CHAPTER II. OUR DILEMMA
CHAPTER III. OUR QUEEN OF HEARTS
CHAPTER IV. OUR GRAND PROJECT
THE TEN DAYS
THE FIRST DAY
BROTHER OWEN’S STORY OF THE SIEGE OF THE BLACK COTTAGE
THE SECOND DAY
BROTHER GRIFFITH’S STORY of THE FAMILY SECRET
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
THE THIRD DAY
BROTHER MORGAN’S STORY of THE DREAM-WOMAN
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
THE FOURTH DAY
BROTHER GRIFFITH’S STORY of MAD MONKTON
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
THE FIFTH DAY
BROTHER MORGAN’S STORY of THE DEAD HAND
THE SIXTH DAY
BROTHER GRIFFITH’S STORY of THE BITER BIT
THE SEVENTH DAY
BROTHER OWEN’S STORY of THE PARSON’S SCRUPLE
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
THE EIGHTH DAY
BROTHER GRIFFITH’S STORY of A PLOT IN PRIVATE LIFE
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
THE NINTH DAY
BROTHER MORGAN’S STORY of FAUNTLEROY
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
THE TENTH DAY
BROTHER OWEN’S STORY of ANNE RODWAY
THE NIGHT
THE MORNING
LETTER OF DEDICATION.
TO EMILE FORGUES.
At a time when French readers were altogether unaware of the existence
of any books of my writing, a critical examination of my novels
appeared under your signature in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. I read
that article, at the time of its appearance, with sincere pleasure and
sincere gratitude to the writer, and I have honestly done my best to
profit by it ever since.
At a later period, when arrangements were made for the publication of
my novels in Paris, you kindly undertook, at some sacrifice of your own
convenience, to give the first of the series—“The Dead Secret”—the
great advantage of being rendered into French by your pen. Your
excellent translation of “The Lighthouse” had already taught me how to
appreciate the value of your assistance; and when “The Dead Secret”
appeared in its French form, although I was sensibly gratified, I was
by no means surprised to find my fortunate work of fiction, not
translated, in the mechanical sense of the word, but transformed from a
novel that I had written in my language to a novel that you might have
written in yours.
I am now about to ask you to confer one more literary obligation on me
by accepting the dedication of this book, as the earliest
acknowledgment which it has been in my power to make of the debt I owe
to my critic, to my translator, and to my friend.
The stories which form the principal contents of the following pages
are all, more or less, exercises in that art which I have now studied
anxiously for some years, and which I still hope to cultivate, to
better and better purpose, for many more. Allow me, by inscribing the
collection to you, to secure one reader for it at the outset of its
progress through the world of letters whose capacity for seeing all a
writer’s defects may be matched by many other critics, but whose rarer
faculty of seeing all a writer’s merits is equaled by very few.
WILKIE COLLINS.
THE QUEEN OF HEARTS.
CHAPTER I.
OURSELVES.
We were three quiet, lonely old men, and SHE was a lively, handsome
young woman, and we were at our wits’ end what to do with her.
A word about ourselves, first of all—a necessary word, to explain the
singular situation of our fair young guest.
We are three brothers; and we live in a barbarous, dismal old house
called The Glen Tower. Our place of abode stands in a hilly, lonesome
district of South Wales. No such thing as a line of railway runs
anywhere near us. No gentleman’s seat is within an easy drive of us. We
are at an unspeakably inconvenient distance from a town, and the
village to which we send for our letters is three miles off.
My eldest brother, Owen, was brought up to the Church. All the prime of
his life was passed in a populous London parish. For more years than I
now like to reckon up, he worked unremittingly, in defiance of failing
health and adverse fortune, amid the multitudinous misery of the London
poor; and he would, in all probability, have sacrificed his life to his
duty long before the present time if The Glen Tower had not come into
his possession through two unexpected deaths in the elder and richer
branch of our family. This opening to him of a place of rest and refuge
saved his life. No man ever drew breath who better deserved the gifts
of fortune; for no man, I sincerely believe, more tender of others,
more diffident of himself, more gentle, more generous, and more
simple-hearted than Owen, ever walked this earth.
My second brother, Morgan, started in life as a doctor, and learned all
that his profession could teach him at home and abroad. He realized a
moderate independence by his practice, beginning in one of our large
northern towns and ending as a physician in London; but, although he
was well known and appreciated among his brethren, he failed to gain
that sort of reputation with the public which elevates a man into the
position of a great doctor. The ladies never liked him. In the first
place, he was ugly (Morgan will excuse me for mentioning this); in the
second place, he was an inveterate smoker, and he smelled of tobacco
when he felt languid pulses in elegant bedrooms; in the third place, he
was the most formidably outspoken teller of the truth as regarded
himself, his profession, and his patients, that ever imperiled the
social standing of the science of medicine. For these reasons, and for
others which it is not necessary to mention, he never pushed his way,
as a doctor, into the front ranks, and he never cared to do so. About a
year after Owen came into possession of The Glen Tower, Morgan
discovered that he had saved as much money for his old age as a
sensible man could want; that he was tired of the active pursuit—or, as
he termed it, of the dignified quackery of his profession; and that it
was only common charity to give his invalid brother a companion who
could physic him for nothing, and so prevent him from getting rid of
his money in the worst of all possible ways, by wasting it on doctors’
bills. In a week after Morgan had arrived at these conclusions, he was
settled at The Glen Tower; and from that time, opposite as their
characters were, my two elder brothers lived together in their lonely
retreat, thoroughly understanding, and, in their very different ways,
heartily loving one another.
Many years passed before I, the youngest of the three—christened by the
unmelodious name of Griffith—found my way, in my turn, to the dreary
old house, and the sheltering quiet of the Welsh hills. My career in
life had led me away from my brothers; and even now, when we are all
united, I have still ties and interests to connect me with the outer
world which neither Owen nor Morgan possess.
I was brought up to the Bar. After my first year’s study of the law, I
wearied of it, and strayed aside idly into the brighter and more
attractive paths of literature. My occasional occupation with my pen
was varied by long traveling excursions in all parts of the Continent;
year by year my circle of gay friends and acquaintances increased, and
I bade fair to sink into the condition of a wandering desultory man,
without a fixed purpose in life of any sort, when I was saved by what
has saved many another in my situation—an attachment to a good and a
sensible woman. By the time I had reached the age of thirty-five, I had
done what neither of my brothers had done before me—I had married.
As a single man, my own small independence, aided by what little
additions to it I could pick up with my pen, had been sufficient for my
wants; but with marriage and its responsibilities came the necessity
for serious exertion. I returned to my neglected studies, and grappled
resolutely, this time, with the intricate difficulties of the law. I
was called to the Bar. My wife’s father aided me with his interest, and
I started into practice without difficulty and without delay.
For the next twenty years my married life was a scene of happiness and
prosperity, on which I now look back with a grateful tenderness that no
words of mine can express. The memory of my wife is busy at my heart
while I think of those past times. The forgotten tears rise in my eyes
again, and trouble the course of my pen while it traces these simple
lines.
Let me pass rapidly over the one unspeakable misery of my life; let me
try to remember now, as I tried to remember then, that she lived to see
our only child—our son, who was so good to her, who is still so good to
me—grow up to manhood; that her head lay on my bosom when she died; and
that the last frail movement of her hand in this world was the movement
that brought it closer to her boy’s lips.
I bore the blow—with God’s help I bore it, and bear it still. But it
struck me away forever from my hold on social life; from the purposes
and pursuits, the companions and the pleasures of twenty years, which
her presence had sanctioned and made dear to me. If my son George had
desired to follow my profession, I should still have struggled against
myself, and have kept my place in the world until I had seen him
prosperous and settled. But his choice led him to the army; and before
his mother’s death he had obtained his commission, and had entered on
his path in life. No other responsibility remained to claim from me the
sacrifice of myself; my brothers had made my place ready for me by
their fireside; my heart yearned, in its desolation, for the friends
and companions of the old boyish days; my good, brave son promised that
no year should pass, as long as he was in England, without his coming
to cheer me; and so it happened that I, in my turn, withdrew from the
world, which had once been a bright and a happy world to me, and
retired to end my days, peacefully, contentedly, and gratefully, as my
brothers are ending theirs, in the solitude of The Glen Tower.
How many years have passed since we have all three been united it is
not necessary to relate. It will be more to the purpose if I briefly
record that we have never been separated since the day which first saw
us assembled together in our hillside retreat; that we have never yet
wearied of the time, of the place, or of ourselves; and that the
influence of solitude on our hearts and minds has not altered them for
the worse, for it has not embittered us toward our fellow-creatures,
and it has not dried up in us the sources from which harmless
occupations and innocent pleasures may flow refreshingly to the last
over the waste places of human life. Thus much for our own story, and
for the circumstances which have withdrawn us from the world for the
rest of our days.
And now imagine us three lonely old men, tall and lean, and
white-headed; dressed, more from past habit than from present
association, in customary suits of solemn black: Brother Owen,
yielding, gentle, and affectionate in look, voice, and manner; brother
Morgan, with a quaint, surface-sourness of address, and a tone of dry
sarcasm in his talk, which single him out, on all occasions, as a
character in our little circle; brother Griffith forming the link
between his two elder companions, capable, at one time, of sympathizing
with the quiet, thoughtful tone of Owen’s conversation, and ready, at
another, to exchange brisk severities on life and manners with
Morgan—in short, a pliable, double-sided old lawyer, who stands between
the clergyman-brother and the physician-brother with an ear ready for
each, and with a heart open to both, share and share together.
