sentences with a point of steel, but, in the
old fashion, wing my words with a possibly too appropriate grey-goose
plume--I look through a tall window in an old house on the scenery I
have loved best and earliest in the world. The noble Welsh mountains are
on my right, the purple headlands stooping grandly into the waves; I
look upon the sea, the enchanted element, my first love and my last! How
often I lean upon my hand and smile back upon the waters that silently
smile on me, rejoicing under the summer heavens; and in wintry
moonlights, when the north wind drives the awful waves upon the rocks,
and I see the foam shooting cloud after cloud into the air, I have
found myself, after long hours, still gazing, as if my breath were
frozen, on the one peaked black rock, thinking what the storm and foam
once gave me up there, until, with a sudden terror, and a gasp, I wake
from the spell, and recoil from the white image, as if a spirit had been
talking with me all the time.
From this same window, in the fore-ground, I see, in morning light or
melancholy sunset, with very perfect and friendly trust, the shadowy old
churchyard, where I have arranged my narrow bed shall be. There my
mother-earth, at last, shall hold me in her bosom, and I shall find my
anodyne and rest. There over me shall hover through the old church
windows faintly the sweet hymns and the voices in prayer I heard long
ago; there the shadow of tower and tree shall slowly move over the grass
above me, from dawn till night, and there, within the fresh and solemn
sound of its waves, I shall lie near the ceaseless fall and flow of the
sea I loved so well.
I am not sorry, as I sit here, with my vain recollections and my direful
knowledge, that my life has been what it was.
A member of the upper ten thousand, I should have known nothing. I have
bought my knowledge dear. But truth is a priceless jewel. Would you part
with it, fellow-mourner, and return to the simplicities and illusions of
early days? Consider the question truly; be honest; and you will answer
"No." In the volume of memory, every page of which, like "Cornelius
Agrippa's bloody book," has power to evoke a spectre, would you yet
erase a line? We can willingly part with nothing that ever was part of
mind, or memory, or self. The lamentable past is our own for ever.
Thank Heaven, my childhood was passed in a tranquil nook, where the roar
of the world's traffic is not so much as heard; among scenery, where
there lurks little capital, and no enterprise; where the good people are
asleep; and where, therefore, the irreparable improvements that in other
places carry on their pitiless work of obliteration are undreamed of. I
am looking out on scenes that remain unchanged as heaven itself. The
summer comes and goes; the autumn drifts of leaves, and winter snows;
and all things here remain as my round childish eyes beheld them in
stupid wonder and delight when first the world was opening upon them.
The trees, the tower, the stile, the very gravestones, are my earliest
friends; I stretch my arms to the mountains, as if I could fold them to
my heart. And in the opening through the ancient trees, the great
estuary stretches northward, wider and wider, into the grey horizon of
the open sea.
The sinking sun askance,
Spreads a dull glare,
Through evening air;
And, in a happy trance,
Forest and wave, and white cliff stand,
Like an enchanted sea and land.
The sea-breeze wakens clear and cold,
Over the azure wide;
Before whose breath, in threads of gold,
The ruddy ripples glide,
And chasing, break and mingle;
While clear as bells,
Each wavelet tells,
O'er the stones on the hollow shingle.
The rising of winds and the fall of the waves!
I love the music of shingle and caves.
And the billows that travel so far to die,
In foam, on the loved shore where they lie.
I lean my cold cheek on my hand;
And as a child, with open eyes,
Listens, in a dim surprise,
To some high story
Of grief and glory,
It cannot understand;
So, like that child,
To meanings of a music wild,
I listen, in a rapture lonely,
Not understanding, listening only,
To a story not for me;
And let my fancies come and go,
And fall and flow,
With the eternal sea.
And so, to leave rhyme, and return to prose, I end my preface, and begin
my story here.
CHAPTER I.
AN ARRIVAL.
One of the earliest scenes I can remember with perfect distinctness is
this. My sister and I, still denizens of the nursery, had come down to
take our tea with good old Rebecca Torkill, the Malory housekeeper, in
the room we called the cedar parlour. It is a long and rather sombre
room, with two tall windows looking out upon the shadowy court-yard.
There are on the wall some dingy portraits, whose pale faces peep out,
as it were, through a background of black fog, from the canvas; and
there is one, in better order than the others, of a grave man in the
stately costume of James the First, which hangs over the mantel-piece.
As a child I loved this room; I loved the half-decipherable pictures; it
was solemn and even gloomy, but it was with the delightful gloom and
solemnity of one of Rebecca Torkill's stories of castles, giants, and
goblins.
It was evening now, with a stormy, red sky in the west. Rebecca and we
two children were seated round the table, sipping our tea, eating hot
cake, and listening to her oft-told tale, entitled the Knight of the
Black Castle.
