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[Illustration: "So we went down our stairs."--Chap. II.]
_Cecilia de Noël_
BY
LANOE FALCONER
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTINS ST., LONDON
1910
[Illustration: Title Page]
CECILIA DE NOËL
CHAPTER I
ATHERLEY'S GOSPEL
"There is no revelation but that of science," said Atherley.
It was after dinner in the drawing-room. From the cold of the early
spring night, closed shutters and drawn curtains carefully protected us;
shaded lamps and a wood fire diffused an exquisite twilight; we breathed
a mild and even balmy atmosphere scented with hothouse flowers.
"And this revelation completely satisfies all reasonable desires," he
continued, surveying his small audience from the hearthrug where he
stood; "mind, I say all reasonable desires. If you have a healthy
appetite for bread, you will get it and plenty of it, but if you have a
sickly craving for manna, why then you will come badly off, that is all.
This is the gospel of fact, not of fancy: of things as they actually
are, you know, instead of as A dreamt they were, or B decided they ought
to be, or C would like to have them. So this gospel is apt to look a
little dull beside the highly coloured romances the churches have
accustomed us to--as a modern plate-glass window might, compared with a
stained-glass oriel in a mediæval cathedral. There is no doubt which is
the prettier of the two. The question is, do you want pretty colour or
do you want clear daylight?" He paused, but neither of his listeners
spoke. Lady Atherley was counting the stitches of her knitting; I was
too tired; so he resumed: "For my part, I prefer the daylight and the
glass, without any daubing. What does science discover in the universe?
Precision, accuracy, reliability--any amount of it; but as to pity,
mercy, love! The fact is, that famous simile of the angel playing at
chess was a mistake. Very smart, I grant you, but altogether misleading.
Why! the orthodox quote it as much as the others--always a bad sign. It
tickles these anthropomorphic fancies, which are at the bottom of all
their creeds. Imagine yourself playing at chess, not with an angel, but
with an automaton, an admirably constructed automaton whose mechanism
can outwit your brains any day: calm and strong, if you like, but no
more playing for love than the clock behind me is ticking for love;
there you have a much clearer notion of existence. A much clearer
notion, and a much more satisfactory notion too, I say. Fair play and no
favour! What more can you ask, if you are fit to live?"
His kindling glance sought the farther end of the long drawing-room; had
it fallen upon me instead, perhaps that last challenge might have been
less assured; and yet how bravely it became the speaker, whose
wide-browed head a no less admirable frame supported. Even the stiff
evening uniform of his class could not conceal the grace of form which
health and activity had moulded, working through highly favoured
generations. There was latent force implied in every line of it, and,
in the steady poise of look and mien, that perfect nervous balance
which is the crown of strength.
"And with our creed, of course, we shift our moral code as well. The ten
commandments, or at least the second table, we retain for obvious
reasons, but the theological virtues must be got rid of as quickly as
possible. Charity, for instance, is a mischievous quality--it is too
indulgent to weakness, which is not to be indulged or encouraged, but
stamped out. Hope is another pernicious quality leading to all kinds of
preposterous expectations which never are, or can be, fulfilled; and as
to faith, it is simply a vice. So far from taking anything on trust, you
must refuse to accept any statement whatsoever till it is proved so
plainly you can't help believing it whether you like it or not; just as
a theorem in--"
"George," said Lady Atherley, "what is that noise?"
The question, timed as Lady Atherley's remarks so often were, came with
something of a shock. Her husband, thus checked in full flight, seemed
to reel for a moment, but quickly recovering himself, asked resignedly:
"What noise?"
"Such a strange noise, like the howling of a dog."
"Probably it is the howling of a dog."
"No, for it came from inside the house, and Tip sleeps outside now, in
the saddle-room, I believe. It sounded in the servants' wing. Did you
hear it, Mr. Lyndsay?"
I confessed that I had not.
"Well, as I can offer no explanation," said Atherley, "perhaps I may be
allowed to go on with what I was saying. Doubt, obstinate and almost
invincible doubt, is the virtue we must now cultivate, just as--"
"Why, there it is again," cried Lady Atherley.