Imagine the strange old building in which we live to be really what its
name implies—a tower standing in a glen; in past times the fortress of
a fighting Welsh chieftain; in present times a dreary land-lighthouse,
built up in many stories of two rooms each, with a little modern
lean-to of cottage form tacked on quaintly to one of its sides; the
great hill, on whose lowest slope it stands, rising precipitously
behind it; a dark, swift-flowing stream in the valley below; hills on
hills all round, and no way of approach but by one of the loneliest and
wildest crossroads in all South Wales.
Imagine such a place of abode as this, and such inhabitants of it as
ourselves, and them picture the descent among us—as of a goddess
dropping from the clouds—of a lively, handsome, fashionable young
lady—a bright, gay, butterfly creature, used to flutter away its
existence in the broad sunshine of perpetual gayety—a child of the new
generation, with all the modern ideas whirling together in her pretty
head, and all the modern accomplishments at the tips of her delicate
fingers. Imagine such a light-hearted daughter of Eve as this, the
spoiled darling of society, the charming spendthrift of Nature’s
choicest treasures of beauty and youth, suddenly flashing into the dim
life of three weary old men—suddenly dropped into the place, of all
others, which is least fit for her—suddenly shut out from the world in
the lonely quiet of the loneliest home in England. Realize, if it be
possible, all that is most whimsical and most anomalous in such a
situation as this, and the startling confession contained in the
opening sentence of these pages will no longer excite the faintest
emotion of surprise. Who can wonder now, when our bright young goddess
really descended on us, that I and my brothers were all three at our
wits’ end what to do with her!
CHAPTER II.
OUR DILEMMA.
Who is the young lady? And how did she find her way into The Glen
Tower?
Her name (in relation to which I shall have something more to say a
little further on) is Jessie Yelverton. She is an orphan and an only
child. Her mother died while she was an infant; her father was my dear
and valued friend, Major Yelverton. He lived long enough to celebrate
his darling’s seventh birthday. When he died he intrusted his authority
over her and his responsibility toward her to his brother and to me.
When I was summoned to the reading of the major’s will, I knew
perfectly well that I should hear myself appointed guardian and
executor with his brother; and I had been also made acquainted with my
lost friend’s wishes as to his daughter’s education, and with his
intentions as to the disposal of all his property in her favor. My own
idea, therefore, was, that the reading of the will would inform me of
nothing which I had not known in the testator’s lifetime. When the day
came for hearing it, however, I found that I had been over hasty in
arriving at this conclusion. Toward the end of the document there was a
clause inserted which took me entirely by surprise.
After providing for the education of Miss Yelverton under the direction
of her guardians, and for her residence, under ordinary circumstances,
with the major’s sister, Lady Westwick, the clause concluded by
saddling the child’s future inheritance with this curious condition:
From the period of her leaving school to the period of her reaching the
age of twenty-one years, Miss Yelverton was to pass not less than six
consecutive weeks out of every year under the roof of one of her two
guardians. During the lives of both of them, it was left to her own
choice to say which of the two she would prefer to live with. In all
other respects the condition was imperative. If she forfeited it,
excepting, of course, the case of the deaths of both her guardians, she
was only to have a life-interest in the property; if she obeyed it, the
money itself was to become her own possession on the day when she
completed her twenty-first year.
This clause in the will, as I have said, took me at first by surprise.
I remembered how devotedly Lady Westwick had soothed her
sister-in-law’s death-bed sufferings, and how tenderly she had
afterward watched over the welfare of the little motherless child—I
remembered the innumerable claims she had established in this way on
her brother’s confidence in her affection for his orphan daughter, and
I was, therefore, naturally amazed at the appearance of a condition in
his will which seemed to show a positive distrust of Lady Westwick’s
undivided influence over the character and conduct of her niece.
A few words from my fellow-guardian, Mr. Richard Yelverton, and a
little after-consideration of some of my deceased friend’s
peculiarities of disposition and feeling, to which I had not hitherto
attached sufficient importance, were enough to make me understand the
motives by which he had been influenced in providing for the future of
his child.
Major Yelverton had raised himself to a position of affluence and
eminence from a very humble origin. He was the son of a small farmer,
and it was his pride never to forget this circumstance, never to be
ashamed of it, and never to allow the prejudices of society to
influence his own settled opinions on social questions in general.
Acting, in all that related to his intercourse with the world, on such
principles as these, the major, it is hardly necessary to say, held
some strangely heterodox opinions on the modern education of girls, and
on the evil influence of society over the characters of women in
general. Out of the strength of those opinions, and out of the
certainty of his conviction that his sister did not share them, had
grown that condition in his will which removed his daughter from the
influence of her aunt for six consecutive weeks in every year. Lady
Westwick was the most light-hearted, the most generous, the most
impulsive of women; capable, when any serious occasion called it forth,
of all that was devoted and self-sacrificing, but, at other and
ordinary times, constitutionally restless, frivolous, and eager for
perpetual gayety. Distrusting the sort of life which he knew his
daughter would lead under her aunt’s roof, and at the same time
gratefully remembering his sister’s affectionate devotion toward his
dying wife and her helpless infant, Major Yelverton had attempted to
make a compromise, which, while it allowed Lady Westwick the close
domestic intercourse with her niece that she had earned by innumerable
kind offices, should, at the same time, place the young girl for a
fixed period of every year of her minority under the corrective care of
two such quiet old-fashioned guardians as his brother and myself. Such
is the history of the clause in the will. My friend little thought,
when he dictated it, of the extraordinary result to which it was one
day to lead.
For some years, however, events ran on smoothly enough. Little Jessie
was sent to an excellent school, with strict instructions to the
mistress to make a good girl of her, and not a fashionable young lady.
Although she was reported to be anything but a pattern pupil in respect
of attention to her lessons, she became from the first the chosen
favorite of every one about her. The very offenses which she committed
against the discipline of the school were of the sort which provoke a
smile even on the stern countenance of authority itself. One of these
quaint freaks of mischief may not inappropriately be mentioned here,
inasmuch as it gained her the pretty nickname under which she will be
found to appear occasionally in these pages.
On a certain autumn night shortly after the Midsummer vacation, the
mistress of the school fancied she saw a light under the door of the
bedroom occupied by Jessie and three other girls. It was then close on
midnight; and, fearing that some case of sudden illness might have
happened, she hastened into the room. On opening the door, she
discovered, to her horror and amazement, that all four girls were out
of bed—were dressed in brilliantly-fantastic costumes, representing the
four grotesque “Queens” of Hearts, Diamonds, Spades, and Clubs,
familiar to us all on the pack of cards—and were dancing a quadrille,
in which Jessie sustained the character of The Queen of Hearts. The
next morning’s investigation disclosed that Miss Yelverton had smuggled
the dresses into the school, and had amused herself by giving an
impromptu fancy ball to her companions, in imitation of an
entertainment of the same kind at which she had figured in a
“court-card” quadrille at her aunt’s country house.
The dresses were instantly confiscated and the necessary punishment
promptly administered; but the remembrance of Jessie’s extraordinary
outrage on bedroom discipline lasted long enough to become one of the
traditions of the school, and she and her sister-culprits were
thenceforth hailed as the “queens” of the four “suites” by their
class-companions whenever the mistress’s back was turned, Whatever
might have become of the nicknames thus employed in relation to the
other three girls, such a mock title as The Queen of Hearts was too
appropriately descriptive of the natural charm of Jessie’s character,
as well as of the adventure in which she had taken the lead, not to
rise naturally to the lips of every one who knew her. It followed her
to her aunt’s house—it came to be as habitually and familiarly
connected with her, among her friends of all ages, as if it had been
formally inscribed on her baptismal register; and it has stolen its way
into these pages because it falls from my pen naturally and inevitably,
exactly as it often falls from my lips in real life.
When Jessie left school the first difficulty presented itself—in other
words, the necessity arose of fulfilling the conditions of the will. At
that time I was already settled at The Glen Tower, and her living six
weeks in our dismal solitude and our humdrum society was, as she
herself frankly wrote me word, quite out of the question. Fortunately,
she had always got on well with her uncle and his family; so she
exerted her liberty of choice, and, much to her own relief and to mine
also, passed her regular six weeks of probation, year after year, under
Mr. Richard Yelverton’s roof.
During this period I heard of her regularly, sometimes from my
fellow-guardian, sometimes from my son George, who, whenever his
military duties allowed him the opportunity, contrived to see her, now
at her aunt’s house, and now at Mr. Yelverton’s. The particulars of her
character and conduct, which I gleaned in this way, more than sufficed
to convince me that the poor major’s plan for the careful training of
his daughter’s disposition, though plausible enough in theory, was
little better than a total failure in practice. Miss Jessie, to use the
expressive common phrase, took after her aunt. She was as generous, as
impulsive, as light-hearted, as fond of change, and gayety, and fine
clothes—in short, as complete and genuine a woman as Lady Westwick
herself. It was impossible to reform the “Queen of Hearts,” and equally
impossible not to love her. Such, in few words, was my
fellow-guardian’s report of his experience of our handsome young ward.