This knight, habited in black, lived in his black castle, in the centre
of a dark wood, and being a giant, and an ogre, and something of a
magician besides, he used to ride out at nightfall with a couple of
great black bags, to stow his prey in, at his saddle-bow, for the
purpose of visiting such houses as had their nurseries well-stocked with
children. His tall black horse, when he dismounted, waited at the
hall-door, which, however mighty its bars and bolts, could not resist
certain magical words which he uttered in a sepulchral voice--
"Yoke, yoke,
Iron and oak;
One, two, and three,
Open to me."
At this charmed summons the door turned instantly on its hinges, without
warning of creak or rattle, and the black knight mounted the stairs to
the nursery, and was drawing the children softly out of their beds, by
their feet, before any one knew he was near.
As this story, which with childish love of iteration we were listening
to now for the fiftieth time, went on, I, whose chair faced the window,
saw a tall man on a tall horse--both looked black enough against the red
sky--ride by at a walk.
I thought it was the gaunt old vicar, who used to ride up now and then
to visit our gardener's mother, who was sick and weak, and troubling my
head no more about him, was instantly as much absorbed as ever in the
predatory prowlings of the Knight of the Black Castle.
It was not until I saw Rebecca's face, in which I was staring with the
steadiness of an eager interest, undergo a sudden and uncomfortable
change, that I discovered my error. She stopped in the middle of a
sentence, and her eyes were fixed on the door. Mine followed hers
thither. I was more than startled. In the very crisis of a tale of
terror, ready to believe any horror, I thought, for a moment, that I
actually beheld the Black Knight, and felt that his horse, no doubt, and
his saddle-bags, were waiting at the hall-door to receive me and my
sister.
What I did see was a man who looked to me gigantic. He seemed to fill
the tall door-case. His dress was dark, and he had a pair of leather
overalls, I believe they called them, which had very much the effect of
jack-boots, and he had a low-crowned hat on. His hair was long and
black, his prominent black eyes were fixed on us, his face was long, but
handsome, and deadly pale, as it seemed to me, from intense anger. A
child's instinctive reading of countenance is seldom at fault. The ideas
of power and mystery surround grown persons in the eyes of children. A
gloomy or forbidding face upon a person of great stature inspires
something like panic; and if that person is a stranger, and evidently
transported with anger, his mere appearance in the same room will, I can
answer for it, frighten a child half into hysterics. This alarming face,
with its black knit brows, and very blue shorn chin, was to me all the
more fearful that it was that of a man no longer young. He advanced to
the table with two strides, and said, in resonant, deep tones, to which
my very heart seemed to vibrate:
"Mr. Ware's not here, but he will be, soon enough; you give him that;"
and he hammered down a letter on the table, with a thump of his huge
fist. "That's my answer; and tell him, moreover, that I took his
letter,"--and he plucked an open letter deliberately from his great-coat
pocket--"and tore it, this way and that way, across and across," and he
suited the action fiercely to the words, "and left it for him, there!"
So saying, he slapped down the pieces with his big hand, and made our
tea-spoons jump and jingle in our cups, and turned and strode again to
the door.
"And tell him this," he added, in a tone of calmer hatred, turning his
awful face on us again, "that there's a God above us, who judges
righteously."
The door shut, and we saw him no more. I and my sister burst into
clamorous tears, and roared and cried for a full half hour, from sheer
fright--a demonstration which, for a time, gave Rebecca Torkill ample
occupation for all her energies and adroitness.
This recollection remains, with all the colouring and exaggeration of a
horrible impression received in childhood, fixed in my imagination. I
and dear Nelly long remembered the apparition, and in our plays used to
call him, after the goblin hero of the romance to which we had been
listening when he entered, the Knight of the Black Castle.
The adventure made, indeed, a profound impression upon our nerves, and I
have related it, with more detail than it seems to deserve, because it
was, in truth, connected with my story; and I afterwards, unexpectedly,
saw a good deal more of the awful man in whose presence my heart had
quaked, and after whose visit I and my sister seemed for days to have
drunk of "the cup of trembling."
I must take up my story now at a point a great many years later.
Let the reader fancy me and my sister Helen; I dark-haired, and a few
months past sixteen; she, with flaxen, or rather golden hair and large
blue eyes, and only fifteen, standing in the hall at Malory, lighted
with two candles; one in the old-fashioned glass bell that swings by
three chains from the ceiling, the other carried out hastily from the
housekeeper's room, and flaming on the table, in the foggy puffs of the
February night air that entered at the wide-open hall-door.
Old Rebecca Torkill stood on the steps, with her broad hand shading her
eyes, as if the moon dazzled them.
"There's nothing, dear; no, Miss Helen, it mustn't a' bin the gate.