Atherley instantly rang the bell near him, and while Lady Atherley
continued to repeat that it was very strange, and that she could not
imagine what it could be, he waited silently till his summons was
answered by a footman.
"Charles, what is the meaning of that crying or howling which seems to
come from your end of the house?"
"I think, Sir George," said Charles, with the coldly impassive manner of
a highly-trained servant--"I think, Sir George, it must be Ann, the
kitchen-maid, that you hear."
"Indeed! and may I ask what Ann, the kitchen-maid, is supposed to be
doing?"
"If you please, Sir George, she is in hysterics."
"Oh! why?" exclaimed Lady Atherley plaintively.
"Because, my lady, Mrs. Mallet has seen the ghost!"
"Because Mrs. Mallet has seen the ghost!" repeated Atherley. "Pray, what
is Mrs. Mallet herself doing under the circumstances?"
"She is having some brandy-and-water, Sir George."
"Mrs. Mallet is a sensible woman," said Atherley heartily; "Ann, the
kitchen-maid, had better follow her example."
"You may go, Charles," said Lady Atherley; and, as the door closed
behind him, exclaimed, "I wish that horrid woman had never entered the
house!"
"What horrid woman? Your too sympathetic kitchen-maid?"
"No, that--that Mrs. Mallet."
"Why are you angry with her? Because she has seen the ghost?"
"Yes, for I told her most particularly the very day I engaged her, after
Mrs. Webb left us in that sudden way--I told her I never allowed the
ghost to be mentioned."
"And why, my dear, did you break your own excellent rule by mentioning
it to her?"
"Because she had the impertinence to tell me, almost directly she came
into the morning-room, that she knew all about the ghost; but I stopped
her at once, and said that if ever she spoke of such a thing especially
to the other servants, I should be very much displeased; and now she
goes and behaves in this way."
"Where did you pick up this viper?"
"She comes from Quarley Beacon. There was no one in this stupid village
who could cook at all, and Cecilia de Noël, who recommended her--"
"Cecilia de Noël!" repeated Atherley, with that long-drawn emphasis
which suggests so much. "My dear Jane, I must say that in taking a
servant on Cissy's recommendation you did not display your usual sound
common sense. I should as soon have thought of asking her to buy me a
gun, knowing that she would carefully pick out the one least likely to
shoot anything. Cissy is accustomed to look upon a servant as something
to be waited on and taken care of. Her own household, as we all know,
is composed chiefly of chronic invalids."
"But I explained to Cecilia that I wanted somebody who was strong as
well as a good cook; and I am sure there is nothing the matter with Mrs.
Mallet. She is as fat as possible, and as red! Besides, she has never
been one of Cecilia's servants; she only goes there to help sometimes;
and she says she is perfectly respectable."
"Mrs. Mallet says that Cissy is perfectly respectable?"
"No, George; it is not likely that I should allow a person in Mrs.
Mallet's position to speak disrespectfully to me about Cecilia. Cecilia
said Mrs. Mallet was perfectly respectable."
"I should not think dear old Ciss exactly knew the meaning of the word."
"Cecilia may be peculiar in many ways, but she is too much of a lady to
send me any one who was not quite nice. I don't believe there is
anything against Mrs. Mallet's character. She cooks very well, you must
allow that; you said only two days ago you never had tasted an omelette
so nicely made in England."
"Did she cook that omelette? Then I am sure she is perfectly
respectable; and pray let her see as many ghosts as she cares to,
especially if it leads to nothing worse than her taking a moderate
quantity of brandy. Time to smoke, Lindy. I am off."
I dragged myself up after my usual fashion, and was preparing to follow
him, when Lady Atherley, directly he was gone, began:
"It is such a pity that clever people can never see things as others do.