So the time passed till the year came of which I am now writing—the
ever-memorable year, to England, of the Russian war. It happened that I
had heard less than usual at this period, and indeed for many months
before it, of Jessie and her proceedings. My son had been ordered out
with his regiment to the Crimea in 1854, and had other work in hand now
than recording the sayings and doings of a young lady. Mr. Richard
Yelverton, who had been hitherto used to write to me with tolerable
regularity, seemed now, for some reason that I could not conjecture, to
have forgotten my existence. Ultimately I was reminded of my ward by
one of George’s own letters, in which he asked for news of her; and I
wrote at once to Mr. Yelverton. The answer that reached me was written
by his wife: he was dangerously ill. The next letter that came informed
me of his death. This happened early in the spring of the year 1855.
I am ashamed to confess it, but the change in my own position was the
first idea that crossed my mind when I read the news of Mr. Yelverton’s
death. I was now left sole guardian, and Jessie Yelverton wanted a year
still of coming of age.
By the next day’s post I wrote to her about the altered state of the
relations between us. She was then on the Continent with her aunt,
having gone abroad at the very beginning of the year. Consequently, so
far as eighteen hundred and fifty-five was concerned, the condition
exacted by the will yet remained to be performed. She had still six
weeks to pass—her last six weeks, seeing that she was now twenty years
old—under the roof of one of her guardians, and I was now the only
guardian left.
In due course of time I received my answer, written on rose-colored
paper, and expressed throughout in a tone of light, easy, feminine
banter, which amused me in spite of myself. Miss Jessie, according to
her own account, was hesitating, on receipt of my letter, between two
alternatives—the one, of allowing herself to be buried six weeks in The
Glen Tower; the other, of breaking the condition, giving up the money,
and remaining magnanimously contented with nothing but a life-interest
in her father’s property. At present she inclined decidedly toward
giving up the money and escaping the clutches of “the three horrid old
men;” but she would let me know again if she happened to change her
mind. And so, with best love, she would beg to remain always
affectionately mine, as long as she was well out of my reach.
The summer passed, the autumn came, and I never heard from her again.
Under ordinary circumstances, this long silence might have made me feel
a little uneasy. But news reached me about this time from the Crimea
that my son was wounded—not dangerously, thank God, but still severely
enough to be laid up—and all my anxieties were now centered in that
direction. By the beginning of September, however, I got better
accounts of him, and my mind was made easy enough to let me think of
Jessie again. Just as I was considering the necessity of writing once
more to my refractory ward, a second letter arrived from her. She had
returned at last from abroad, had suddenly changed her mind, suddenly
grown sick of society, suddenly become enamored of the pleasures of
retirement, and suddenly found out that the three horrid old men were
three dear old men, and that six weeks’ solitude at The Glen Tower was
the luxury, of all others, that she languished for most. As a necessary
result of this altered state of things, she would therefore now propose
to spend her allotted six weeks with her guardian. We might certainly
expect her on the twentieth of September, and she would take the
greatest care to fit herself for our society by arriving in the lowest
possible spirits, and bringing her own sackcloth and ashes along with
her.
The first ordeal to which this alarming letter forced me to submit was
the breaking of the news it contained to my two brothers. The
disclosure affected them very differently. Poor dear Owen merely turned
pale, lifted his weak, thin hands in a panic-stricken manner, and then
sat staring at me in speechless and motionless bewilderment. Morgan
stood up straight before me, plunged both his hands into his pockets,
burst suddenly into the harshest laugh I ever heard from his lips, and
told me, with an air of triumph, that it was exactly what he expected.
“What you expected?” I repeated, in astonishment.
“Yes,” returned Morgan, with his bitterest emphasis. “It doesn’t
surprise me in the least. It’s the way things go in this world—it’s the
regular moral see-saw of good and evil—the old story with the old end
to it. They were too happy in the garden of Eden—down comes the serpent
and turns them out. Solomon was too wise—down comes the Queen of Sheba,
and makes a fool of him. We’ve been too comfortable at The Glen
Tower—down comes a woman, and sets us all three by the ears together.
All I wonder at is that it hasn’t happened before.” With those words
Morgan resignedly took out his pipe, put on his old felt hat and turned
to the door.
“You’re not going away before she comes?” exclaimed Owen, piteously.
“Don’t leave us—please don’t leave us!”
“Going!” cried Morgan, with great contempt. “What should I gain by
that? When destiny has found a man out, and heated his gridiron for
him, he has nothing left to do, that I know of, but to get up and sit
on it.”
I opened my lips to protest against the implied comparison between a
young lady and a hot gridiron, but, before I could speak, Morgan was
gone.
“Well,” I said to Owen, “we must make the best of it. We must brush up
our manners, and set the house tidy, and amuse her as well as we can.
The difficulty is where to put her; and, when that is settled, the next
puzzle will be, what to order in to make her comfortable. It’s a hard
thing, brother, to say what will or what will not please a young lady’s
taste.”
Owen looked absently at me, in greater bewilderment than ever—opened
his eyes in perplexed consideration—repeated to himself slowly the word
“tastes”—and then helped me with this suggestion:
“Hadn’t we better begin, Griffith, by getting her a plum-cake?”
“My dear Owen,” I remonstrated, “it is a grown young woman who is
coming to see us, not a little girl from school.”
“Oh!” said Owen, more confused than before. “Yes—I see; we couldn’t do
wrong, I suppose—could we?—if we got her a little dog, and a lot of new
gowns.”
There was, evidently, no more help in the way of advice to be expected
from Owen than from Morgan himself. As I came to that conclusion, I saw
through the window our old housekeeper on her way, with her basket, to
the kitchen-garden, and left the room to ascertain if she could assist
us.
To my great dismay, the housekeeper took even a more gloomy view than
Morgan of the approaching event. When I had explained all the
circumstances to her, she carefully put down her basket, crossed her
arms, and said to me in slow, deliberate, mysterious tones:
“You want my advice about what’s to be done with this young woman?
Well, sir, here’s my advice: Don’t you trouble your head about her. It
won’t be no use. Mind, I tell you, it won’t be no use.”
“What do you mean?”
“You look at this place, sir—it’s more like a prison than a house,
isn’t it? You, look at us as lives in it. We’ve got (saving your
presence) a foot apiece in our graves, haven’t we? When you was young
yourself, sir, what would you have done if they had shut you up for six
weeks in such a place as this, among your grandfathers and
grandmothers, with their feet in the grave?”
“I really can’t say.”
“I can, sir. You’d have run away. _She’ll_ run away. Don’t you worry
your head about her—she’ll save you the trouble. I tell you again,
she’ll run away.”
With those ominous words the housekeeper took up her basket, sighed
heavily, and left me.
I sat down under a tree quite helpless. Here was the whole
responsibility shifted upon my miserable shoulders. Not a lady in the
neighborhood to whom I could apply for assistance, and the nearest shop
eight miles distant from us. The toughest case I ever had to conduct,
when I was at the Bar, was plain sailing compared with the difficulty
of receiving our fair guest.
It was absolutely necessary, however, to decide at once where she was
to sleep. All the rooms in the tower were of stone—dark, gloomy, and
cold even in the summer-time. Impossible to put her in any one of them.
The only other alternative was to lodge her in the little modern
lean-to, which I have already described as being tacked on to the side
of the old building. It contained three cottage-rooms, and they might
be made barely habitable for a young lady. But then those rooms were
occupied by Morgan. His books were in one, his bed was in another, his
pipes and general lumber were in the third. Could I expect him, after
the sour similitudes he had used in reference to our expected visitor,
to turn out of his habitation and disarrange all his habits for her
convenience? The bare idea of proposing the thing to him seemed
ridiculous; and yet inexorable necessity left me no choice but to make
the hopeless experiment. I walked back to the tower hastily and
desperately, to face the worst that might happen before my courage
cooled altogether.
On crossing the threshold of the hall door I was stopped, to my great
amazement, by a procession of three of the farm-servants, followed by
Morgan, all walking after each other, in Indian file, toward the spiral
staircase that led to the top of the tower. The first of the servants
carried the materials for making a fire; the second bore an inverted
arm-chair on his head; the third tottered under a heavy load of books;
while Morgan came last, with his canister of tobacco in his hand, his
dressing-gown over his shoulders, and his whole collection of pipes
hugged up together in a bundle under his arm.
“What on earth does this mean?” I inquired.
“It means taking Time by the forelock,” answered Morgan, looking at me
with a smile of sour satisfaction. “I’ve got the start of your young
woman, Griffith, and I’m making the most of it.”
“But where, in Heaven’s name, are you going?” I asked, as the head man
of the procession disappeared with his firing up the staircase.
“How high is this tower?” retorted Morgan.
“Seven stories, to be sure,” I replied.
“Very good,” said my eccentric brother, setting his foot on the first
stair, “I’m going up to the seventh.”
“You can’t,” I shouted.
“_She_ can’t, you mean,” said Morgan, “and that’s exactly why I’m going
there.”
“But the room is not furnished.”
“It’s out of her reach.”
“One of the windows has fallen to pieces.”
“It’s out of her reach.”
“There’s a crow’s nest in the corner.”