There's no sign o' nothin' comin' up, and no sound nor nothing at all;
come in, dear; you shouldn't a' come out to the open door, with your
cough in this fog."
So in she stumped, and shut the door; and we saw no more of the dark
trunks and boughs of the elms at the other side of the courtyard, with
the smoky mist between; and we three trooped together to the
housekeeper's room, where we had taken up our temporary quarters.
This was the second false alarm that night, sounded, in Helen's fancy,
by the quavering scream of the old iron gate. We had to wait and watch
in the fever of expectation for some time longer.
Our old house of Malory was, at the best, in the forlorn condition of a
ship of war out of commission. Old Rebecca and two rustic maids, and
Thomas Jones, who was boots, gardener, hen-wife, and farmer, were all
the hands we could boast; and at least three-fourths of the rooms were
locked up, with shutters closed; and many of them, from year to year,
never saw the light, and lay in perennial dust.
The truth is, my father and mother seldom visited Malory. They had a
house in London, and led a very gay life; were very "good people,"
immensely in request, and everywhere. Their rural life was not at
Malory, but spent in making visits at one country-house after another.
Helen and I, their only children, saw very little of them. We sometimes
were summoned up to town for a month or two for lessons in dancing,
music, and other things, but there we saw little more of them than at
home. The being in society, judging by its effects upon them, appeared
to me a very harassing and laborious profession. I always felt that we
were half in the way and half out of sight in town, and was immensely
relieved when we were dismissed again to our holland frocks, and to the
beloved solitudes of Malory.
This was a momentous night. We were expecting the arrival of a new
governess, or rather companion.
Laura Grey--we knew no more than her name, for in his hurried note we
could not read whether she was Miss or Mrs.--my father had told us, was
to arrive this night at about nine o'clock. I had asked him, when he
paid his last visit of a day here, and announced the coming event,
whether she was a married lady; to which he answered, laughing:
"You wise little woman! That's a very pertinent question, though I never
thought of it, and I have been addressing her as Miss Grey all this
time. She certainly is old enough to be married."
"Is she cross, papa, I wonder?" I further inquired.
"Not cross--perhaps a little severe. 'She whipped two female 'prentices
to death, and hid them in the coal-hole,' or something of that kind, but
she has a very cool temper;" and so he amused himself with my curiosity.
Now, although we knew that all this, including the quotation, was spoken
in jest, it left an uncomfortable suspicion. Was this woman old and
ill-tempered? A great deal was in the power of a governess here. An
artful woman, who liked power, and did not like us, might make us very
miserable.
At length the little party in the housekeeper's room did hear sounds at
which we all started up with one consent. They were the trot of a
horse's hoofs and the roll of wheels, and before we reached the
hall-door the bell was ringing.
Rebecca swung open the door, and we saw in the shadow of the house, with
the wheels touching the steps, a one-horse conveyance, with some luggage
on top, dimly lighted by the candles in the hall.
A little bonnet was turned towards us from the windows; we could not see
what the face was like; a slender hand turned the handle, and a lady,
whose figure, though enveloped in a tweed cloak, looked very slight and
pretty, came down, and ran up the steps, and hesitated, and being
greeted encouragingly by Rebecca Torkill, entered the hall smiling, and
showed a very pretty and modest face, rather pale, and very young.
"My name is Grey; I am the new governess," she said, in a pleasant
voice, which, with her pretty looks, was very engaging; "and these are
the young ladies?" she continued, glancing at Rebecca and back again at
us; "you are Ethel, and you Helen Ware?" and a little timidly she
offered her hand to each.
I liked her already.
"Shall I go with you to your room," I asked, "while Rebecca is making
tea for us in the housekeeper's room? We thought we should be more
comfortable there to-night."
"I'm so glad--I shall feel quite at home. It is the very thing I should
have liked," she said; and talked on as I led her to her room, which,
though very old-fashioned, looked extremely cosy, with a good fire
flickering abroad and above on walls and ceiling.
I remember everything about that evening so well. I have reason to
remember Miss Laura Grey. Some people would have said that there was not
a regular feature in her face, except her eyes, which were very fine;
but she had beautiful little teeth, and a skin wonderfully smooth and
clear, and there was refinement and energy in her face, which was pale
and spiritual, and indescribably engaging. To my mind, whether according
to rule or not, she was nothing short of beautiful.
I have reason to remember that pale, pretty young face. The picture is
clear and living before me this moment, as it was then in the
firelight. Standing there, she smiled on me very kindly--she looked as
if she would have kissed me--and then, suddenly thoughtful, she
stretched her slender hands to the fire, and, in a momentary reverie,
sighed very deeply.
I left her, softly, with her trunks and boxes, which Thomas Jones had
already carried up, and ran downstairs.