George always goes on in this way as if the ghost were of no
consequence, but I always knew how it would be. Of course it is nice
that George should come in for the place, as he might not have done if
his uncle had married, and people said it would be delightful to live in
such an old house, but there are a good many drawbacks, I can assure
you. Sir Marmaduke lived abroad for years before he died, and everything
has got into such a state. We have had to nearly refurnish the house;
the bedrooms are not done yet. The servants' accommodation is very bad
too, and there was no proper cooking-range in the kitchen. But the worst
of all is the ghost. Directly I heard of it I knew we should have
trouble with the servants; and we had not been here a month when our
cook, who had lived with us for years, gave warning because the place
was damp. At first she said it was the ghost, but when I told her not to
talk such nonsense she said it was the damp. And then it is so awkward
about visitors. What are we to do when the fishing season begins? I
cannot get George to understand that some people have a great objection
to anything of the kind, and are quite angry if you put them into a
haunted room. And it is much worse than having only one haunted room,
because we could make that into a bachelor's bedroom--I don't think they
mind; or a linen cupboard, as they do at Wimbourne Castle; but this
ghost seems to appear in all the rooms, and even in the halls and
passages, so I cannot think what we are to do."
I said it was extraordinary, and I meant it. That a ghost should venture
into Atherley's neighbourhood was less amazing than that it should
continue to exist in his wife's presence, so much more fatal than his
eloquence to all but the tangible and the solid. Her orthodoxy is above
suspicion, but after some hours of her society I am unable to
contemplate any aspects of life save the comfortable and the
uncomfortable: while the Universe itself appears to me only a gigantic
apparatus especially designed to provide Lady Atherley and her class
with cans of hot water at stated intervals, costly repasts elaborately
served, and all other requisites of irreproachable civilisation.
But before I had time to say more, Atherley in his smoking-coat looked
in to see if I was coming or not.
"Don't keep Mr. Lyndsay up late, George," said my kind hostess; "he
looks so tired."
"You look dead beat," he said later on, in his own particular and untidy
den, as he carefully stuffed the bowl of his pipe. "I think it would go
better with you, old chap, if you did not hold yourself in quite so
tight. I don't want you to rave or commit suicide in some untidy
fashion, as the hero of a French novel does; but you are as well-behaved
as a woman, without a woman's grand resources of hysterics and general
unreasonableness all round. You always were a little too good for human
nature's daily food. Your notions on some points are quite unwholesomely
superfine. It would be a comfort to see you let out in some way. I wish
you would have a real good fling for once."
"I should have to pay too dear for it afterwards. My superfine habits
are not a matter of choice only, you must remember."
"Oh!--the women! Not the best of them is worth bothering about, let
alone a shameless jilt."
"You were always hard upon her, George. She jilted a cripple for a very
fine specimen of the race. Some of your favourite physiologists would
say she was quite right."
"You never understood her, Lindy. It was not a case of jilting a cripple
at all. She jilted three thousand a year and a small place for ten
thousand a year and a big one."
After all, it did hurt a little, which Atherley must have divined, for
crossing the room on some pretext or another he let his strong hand
rest, just for an instant, gently upon my shoulder, thus, after the
manner of his race, mutely and concisely expressing affection and
sympathy that might have swelled a canto.
"I shall be sorry," he said presently, lying rather than sitting in the
deep chair beside the fire, "very sorry, if the ghost is going to make
itself a nuisance."
"What is the story of the ghost?"
"Story! God bless you, it has none to tell, sir; at least it never has
told it, and no one else rightly knows it. It--I mean the ghost--is
older than the family. We found it here when we came into the place
about two hundred years ago, and it refused to be dislodged. It is
rather uncertain in its habits. Sometimes it is not heard of for years;
then all at once it reappears, generally, I may observe, when some
imaginative female in the house is in love, or out of spirits, or bored
in any other way. She sees it, and then, of course--the complaint being
highly infectious--so do a lot more. One of the family started the
theory it was the ghost of the portrait, or rather the unknown
individual whose portrait hangs high up over the sideboard in the
dining-room."
"You don't mean the lady in green velvet with the snuff-box?"
"Certainly not; that is my own great-grand-aunt. I mean a square of
black canvas with one round yellow spot in the middle and a dirty white
smudge under the spot. There are members of this family--Aunt Eleanour,
for instance--who tell me the yellow spot is a man's face and the dirty
white smudge is an Elizabethan ruff. Then there is a picture of a man in
armour in the oak room, which I don't believe is a portrait at all; but
Aunt Henrietta swears it is, and of the ghost, too--as he was before he
died, of course. And very interesting details both my aunts are ready to
furnish concerning the two originals. It is extraordinary what an amount
of information is always forthcoming about things of which nobody can
know anything--as about the next world, for instance. The, last time I
went to church the preacher gave as minute an account of what our
post-mortem experiences were to be as if he had gone through it all
himself several times."