“It’s out of her reach.”
By the time this unanswerable argument had attained its third
repetition, Morgan, in his turn, had disappeared up the winding stairs.
I knew him too well to attempt any further protest.
Here was my first difficulty smoothed away most unexpectedly; for here
were the rooms in the lean-to placed by their owner’s free act and deed
at my disposal. I wrote on the spot to the one upholsterer of our
distant county town to come immediately and survey the premises, and
sent off a mounted messenger with the letter. This done, and the
necessary order also dispatched to the carpenter and glazier to set
them at work on Morgan’s sky-parlor in the seventh story, I began to
feel, for the first time, as if my scattered wits were coming back to
me. By the time the evening had closed in I had hit on no less than
three excellent ideas, all providing for the future comfort and
amusement of our fair guest. The first idea was to get her a Welsh
pony; the second was to hire a piano from the county town; the third
was to send for a boxful of novels from London. I must confess I
thought these projects for pleasing her very happily conceived, and
Owen agreed with me. Morgan, as usual, took the opposite view. He said
she would yawn over the novels, turn up her nose at the piano, and
fracture her skull with the pony. As for the housekeeper, she stuck to
her text as stoutly in the evening as she had stuck to it in the
morning. “Pianner or no pianner, story-book or no story-book, pony or
no pony, you mark my words, sir—that young woman will run away.”
Such were the housekeeper’s parting words when she wished me
good-night.
When the next morning came, and brought with it that terrible waking
time which sets a man’s hopes and projects before him, the great as
well as the small, stripped bare of every illusion, it is not to be
concealed that I felt less sanguine of our success in entertaining the
coming guest. So far as external preparations were concerned, there
seemed, indeed, but little to improve; but apart from these, what had
we to offer, in ourselves and our society, to attract her? There lay
the knotty point of the question, and there the grand difficulty of
finding an answer.
I fall into serious reflection while I am dressing on the pursuits and
occupations with which we three brothers have been accustomed, for
years past, to beguile the time. Are they at all likely, in the case of
any one of us, to interest or amuse her?
My chief occupation, to begin with the youngest, consists, in acting as
steward on Owen’s property. The routine of my duties has never lost its
sober attraction to my tastes, for it has always employed me in
watching the best interests of my brother, and of my son also, who is
one day to be his heir. But can I expect our fair guest to sympathize
with such family concerns as these? Clearly not.
Morgan’s pursuit comes next in order of review—a pursuit of a far more
ambitious nature than mine. It was always part of my second brother’s
whimsical, self-contradictory character to view with the profoundest
contempt the learned profession by which he gained his livelihood, and
he is now occupying the long leisure hours of his old age in composing
a voluminous treatise, intended, one of these days, to eject the whole
body corporate of doctors from the position which they have usurped in
the estimation of their fellow-creatures. This daring work is entitled
“An Examination of the Claims of Medicine on the Gratitude of Mankind.
Decided in the Negative by a Retired Physician.” So far as I can tell,
the book is likely to extend to the dimensions of an Encyclopedia; for
it is Morgan’s plan to treat his comprehensive subject principally from
the historical point of view, and to run down all the doctors of
antiquity, one after another, in regular succession, from the first of
the tribe. When I last heard of his progress he was hard on the heels
of Hippocrates, but had no immediate prospect of tripping up his
successor, Is this the sort of occupation (I ask myself) in which a
modern young lady is likely to feel the slightest interest? Once again,
clearly not.
Owen’s favorite employment is, in its way, quite as characteristic as
Morgan’s, and it has the great additional advantage of appealing to a
much larger variety of tastes. My eldest brother—great at drawing and
painting when he was a lad, always interested in artists and their
works in after life—has resumed, in his declining years, the holiday
occupation of his schoolboy days. As an amateur landscape-painter, he
works with more satisfaction to himself, uses more color, wears out
more brushes, and makes a greater smell of paint in his studio than any
artist by profession, native or foreign, whom I ever met with. In look,
in manner, and in disposition, the gentlest of mankind, Owen, by some
singular anomaly in his character, which he seems to have caught from
Morgan, glories placidly in the wildest and most frightful range of
subjects which his art is capable of representing. Immeasurable ruins,
in howling wildernesses, with blood-red sunsets gleaming over them;
thunder-clouds rent with lightning, hovering over splitting trees on
the verges of awful precipices; hurricanes, shipwrecks, waves, and
whirlpools follow each other on his canvas, without an intervening
glimpse of quiet everyday nature to relieve the succession of pictorial
horrors. When I see him at his easel, so neat and quiet, so
unpretending and modest in himself, with such a composed expression on
his attentive face, with such a weak white hand to guide such bold, big
brushes, and when I look at the frightful canvasful of terrors which he
is serenely aggravating in fierceness and intensity with every
successive touch, I find it difficult to realize the connection between
my brother and his work, though I see them before me not six inches
apart. Will this quaint spectacle possess any humorous attractions for
Miss Jessie? Perhaps it may. There is some slight chance that Owen’s
employment will be lucky enough to interest her.
Thus far my morning cogitations advance doubtfully enough, but they
altogether fail in carrying me beyond the narrow circle of The Glen
Tower. I try hard, in our visitor’s interest, to look into the
resources of the little world around us, and I find my efforts rewarded
by the prospect of a total blank.
Is there any presentable living soul in the neighborhood whom we can
invite to meet her? Not one. There are, as I have already said, no
country seats near us; and society in the county town has long since
learned to regard us as three misanthropes, strongly suspected, from
our monastic way of life and our dismal black costume, of being popish
priests in disguise. In other parts of England the clergyman of the
parish might help us out of our difficulty; but here in South Wales,
and in this latter half of the nineteenth century, we have the old type
parson of the days of Fielding still in a state of perfect
preservation. Our local clergyman receives a stipend which is too
paltry to bear comparison with the wages of an ordinary mechanic. In
dress, manners, and tastes he is about on a level with the upper class
of agricultural laborer. When attempts have been made by well-meaning
gentlefolks to recognize the claims of his profession by asking him to
their houses, he has been known, on more than one occasion, to leave
his plowman’s pair of shoes in the hall, and enter the drawing-room
respectfully in his stockings. Where he preaches, miles and miles away
from us and from the poor cottage in which he lives, if he sees any of
the company in the squire’s pew yawn or fidget in their places, he
takes it as a hint that they are tired of listening, and closes his
sermon instantly at the end of the sentence. Can we ask this most
irreverend and unclerical of men to meet a young lady? I doubt, even if
we made the attempt, whether we should succeed, by fair means, in
getting him beyond the servants’ hall.
Dismissing, therefore, all idea of inviting visitors to entertain our
guest, and feeling, at the same time, more than doubtful of her chance
of discovering any attraction in the sober society of the inmates of
the house, I finish my dressing and go down to breakfast, secretly
veering round to the housekeeper’s opinion that Miss Jessie will really
bring matters to an abrupt conclusion by running away. I find Morgan as
bitterly resigned to his destiny as ever, and Owen so affectionately
anxious to make himself of some use, and so lamentably ignorant of how
to begin, that I am driven to disembarrass myself of him at the outset
by a stratagem.
I suggest to him that our visitor is sure to be interested in pictures,
and that it would be a pretty attention, on his part, to paint her a
landscape to hang up in her room. Owen brightens directly, informs me
in his softest tones that he is then at work on the Earthquake at
Lisbon, and inquires whether I think she would like that subject. I
preserve my gravity sufficiently to answer in the affirmative, and my
brother retires meekly to his studio, to depict the engulfing of a city
and the destruction of a population. Morgan withdraws in his turn to
the top of the tower, threatening, when our guest comes, to draw all
his meals up to his new residence by means of a basket and string. I am
left alone for an hour, and then the upholsterer arrives from the
county town.
This worthy man, on being informed of our emergency, sees his way,
apparently, to a good stroke of business, and thereupon wins my lasting
gratitude by taking, in opposition to every one else, a bright and
hopeful view of existing circumstances.
“You’ll excuse me, sir,” he says, confidentially, when I show him the
rooms in the lean-to, “but this is a matter of experience. I’m a family
man myself, with grown-up daughters of my own, and the natures of young
women are well known to me. Make their rooms comfortable, and you make
’em happy. Surround their lives, sir, with a suitable atmosphere of
furniture, and you never hear a word of complaint drop from their lips.
Now, with regard to these rooms, for example, sir—you put a neat French
bedstead in that corner, with curtains conformable—say a tasty chintz;
you put on that bedstead what I will term a sufficiency of bedding; and
you top up with a sweet little eider-down quilt, as light as roses, and
similar the same in color. You do that, and what follows? You please
her eye when she lies down at night, and you please her eye when she
gets up in the morning—and you’re all right so far, and so is she. I
will not dwell, sir, on the toilet-table, nor will I seek to detain you
about the glass to show her figure, and the other glass to show her
face, because I have the articles in stock, and will be myself
answerable for their effect on a lady’s mind and person.”
He led the way into the next room as he spoke, and arranged its future
fittings, and decorations, as he had already planned out the bedroom,
with the strictest reference to the connection which experience had
shown him to exist between comfortable furniture and female happiness.