I remember the pictures of that night with supernatural distinctness;
for at that point of time fate changed my life, and with pretty Miss
Grey another pale figure entered, draped in black, and calamity was my
mate for many a day after.
Our tea-party, however, this night in Mrs. Torkill's room, was very
happy. I don't remember what we talked about, but we were in high
good-humour with our young lady-superioress, and she seemed to like us.
I am going to tell you very shortly my impressions of this lady. I never
met any one in my life who had the same influence over me; and, for a
time, it puzzled me. When we were not at French, German, music--our
studies, in fact--she was exactly like one of ourselves, always ready to
do whatever we liked best, always pleasant, gentle, and, in her way,
even merry. When she was alone, or thinking, she was sad. That seemed
the habit of her mind; but she was naturally gay and sympathetic, as
ready as we for a walk on the strand to pick up shells, for a ride on
the donkeys to Penruthyn Priory, to take a sail or a row on the estuary,
or a drive in our little pony-carriage anywhere. Sometimes on our
rambles we would cross the stile and go into the pretty little
churchyard that lies to the left of Malory, near the sea, and if it was
a sunny day we would read the old inscriptions and loiter away half an
hour among the tombstones.
And when we came home to tea we would sit round the fire and tell
stories, of which she had ever so many, German, French, Scotch, Irish,
Icelandic, and I know not what; and sometimes we went to the
housekeeper's room, and, with Rebecca Torkill's leave, made a hot cake,
and baked it on the griddle there, with great delight.
The secret of Laura Grey's power was in her gentle temper, her
inflexible conscience, and her angelic firmness in all matters of duty.
I never saw her excited, or for a moment impatient; and at idle times,
as I said, she was one of ourselves. The only threat she ever used was
to tell us that she could not stay at Malory as our governess if we
would not do what she thought right. There is in young people an
instinctive perception of motive, and no truer spirit than Laura Grey
ever lived on earth. I loved her. I had no fear of her. She was our
gentle companion and playmate; and yet, in a certain sense, I never
stood so much in awe of any human being.
Only a few days after Laura Grey had come home, we were sitting in our
accustomed room, which was stately, but not uncomfortably spacious, and,
like many at the same side of the house, panelled up to the ceiling. I
remember, it was just at the hour of the still early sunset, and the
ruddy beams were streaming their last through the trunks of the great
elms. We were in high chat over Helen's little sparrow, Dickie, a
wonderful bird, whose appetite and spirits we were always discussing,
when the door opened, and Rebecca said, "Young ladies, please, here's
Mr. Carmel;" and Miss Grey, for the first time, saw a certain person who
turns up at intervals and in odd scenes in the course of this
autobiography.
The door is at some distance from the window, and through its panes
across that space upon the opposite wall the glow of sunset fell
mistily, making the clear shadow, in which our visitor stood, deeper.
The figure stood out against this background like a pale old portrait,
his black dress almost blended with the background; but, indistinct as
it was, it was easy to see that the dress he wore was of some
ecclesiastical fashion not in use among Church of England men. The coat
came down a good deal lower than his knees. His thin slight figure gave
him an effect of height far greater than his real stature; his fine
forehead showed very white in contrast with his close dark hair, and his
thin, delicate features, as he stepped slowly in, with an ascetic smile,
and his hand extended, accorded well with ideas of abstinence and
penance. Gentle as was his manner, there was something of authority also
in it, and in the tones of his voice.
"How do you do, Miss Ethel? How do you do, Miss Helen? I am going to
write my weekly note to your mamma, and--oh! Miss Grey, I believe?"--he
interrupted himself, and bowed rather low to the young governess,
disclosing the small tonsure on the top of his head.
Miss Grey acknowledged his bow, but I could see that she was puzzled and
surprised.
"I am to tell your mamma, I hope, that you are both quite well?" he
said, addressing himself to me, and taking my hand: "and in good
spirits, I suppose, Miss Grey?" he said, apparently recollecting that
she was to be recognized; "I may say that?"
He turned to her, still holding my hand.
"Yes, they are quite well, and, I believe, happy," she said, still
looking at him, I could see, with curiosity.
It was a remarkable countenance, with large earnest eyes, and a mouth
small and melancholy, with those brilliant red lips that people
associate with early decay. It was a pale face of suffering and
decision, which so vaguely indicated his years that he might be any age
you please, from six-and-twenty up to six-and-thirty, as you allowed
more or less in the account for the afflictions of a mental and bodily
discipline.
He stood there for a little while chatting with us. There was something
engaging in this man, cold, severe, and melancholy as his manner was. I
was conscious that he was agreeable, and, young as I was, I felt that he
was a man of unusual learning and ability.
In a little time he left us. It was now twilight, and we saw him, with
his slight stoop, pass our window with slow step and downcast eyes.