"Well, does the ghost usually appear in a ruff or in armour?"
"It depends entirely upon who sees it--a ghost always does. Last night,
for instance, I lay you odds it wore neither ruff nor armour, because
Mrs. Mallet is not likely to have heard of either the one or the other.
Not that she saw the ghost--not she. What she saw was a bogie, not a
ghost."
"Why, what is the difference?"
"Immense! As big as that which separates the objective from the
subjective. Any one can see a bogie. It is a real thing belonging to the
external world. It may be a bright light, a white sheet, or a black
shadow--always at night, you know, or at least in the dusk, when you are
apt to be a little mixed in your observations. The best example of a
bogie was Sir Walter Scott's. It looked--in the twilight
remember--exactly like Lord Byron, who had not long departed this life
at the time Sir Walter saw it. Nine men out of ten would have gone off
and sworn they had seen a ghost; why, religions have been founded on
just such stuff: but Sir Walter, as sane a man as ever lived--though he
did write poetry--kept his head clear and went up closer to his ghost,
which proved on examination to be a waterproof."
"A waterproof?"
"Or a railway rug--I forget which: the moral is the same."
"Well, what is a ghost?"
"A ghost is nothing--an airy nothing manufactured by your own disordered
senses of your own over-excited brain."
"I beg to observe that I never saw a ghost in my life."
"I am glad to hear it. It does you credit. If ever any one had an excuse
for seeing a ghost it would be a man whose spine was jarred. But I meant
nothing personal by the pronoun--only to give greater force to my
remarks. The first person singular will do instead. The ghost belongs to
the same lot, as the faces that make mouths at me when I have
brain-fever, the reptiles that crawl about when I have an attack of the
D.T., or--to take a more familiar example--the spots I see floating
before my eyes when my liver is out of order. You will allow there is
nothing supernatural in all that?"
"Certainly. Though, did not that pretty niece of Mrs. Molyneux's say she
used to see those spots floating before her eyes when a misfortune was
impending?"
"I fancy she did, and true enough too, as such spots would very likely
precede a bilious attack, which is misfortune enough while it lasts. But
still, even Mrs. Molyneux's niece, even Mrs. Molyneux herself, would
not say the fever faces, or the reptiles, or the spots, were
supernatural. And in fact the ghost is, so far, more--more _recherché_,
let us say, than the other things. It takes more than a bilious attack
or a fever, or even D.T., to produce a ghost. It takes nothing less than
a pretty high degree of nervous sensibility and excitable imagination.
Now these two disorders have not been much developed yet by the masses,
in spite of the school-boards: ergo, any apparition which leads to
hysterics or brandy-and-water in the servants' hall is a bogie, not a
ghost."
He knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and added:
"And now, Lindy, as we don't want another ghost haunting the house. I
will conduct you to by-by."
It was a strange house, Weald Manor, designed, one might suppose, by
some inveterate enemy of light. It lay at the foot of a steep hill which
screened it from the morning sun, and the few windows which looked
towards the rising day were so shaped as to admit but little of its
brightness. At night it was even worse, at least in the halls and
passages, for there, owing probably to the dark oak which lined both
walls and floor, a generous supply of lamps did little more than
illumine the surface of the darkness, leaving unfathomed and unexplained
mysterious shadows that brooded in distant corners, or, towering
giant-wise to the ceiling, loomed ominously overhead.
Will-o'-the-wisp-like reflections from our lighted candles danced in the
polished surface of panel and balustrade, as from the hall we went
upstairs, I helping myself from step to step by Atherley's arm, as
instinctively, as unconsciously almost, as he offered it. We stopped on
the first landing. Before us rose the stairs leading to the gallery
where Atherley's bedroom was: to our left ran "the bachelor's passage,"
where I was lodged.