Thus far, in my helpless state of mind, the man’s confidence had
impressed me in spite of myself, and I had listened to him in
superstitious silence. But as he continued to rise, by regular
gradations, from one climax of upholstery to another, warning visions
of his bill disclosed themselves in the remote background of the scene
of luxury and magnificence which my friend was conjuring up. Certain
sharp professional instincts of bygone times resumed their influence
over me; I began to start doubts and ask questions; and as a necessary
consequence the interview between us soon assumed something like a
practical form.
Having ascertained what the probable expense of furnishing would amount
to and having discovered that the process of transforming the lean-to
(allowing for the time required to procure certain articles of rarity
from Bristol) would occupy nearly a fortnight, I dismissed the
upholsterer with the understanding that I should take a day or two for
consideration, and let him know the result. It was then the fifth of
September, and our Queen of Hearts was to arrive on the twentieth. The
work, therefore, if it was begun on the seventh or eighth, would be
begun in time.
In making all my calculations with a reference to the twentieth of
September, I relied implicitly, it will be observed, on a young lady’s
punctuality in keeping an appointment which she had herself made. I can
only account for such extraordinary simplicity on my part on the
supposition that my wits had become sadly rusted by long seclusion from
society. Whether it was referable to this cause or not, my innocent
trustfulness was at any rate destined to be practically rebuked before
long in the most surprising manner. Little did I suspect, when I parted
from the upholsterer on the fifth of the month, what the tenth of the
month had in store for me.
On the seventh I made up my mind to have the bedroom furnished at once,
and to postpone the question of the sitting-room for a few days longer.
Having dispatched the necessary order to that effect, I next wrote to
hire the piano and to order the box of novels. This done, I
congratulated myself on the forward state of the preparations, and sat
down to repose in the atmosphere of my own happy delusions.
On the ninth the wagon arrived with the furniture, and the men set to
work on the bedroom. From this moment Morgan retired definitely to the
top of the tower, and Owen became too nervous to lay the necessary
amount of paint on the Earthquake at Lisbon.
On the tenth the work was proceeding bravely. Toward noon Owen and I
strolled to the door to enjoy the fine autumn sunshine. We were sitting
lazily on our favorite bench in front of the tower when we were
startled by a shout from above us. Looking up directly, we saw Morgan
half in and half out of his narrow window. In the seventh story,
gesticulating violently with the stem of his long meerschaum pipe in
the direction of the road below us.
We gazed eagerly in the quarter thus indicated, but our low position
prevented us for some time from seeing anything. At last we both
discerned an old yellow post-chaise distinctly and indisputably
approaching us.
Owen and I looked at one another in panic-stricken silence. It was
coming to us—and what did it contain? Do pianos travel in chaises? Are
boxes of novels conveyed to their destination by a postilion? We
expected the piano and expected the novels, but nothing
else—unquestionably nothing else.
The chaise took the turn in the road, passed through the gateless gap
in our rough inclosure-wall of loose stone, and rapidly approached us.
A bonnet appeared at the window and a hand gayly waved a white
handkerchief.
Powers of caprice, confusion, and dismay! It was Jessie Yelverton
herself—arriving, without a word of warning, exactly ten days before
her time.
CHAPTER III.
OUR QUEEN OF HEARTS.
The chaise stopped in front of us, and before we had recovered from our
bewilderment the gardener had opened the door and let down the steps.
A bright, laughing face, prettily framed round by a black veil passed
over the head and tied under the chin—a traveling-dress of a nankeen
color, studded with blue buttons and trimmed with white braid—a light
brown cloak over it—little neatly-gloved hands, which seized in an
instant on one of mine and on one of Owen’s—two dark blue eyes, which
seemed to look us both through and through in a moment—a clear, full,
merrily confident voice—a look and manner gayly and gracefully
self-possessed—such were the characteristics of our fair guest which
first struck me at the moment when she left the postchaise and
possessed herself of my hand.
“Don’t begin by scolding me,” she said, before I could utter a word of
welcome. “There will be time enough for that in the course of the next
six weeks. I beg pardon, with all possible humility, for the offense of
coming ten days before my time. Don’t ask me to account for it, please;
if you do, I shall be obliged to confess the truth. My dear sir, the
fact is, this is an act of impulse.”
She paused, and looked us both in the face with a bright confidence in
her own flow of nonsense that was perfectly irresistible.
“I must tell you all about it,” she ran on, leading the way to the
bench, and inviting us, by a little mock gesture of supplication, to
seat ourselves on either side of her. “I feel so guilty till I’ve told
you. Dear me! how nice this is! Here I am quite at home already. Isn’t
it odd? Well, and how do you think it happened? The morning before
yesterday Matilda—there is Matilda, picking up my bonnet from the
bottom of that remarkably musty carriage—Matilda came and woke me as
usual, and I hadn’t an idea in my head, I assure you, till she began to
brush my hair. Can you account for it?—I can’t—but she seemed, somehow,
to brush a sudden fancy for coming here into my head. When I went down
to breakfast, I said to my aunt, ‘Darling, I have an irresistible
impulse to go to Wales at once, instead of waiting till the twentieth.’
She made all the necessary objections, poor dear, and my impulse got
stronger and stronger with every one of them. ‘I’m quite certain,’ I
said, ‘I shall never go at all if I don’t go now.’ ‘In that case,’ says
my aunt, ‘ring the bell, and have your trunks packed. Your whole future
depends on your going; and you terrify me so inexpressibly that I shall
be glad to get rid of you.’ You may not think it, to look at her—but
Matilda is a treasure; and in three hours more I was on the Great
Western Railway. I have not the least idea how I got here—except that
the men helped me everywhere. They are always such delightful
creatures! I have been casting myself, and my maid, and my trunks on
their tender mercies at every point in the journey, and their polite
attentions exceed all belief. I slept at your horrid little county town
last night; and the night before I missed a steamer or a train, I
forget which, and slept at Bristol; and that’s how I got here. And, now
I am here, I ought to give my guardian a kiss—oughtn’t I? Shall I call
you papa? I think I will. And shall I call _you_ uncle, sir, and give
you a kiss too? We shall come to it sooner or later—shan’t we?—and we
may as well begin at once, I suppose.”
Her fresh young lips touched my old withered cheek first, and then
Owen’s; a soft, momentary shadow of tenderness, that was very pretty
and becoming, passing quickly over the sunshine and gayety of her face
as she saluted us. The next moment she was on her feet again, inquiring
“who the wonderful man was who built The Glen Tower,” and wanting to go
all over it immediately from top to bottom.
As we took her into the house, I made the necessary apologies for the
miserable condition of the lean-to, and assured her that, ten days
later, she would have found it perfectly ready to receive her. She
whisked into the rooms—looked all round them—whisked out again—declared
she had come to live in the old Tower, and not in any modern addition
to it, and flatly declined to inhabit the lean-to on any terms
whatever. I opened my lips to state certain objections, but she slipped
away in an instant and made straight for the Tower staircase.
“Who lives here?” she asked, calling down to us, eagerly, from the
first-floor landing.
“I do,” said Owen; “but, if you would like me to move out—”
She was away up the second flight before he could say any more. The
next sound we heard, as we slowly followed her, was a peremptory
drumming against the room door of the second story.
“Anybody here?” we heard her ask through the door.
I called up to her that, under ordinary circumstances, I was there; but
that, like Owen, I should be happy to move out—
My polite offer was cut short as my brother’s had been. We heard more
drumming at the door of the third story. There were two rooms here
also—one perfectly empty, the other stocked with odds and ends of
dismal, old-fashioned furniture for which we had no use, and grimly
ornamented by a life-size basket figure supporting a complete suit of
armor in a sadly rusty condition. When Owen and I got to the
third-floor landing, the door was open; Miss Jessie had taken
possession of the rooms; and we found her on a chair, dusting the man
in armor with her cambric pocket-handkerchief.
“I shall live here,” she said, looking round at us briskly over her
shoulder.
We both remonstrated, but it was quite in vain. She told us that she
had an impulse to live with the man in armor, and that she would have
her way, or go back immediately in the post-chaise, which we pleased.
Finding it impossible to move her, we bargained that she should, at
least, allow the new bed and the rest of the comfortable furniture in
the lean-to to be moved up into the empty room for her sleeping
accommodation. She consented to this condition, protesting, however, to
the last against being compelled to sleep in a bed, because it was a
modern conventionality, out of all harmony with her place of residence
and her friend in armor.
Fortunately for the repose of Morgan, who, under other circumstances,
would have discovered on the very first day that his airy retreat was
by no means high enough to place him out of Jessie’s reach, the idea of
settling herself instantly in her new habitation excluded every other
idea from the mind of our fair guest. She pinned up the nankeen-colored
traveling dress in festoons all round her on the spot; informed us that
we were now about to make acquaintance with her in the new character of
a woman of business; and darted downstairs in mad high spirits,
screaming for Matilda and the trunks like a child for a set of new
toys. The wholesome protest of Nature against the artificial restraints
of modern life expressed itself in all that she said and in all that
she did. She had never known what it was to be happy before, because
she had never been allowed, until now, to do anything for herself. She
was down on her knees at one moment, blowing the fire, and telling us
that she felt like Cinderella; she was up on a table the next,
attacking the cobwebs with a long broom, and wishing she had been born
a housemaid. As for my unfortunate friend, the upholsterer, he was
leveled to the ranks at the first effort he made to assume the command
of the domestic forces in the furniture department. She laughed at him,
pushed him about, disputed all his conclusions, altered all his
arrangements, and ended by ordering half his bedroom furniture to be
taken back again, for the one unanswerable reason that she meant to do
without it.
As evening approached, the scene presented by the two rooms became
eccentric to a pitch of absurdity which is quite indescribable. The
grim, ancient walls of the bedroom had the liveliest modern
dressing-gowns and morning-wrappers hanging all about them. The man in
armor had a collection of smart little boots and shoes dangling by
laces and ribbons round his iron legs. A worm-eaten, steel-clasped
casket, dragged out of a corner, frowned on the upholsterer’s brand-new
toilet-table, and held a miscellaneous assortment of combs, hairpins,
and brushes. Here stood a gloomy antique chair, the patriarch of its
tribe, whose arms of blackened oak embraced a pair of pert, new deal
bonnet-boxes not a fortnight old. There, thrown down lightly on a
rugged tapestry table-cover, the long labor of centuries past, lay the
brief, delicate work of a week ago in the shape of silk and muslin
dresses turned inside out. In the midst of all these confusions and
contradictions, Miss Jessie ranged to and fro, the active center of the
whole scene of disorder, now singing at the top of her voice, and now
declaring in her lighthearted way that one of us must make up his mind
to marry her immediately, as she was determined to settle for the rest
of her life at The Glen Tower.
She followed up that announcement, when we met at dinner, by inquiring
if we quite understood by this time that she had left her “company
manners” in London, and that she meant to govern us all at her absolute
will and pleasure, throughout the whole period of her stay. Having thus
provided at the outset for the due recognition of her authority by the
household generally and individually having briskly planned out all her
own forthcoming occupations and amusements over the wine and fruit at
dessert, and having positively settled, between her first and second
cups of tea, where our connection with them was to begin and where it
was to end, she had actually succeeded, when the time came to separate
for the night, in setting us as much at our ease, and in making herself
as completely a necessary part of our household as if she had lived
among us for years and years past.
Such was our first day’s experience of the formidable guest whose
anticipated visit had so sorely and so absurdly discomposed us all. I
could hardly believe that I had actually wasted hours of precious time
in worrying myself and everybody else in the house about the best means
of laboriously entertaining a lively, high-spirited girl, who was
perfectly capable, without an effort on her own part or on ours, of
entertaining herself.
Having upset every one of our calculations on the first day of her
arrival, she next falsified all our predictions before she had been
with us a week. Instead of fracturing her skull with the pony, as
Morgan had prophesied, she sat the sturdy, sure-footed, mischievous
little brute as if she were part and parcel of himself. With an old
water-proof cloak of mine on her shoulders, with a broad-flapped
Spanish hat of Owen’s on her head, with a wild imp of a Welsh boy
following her as guide and groom on a bare-backed pony, and with one of
the largest and ugliest cur-dogs in England (which she had picked up,
lost and starved by the wayside) barking at her heels, she scoured the
country in all directions, and came back to dinner, as she herself
expressed it, “with the manners of an Amazon, the complexion of a
dairy-maid, and the appetite of a wolf.”
On days when incessant rain kept her indoors, she amused herself with a
new freak. Making friends everywhere, as became The Queen of Hearts,
she even ingratiated herself with the sour old housekeeper, who had
predicted so obstinately that she was certain to run away. To the
amazement of everybody in the house, she spent hours in the kitchen,
learning to make puddings and pies, and trying all sorts of recipes
with very varying success, from an antiquated cookery book which she
had discovered at the back of my bookshelves. At other times, when I
expected her to be upstairs, languidly examining her finery, and idly
polishing her trinkets, I heard of her in the stables, feeding the
rabbits, and talking to the raven, or found her in the conservatory,
fumigating the plants, and half suffocating the gardener, who was
trying to moderate her enthusiasm in the production of smoke.
Instead of finding amusement, as we had expected, in Owen’s studio, she
puckered up her pretty face in grimaces of disgust at the smell of
paint in the room, and declared that the horrors of the Earthquake at
Lisbon made her feel hysterical. Instead of showing a total want of
interest in my business occupations on the estate, she destroyed my
dignity as steward by joining me in my rounds on her pony, with her
vagabond retinue at her heels. Instead of devouring the novels I had
ordered for her, she left them in the box, and put her feet on it when
she felt sleepy after a hard day’s riding. Instead of practicing for
hours every evening at the piano, which I had hired with such a firm
conviction of her using it, she showed us tricks on the cards, taught
us new games, initiated us into the mystics of dominoes, challenged us
with riddles, and even attempted to stimulate us into acting
charades—in short, tried every evening amusement in the whole category
except the amusement of music. Every new aspect of her character was a
new surprise to us, and every fresh occupation that she chose was a
fresh contradiction to our previous expectations. The value of
experience as a guide is unquestionable in many of the most important
affairs of life; but, speaking for myself personally, I never
understood the utter futility of it, where a woman is concerned, until
I was brought into habits of daily communication with our fair guest.
In her domestic relations with ourselves she showed that exquisite
nicety of discrimination in studying our characters, habits and tastes
which comes by instinct with women, and which even the longest practice
rarely teaches in similar perfection to men. She saw at a glance all
the underlying tenderness and generosity concealed beneath Owen’s
external shyness, irresolution, and occasional reserve; and, from first
to last, even in her gayest moments, there was always a certain
quietly-implied consideration—an easy, graceful, delicate deference—in
her manner toward my eldest brother, which won upon me and upon him
every hour in the day.
With me she was freer in her talk, quicker in her actions, readier and
bolder in all the thousand little familiarities of our daily
intercourse. When we met in the morning she always took Owen’s hand,
and waited till he kissed her on the forehead. In my case she put both
her hands on my shoulders, raised herself on tiptoe, and saluted me
briskly on both cheeks in the foreign way. She never differed in
opinion with Owen without propitiating him first by some little artful
compliment in the way of excuse. She argued boldly with me on every
subject under the sun, law and politics included; and, when I got the
better of her, never hesitated to stop me by putting her hand on my
lips, or by dragging me out into the garden in the middle of a
sentence.
As for Morgan, she abandoned all restraint in his case on the second
day of her sojourn among us. She had asked after him as soon as she was
settled in her two rooms on the third story; had insisted on knowing
why he lived at the top of the tower, and why he had not appeared to
welcome her at the door; had entrapped us into all sorts of damaging
admissions, and had thereupon discovered the true state of the case in
less than five minutes.
From that time my unfortunate second brother became the victim of all
that was mischievous and reckless in her disposition. She forced him
downstairs by a series of maneuvers which rendered his refuge
uninhabitable, and then pretended to fall violently in love with him.
She slipped little pink three-cornered notes under his door, entreating
him to make appointments with her, or tenderly inquiring how he would
like to see her hair dressed at dinner on that day. She followed him
into the garden, sometimes to ask for the privilege of smelling his
tobacco-smoke, sometimes to beg for a lock of his hair, or a fragment
of his ragged old dressing-gown, to put among her keepsakes. She sighed
at him when he was in a passion, and put her handkerchief to her eyes
when he was sulky. In short, she tormented Morgan, whenever she could
catch him, with such ingenious and such relentless malice, that he
actually threatened to go back to London, and prey once more, in the
unscrupulous character of a doctor, on the credulity of mankind.
Thus situated in her relations toward ourselves, and thus occupied by
country diversions of her own choosing, Miss Jessie passed her time at
The Glen Tower, excepting now and then a dull hour in the long
evenings, to her guardian’s satisfaction—and, all things considered,
not without pleasure to herself. Day followed day in calm and smooth
succession, and five quiet weeks had elapsed out of the six during
which her stay was to last without any remarkable occurrence to
distinguish them, when an event happened which personally affected me
in a very serious manner, and which suddenly caused our handsome Queen
of Hearts to become the object of my deepest anxiety in the present,
and of my dearest hopes for the future.
CHAPTER IV.
OUR GRAND PROJECT.
At the end of the fifth week of our guest’s stay, among the letters
which the morning’s post brought to The Glen Tower there was one for
me, from my son George, in the Crimea.
The effect which this letter produced in our little circle renders it
necessary that I should present it here, to speak for itself.
This is what I read alone in my own room:
“My dearest Father:—After the great public news of the fall of
Sebastopol, have you any ears left for small items of private
intelligence from insignificant subaltern officers? Prepare, if you
have, for a sudden and a startling announcement. How shall I write the
words? How shall I tell you that I am really coming home?
“I have a private opportunity of sending this letter, and only a short
time to write it in; so I must put many things, if I can, into few
words. The doctor has reported me fit to travel at last, and I leave,
thanks to the privilege of a wounded man, by the next ship. The name of
the vessel and the time of starting are on the list which I inclose. I
have made all my calculations, and, allowing for every possible delay,
I find that I shall be with you, at the latest, on the first of
November—perhaps some days earlier.
“I am far too full of my return, and of something else connected with
it which is equally dear to me, to say anything about public affairs,
more especially as I know that the newspapers must, by this time, have
given you plenty of information. Let me fill the rest of this paper
with a subject which is very near to my heart—nearer, I am almost
ashamed to say, than the great triumph of my countrymen, in which my
disabled condition has prevented me from taking any share.