"Night, night," were Atherley's parting words. "Don't dream of flirts or
ghosts, but sleep sound."
Sleep sound! the kind words sounded like mockery. Sleep to me, always
chary of her presence, was at best but a fair-weather friend, instantly
deserting me when pain or exhaustion made me crave the more for rest and
forgetfulness; but I had something to do in the interim--a little
_auto-da-fé_ to perform, by which, with that faith in ceremonial, so
deep laid in human nature, I meant once for all to lay the ghost that
haunted me--the ghost of a delightful but irrevocable past, with which
I had dallied too long.
Sitting before the wood-fire I slowly unfolded them: the three
faintly-perfumed sheets with the gilt monogram above the pointed
writing:
"Dear Mr. Lyndsay," ran the first, "why did you not come over
to-day? I was expecting you to appear all the afternoon.--Yours
sincerely, G.E.L."
The second was dated four weeks later--
"You silly boy! I forbid you ever to write or talk of yourself in
such a way again. You are not a cripple; and if you had ever had a
mother or a sister, you would know how little women think of such
things. How many more assurances do you expect from me? Do you wish
me to propose to you again? No, if you won't have me, go.--Yours,
in spite of yourself, GLADYS."
The third--the third is too long to quote entire; besides, the substance
is contained in this last sentence--
"So I think, my dear Mr. Lyndsay, for your sake more than my own,
our engagement had better be broken off."
In this letter, dated six weeks ago, she had charged me to burn all that
she had written to me, and as yet I had not done so, shrinking from the
sharp unreasonable pain with which we bury the beloved dead. But the
time of my mourning was accomplished. I tore the paper into fragments
and dropped them into the flames.
It must have been the pang with which I watched them darken and shrivel
that brought back the memory of another sharp stab. It was that day ten
years ago, when I walked for the first time after my accident. Supported
by a stick on one side, and by Atherley on the other, I crawled down the
long gallery at home and halted before a high wide-open window to see
the sunlit view of park and woods and distant downland. Then all at
once, ridden by my groom, Charming went past with feet that verily
danced upon the greensward, and quivering nostrils that rapturously
inhaled the breath of spring and of morning. I said: "George, I want
_you_ to have Charming." And it made me smile, even in that bitter
moment, to remember how indistinctly, how churlishly almost, Atherley
accepted the gift, in his eager haste to get me out of sight and thought
of it.
It was long before the last fluttering rags had vanished, transmuted
into fiery dust. The clock on the landing had many times chanted its
dirge since I had heard below the footsteps of the servants carrying
away the lamps from the sitting-rooms and the hall. Later still came the
far-off sound of Atherley's door closing behind him, like the final
good-night of the waking day. Over all the unconscious household had
stolen that silence which is more than silence, that hush which seems to
wait for something, that stillness of the night-watch which is kept
alone. It was familiar enough to me, but to-night it had a new meaning;
like the sunlight that shines when we are happy, or the rain that falls
when we are weeping, it seemed, as if in sympathy, to be repeating and
accenting what I could not so vividly have told in words. In my life,
and for the second time, there was the same desolate pause, as if the
dreary tale were finished and only the drearier epilogue remained to
live through--the same sense of sad separation from the happy and the
healthful.
I made a great effort to read, holding the book before me and compelling
myself to follow the sentences, but that power of abstraction which can
conquer pain does not belong to temperaments like mine. If only I could
have slept, as men have been able to do even upon the rack; but every
hour that passed left me more awake, more alive, more supersensitive to
suffering.
Early in the morning, long before the dawn, I must have been feverish, I
think. My head and hands burned, the air of the room stifled me, I was
losing my self-control.
I opened the window and leant out. The cool air revived me bodily, but
to the fever of the spirit it brought no relief. To my heart, if not to
my lips, sprang the old old cry for help which anguish has wrung from
generation after generation. The agony of mine, I felt wildly, must
pierce through sense, time, space, everything--even to the Living Heart
of all, and bring thence some token of pity! For one instant my passion
seemed to beat against the silent heavens, then to fall back bruised and
bleeding.
Out of the darkness came not so much as a wind whisper or the twinkle of
a star.
Was Atherley right after all?