“I gathered from your last letter that Miss Yelverton was to pay you a
visit this autumn, in your capacity of her guardian. If she is already
with you, pray move heaven and earth to keep her at The Glen Tower till
I come back. Do you anticipate my confession from this entreaty? My
dear, dear father, all my hopes rest on that one darling treasure which
you are guarding perhaps, at this moment, under your own roof—all my
happiness depends on making Jessie Yelverton my wife.
“If I did not sincerely believe that you will heartily approve of my
choice, I should hardly have ventured on this abrupt confession. Now
that I have made it, let me go on and tell you why I have kept my
attachment up to this time a secret from every one—even from Jessie
herself. (You see I call her by her Christian name already!)
“I should have risked everything, father, and have laid my whole heart
open before her more than a year ago, but for the order which sent our
regiment out to take its share in this great struggle of the Russian
war. No ordinary change in my life would have silenced me on the
subject of all others of which I was most anxious to speak; but this
change made me think seriously of the future; and out of those thoughts
came the resolution which I have kept until this time. For her sake,
and for her sake only, I constrained myself to leave the words unspoken
which might have made her my promised wife. I resolved to spare her the
dreadful suspense of waiting for her betrothed husband till the perils
of war might, or might not, give him back to her. I resolved to save
her from the bitter grief of my death if a bullet laid me low. I
resolved to preserve her from the wretched sacrifice of herself if I
came back, as many a brave man will come back from this war, invalided
for life. Leaving her untrammeled by any engagement, unsuspicious
perhaps of my real feelings toward her, I might die, and know that, by
keeping silence, I had spared a pang to the heart that was dearest to
me. This was the thought that stayed the words on my lips when I left
England, uncertain whether I should ever come back. If I had loved her
less dearly, if her happiness had been less precious to me, I might
have given way under the hard restraint I imposed on myself, and might
have spoken selfishly at the last moment.
“And now the time of trial is past; the war is over; and, although I
still walk a little lame, I am, thank God, in as good health and in
much better spirits than when I left home. Oh, father, if I should lose
her now—if I should get no reward for sparing her but the bitterest of
all disappointments! Sometimes I am vain enough to think that I made
some little impression on her; sometimes I doubt if she has a suspicion
of my love. She lives in a gay world—she is the center of perpetual
admiration—men with all the qualities to win a woman’s heart are
perpetually about her—can I, dare I hope? Yes, I must! Only keep her, I
entreat you, at The Glen Tower. In that quiet world, in that freedom
from frivolities and temptations, she will listen to me as she might
listen nowhere else. Keep her, my dearest, kindest father—and, above
all things, breathe not a word to her of this letter. I have surely
earned the privilege of being the first to open her eyes to the truth.
She must know nothing, now that I am coming home, till she knows all
from my own lips.”
Here the writing hurriedly broke off. I am only giving myself credit
for common feeling, I trust, when I confess that what I read deeply
affected me. I think I never felt so fond of my boy, and so proud of
him, as at the moment when I laid down his letter.
As soon as I could control my spirits, I began to calculate the
question of time with a trembling eagerness, which brought back to my
mind my own young days of love and hope. My son was to come back, at
the latest, on the first of November, and Jessie’s allotted six weeks
would expire on the twenty-second of October. Ten days too soon! But
for the caprice which had brought her to us exactly that number of days
before her time she would have been in the house, as a matter of
necessity, on George’s return.
I searched back in my memory for a conversation that I had held with
her a week since on her future plans. Toward the middle of November,
her aunt, Lady Westwick, had arranged to go to her house in Paris, and
Jessie was, of course, to accompany her—to accompany her into that very
circle of the best English and the best French society which contained
in it the elements most adverse to George’s hopes. Between this time
and that she had no special engagement, and she had only settled to
write and warn her aunt of her return to London a day or two before she
left The Glen Tower.
Under these circumstances, the first, the all-important necessity was
to prevail on her to prolong her stay beyond the allotted six weeks by
ten days. After the caution to be silent impressed on me (and most
naturally, poor boy) in George’s letter, I felt that I could only
appeal to her on the ordinary ground of hospitality. Would this be
sufficient to effect the object?
I was sure that the hours of the morning and the afternoon had, thus
far, been fully and happily occupied by her various amusements indoors
and out. She was no more weary of her days now than she had been when
she first came among us. But I was by no means so certain that she was
not tired of her evenings. I had latterly noticed symptoms of weariness
after the lamps were lit, and a suspicious regularity in retiring to
bed the moment the clock struck ten. If I could provide her with a new
amusement for the long evenings, I might leave the days to take care of
themselves, and might then make sure (seeing that she had no special
engagement in London until the middle of November) of her being
sincerely thankful and ready to prolong her stay.
How was this to be done? The piano and the novels had both failed to
attract her. What other amusement was there to offer?
It was useless, at present, to ask myself such questions as these. I
was too much agitated to think collectedly on the most trifling
subjects. I was even too restless to stay in my own room. My son’s
letter had given me so fresh an interest in Jessie that I was now as
impatient to see her as if we were about to meet for the first time. I
wanted to look at her with my new eyes, to listen to her with my new
ears, to study her secretly with my new purposes, and my new hopes and
fears. To my dismay (for I wanted the very weather itself to favor
George’s interests), it was raining heavily that morning. I knew,
therefore, that I should probably find her in her own sitting-room.
When I knocked at her door, with George’s letter crumpled up in my
hand, with George’s hopes in full possession of my heart, it is no
exaggeration to say that my nerves were almost as much fluttered, and
my ideas almost as much confused, as they were on a certain memorable
day in the far past, when I rose, in brand-new wig and gown, to set my
future prospects at the bar on the hazard of my first speech.
When I entered the room I found Jessie leaning back languidly in her
largest arm-chair, watching the raindrops dripping down the
window-pane. The unfortunate box of novels was open by her side, and
the books were lying, for the most part, strewed about on the ground at
her feet. One volume lay open, back upward, on her lap, and her hands
were crossed over it listlessly. To my great dismay, she was
yawning—palpably and widely yawning—when I came in.
No sooner did I find myself in her presence than an irresistible
anxiety to make some secret discovery of the real state of her feelings
toward George took possession of me. After the customary condolences on
the imprisonment to which she was subjected by the weather, I said, in
as careless a manner as it was possible to assume:
“I have heard from my son this morning. He talks of being ordered home,
and tells me I may expect to see him before the end of the year.”
I was too cautious to mention the exact date of his return, for in that
case she might have detected my motive for asking her to prolong her
visit.
“Oh, indeed?” she said. “How very nice. How glad you must be.”
I watched her narrowly. The clear, dark blue eyes met mine as openly as
ever. The smooth, round cheeks kept their fresh color quite unchanged.
The full, good-humored, smiling lips never trembled or altered their
expression in the slightest degree. Her light checked silk dress, with
its pretty trimming of cherry-colored ribbon, lay quite still over the
bosom beneath it. For all the information I could get from her look and
manner, we might as well have been a hundred miles apart from each
other. Is the best woman in the world little better than a fathomless
abyss of duplicity on certain occasions, and where certain feelings of
her own are concerned? I would rather not think that; and yet I don’t
know how to account otherwise for the masterly manner in which Miss
Jessie contrived to baffle me.
I was afraid—literally afraid—to broach the subject of prolonging her
sojourn with us on a rainy day, so I changed the topic, in despair, to
the novels that were scattered about her.
“Can you find nothing there,” I asked, “to amuse you this wet morning?”
“There are two or three good novels,” she said, carelessly, “but I read
them before I left London.”
“And the others won’t even do for a dull day in the country?” I went
on.
“They might do for some people,” she answered, “but not for me. I’m
rather peculiar, perhaps, in my tastes. I’m sick to death of novels
with an earnest purpose. I’m sick to death of outbursts of eloquence,
and large-minded philanthropy, and graphic descriptions, and unsparing
anatomy of the human heart, and all that sort of thing. Good gracious
me! isn’t it the original intention or purpose, or whatever you call
it, of a work of fiction, to set out distinctly by telling a story? And
how many of these books, I should like to know, do that? Why, so far as
telling a story is concerned, the greater part of them might as well be
sermons as novels. Oh, dear me! what I want is something that seizes
hold of my interest, and makes me forget when it is time to dress for
dinner—something that keeps me reading, reading, reading, in a
breathless state to find out the end. You know what I mean—at least you
ought. Why, there was that little chance story you told me yesterday in
the garden—don’t you remember?—about your strange client, whom you
never saw again: I declare it was much more interesting than half these
novels, _because_ it was a story. Tell me another about your young
days, when you were seeing the world, and meeting with all sorts of
remarkable people. Or, no—don’t tell it now—keep it till the evening,
when we all want something to stir us up. You old people might amuse us
young ones out of your own resources oftener than you do. It was very
kind of you to get me these books; but, with all respect to them, I
would rather have the rummaging of your memory than the rummaging of
this box. What’s the matter? Are you afraid I have found out the window
in your bosom already?”
I had half risen from my chair at her last words, and I felt that my
face must have flushed at the same moment. She had started an idea in
my mind—the very idea of which I had been in search when I was
pondering over the best means of amusing her in the long autumn
evenings.
I parried her questions by the best excuses I could offer; changed the
conversation for the next five minutes, and then, making a sudden
remembrance of business my apology for leaving her, hastily withdrew to
devote myself to the new idea in the solitude of my own room.
A little quiet thinking convinced me that I had discovered a means not
only of occupying her idle time, but of decoying her into staying on
with us, evening by evening, until my son’s return. The new project
which she had herself unconsciously suggested involved nothing less
than acting forthwith on her own chance hint, and appealing to her
interest and curiosity by the recital of incidents and adventures drawn
from my own personal experience and (if I could get them to help me)
from the experience of my brothers as well. Strange people and
startling events had connected themselves with Owen’s past life as a
clergyman, with Morgan’s past life as a doctor, and with my past life
as a lawyer, which offered elements of interest of a strong and
striking kind ready to our hands. If these narratives were written
plainly and unpretendingly; if one of them was read every evening,
under circumstances that should pique the curiosity and impress the
imagination of our young guest, the very occupation was found for her
weary hours which would gratify her tastes, appeal to her natural
interest in the early lives of my brothers and myself, and lure her
insensibly into prolonging her visit by ten days without exciting a
suspicion of our real motive for detaining her.
I sat down at my desk; I hid my face in my hands to keep out all
impressions of external and present things; and I searched back through
the mysterious labyrinth of the Past, through the dun, ever-deepening
twilight of the years that were gone.
Slowly, out of the awful shadows, the Ghosts of Memory rose about me.
The dead population of a vanished world came back to life round me, a
living man. Men and women whose earthly pilgrimage had ended long
since, returned upon me from the unknown spheres, and fond, familiar
voices burst their way back to my ears through the heavy silence of the
grave. Moving by me in the nameless inner light, which no eye saw but
mine, the dead procession of immaterial scenes and beings unrolled its
silent length. I saw once more the pleading face of a friend of early
days, with the haunting vision that had tortured him through life by
his side again—with the long-forgotten despair in his eyes which had
once touched my heart, and bound me to him, till I had tracked his
destiny through its darkest windings to the end. I saw the figure of an
innocent woman passing to and fro in an ancient country house, with the
shadow of a strange suspicion stealing after her wherever she went. I
saw a man worn by hardship and old age, stretched dreaming on the straw
of a stable, and muttering in his dream the terrible secret of his
life.
Other scenes and persons followed these, less vivid in their revival,
but still always recognizable and distinct; a young girl alone by
night, and in peril of her life, in a cottage on a dreary moor—an upper
chamber of an inn, with two beds in it; the curtains of one bed closed,
and a man standing by them, waiting, yet dreading to draw them back—a
husband secretly following the first traces of a mystery which his
wife’s anxious love had fatally hidden from him since the day when they
first met; these, and other visions like them, shadowy reflections of
the living beings and the real events that had been once, peopled the
solitude and the emptiness around me. They haunted me still when I
tried to break the chain of thought which my own efforts had wound
about my mind; they followed me to and fro in the room; and they came
out with me when I left it. I had lifted the veil from the Past for
myself, and I was now to rest no more till I had lifted it for others.
I went at once to my eldest brother and showed him my son’s letter, and
told him all that I have written here. His kind heart was touched as
mine had been. He felt for my suspense; he shared my anxiety; he laid
aside his own occupation on the spot.
“Only tell me,” he said, “how I can help, and I will give every hour in
the day to you and to George.”
I had come to him with my mind almost as full of his past life as of my
own; I recalled to his memory events in his experience as a working
clergyman in London; I set him looking among papers which he had
preserved for half his lifetime, and the very existence of which he had
forgotten long since; I recalled to him the names of persons to whose
necessities he had ministered in his sacred office, and whose stories
he had heard from their own lips or received under their own
handwriting. When we parted he was certain of what he was wanted to do,
and was resolute on that very day to begin the work.
I went to Morgan next, and appealed to him as I had already appealed to
Owen. It was only part of his odd character to start all sorts of
eccentric objections in reply; to affect a cynical indifference, which
he was far from really and truly feeling; and to indulge in plenty of
quaint sarcasm on the subject of Jessie and his nephew George. I waited
till these little surface-ebullitions had all expended themselves, and
then pressed my point again with the earnestness and anxiety that I
really felt.
Evidently touched by the manner of my appeal to him even more than by
the language in which it was expressed, Morgan took refuge in his
customary abruptness, spread out his paper violently on the table,
seized his pen and ink, and told me quite fiercely to give him his work
and let him tackle it at once.
I set myself to recall to his memory some very remarkable experiences
of his own in his professional days, but he stopped me before I had
half done.
“I understand,” he said, taking a savage dip at the ink, “I’m to make
her flesh creep, and to frighten her out of her wits. I’ll do it with a
vengeance!”
Reserving to myself privately an editorial right of supervision over
Morgan’s contributions, I returned to my own room to begin my share—by
far the largest one—of the task before us. The stimulus applied to my
mind by my son’s letter must have been a strong one indeed, for I had
hardly been more than an hour at my desk before I found the old
literary facility of my youthful days, when I was a writer for the
magazines, returning to me as if by magic. I worked on unremittingly
till dinner-time, and then resumed the pen after we had all separated
for the night. At two o’clock the next morning I found myself—God help
me!—masquerading, as it were, in my own long-lost character of a
hard-writing young man, with the old familiar cup of strong tea by my
side, and the old familiar wet towel tied round my head.
My review of the progress I had made, when I looked back at my pages of
manuscript, yielded all the encouragement I wanted to drive me on. It
is only just, however, to add to the record of this first day’s
attempt, that the literary labor which it involved was by no means of
the most trying kind. The great strain on the intellect—the strain of
invention—was spared me by my having real characters and events ready
to my hand. If I had been called on to create, I should, in all
probability, have suffered severely by contrast with the very worst of
those unfortunate novelists whom Jessie had so rashly and so
thoughtlessly condemned. It is not wonderful that the public should
rarely know how to estimate the vast service which is done to them by
the production of a good book, seeing that they are, for the most part,
utterly ignorant of the immense difficulty of writing even a bad one.
The next day was fine, to my great relief; and our visitor, while we
were at work, enjoyed her customary scamper on the pony, and her
customary rambles afterward in the neighborhood of the house. Although
I had interruptions to contend with on the part of Owen and Morgan,
neither of whom possessed my experience in the production of what heavy
people call “light literature,” and both of whom consequently wanted
assistance, still I made great progress, and earned my hours of repose
on the evening of the second day.
On that evening I risked the worst, and opened my negotiations for the
future with “The Queen of Hearts.”
About an hour after the tea had been removed, and when I happened to be
left alone in the room with her, I noticed that she rose suddenly and
went to the writing-table. My suspicions were aroused directly, and I
entered on the dangerous subject by inquiring if she intended to write
to her aunt.
“Yes,” she said. “I promised to write when the last week came. If you
had paid me the compliment of asking me to stay a little longer, I
should have returned it by telling you I was sorry to go. As it is, I
mean to be sulky and say nothing.”
With those words she took up her pen to begin the letter.
“Wait a minute,” I remonstrated. “I was just on the point of begging
you to stay when I spoke.”
“Were you, indeed?” she returned. “I never believed in coincidences of
that sort before, but now, of course, I put the most unlimited faith in
them!”
“Will you believe in plain proofs?” I asked, adopting her humor. “How
do you think I and my brothers have been employing ourselves all day
to-day and all day yesterday? Guess what we have been about.”
“Congratulating yourselves in secret on my approaching departure,” she
answered, tapping her chin saucily with the feather-end of her pen.
I seized the opportunity of astonishing her, and forthwith told her the
truth. She started up from the table, and approached me with the
eagerness of a child, her eyes sparkling, and her cheeks flushed.
“Do you really mean it?” she said.
I assured her that I was in earnest. She thereupon not only expressed
an interest in our undertaking, which was evidently sincere, but, with
characteristic impatience, wanted to begin the first evening’s reading
on that very night. I disappointed her sadly by explaining that we
required time to prepare ourselves, and by assuring her that we should
not be ready for the next five days. On the sixth day, I added, we
should be able to begin, and to go on, without missing an evening, for
probably ten days more.
“The next five days?” she replied. “Why, that will just bring us to the
end of my six weeks’ visit. I suppose you are not setting a trap to
catch me? This is not a trick of you three cunning old gentlemen to
make me stay on, is it?”
I quailed inwardly as that dangerously close guess at the truth passed
her lips.
“You forget,” I said, “that the idea only occurred to me after what you
said yesterday. If it had struck me earlier, we should have been ready
earlier, and then where would your suspicions have been?”
“I am ashamed of having felt them,” she said, in her frank, hearty way.
“I retract the word ‘trap,’ and I beg pardon for calling you ‘three
cunning old gentlemen.’ But what am I to say to my aunt?”
She moved back to the writing-table as she spoke.
“Say nothing,” I replied, “till you have heard the first story. Shut up
the paper-case till that time, and then decide when you will open it
again to write to your aunt.”
She hesitated and smiled. That terribly close guess of hers was not out
of her mind yet.
“I rather fancy,” she said, slyly, “that the story will turn out to be
the best of the whole series.”
“Wrong again,” I retorted. “I have a plan for letting chance decide
which of the stories the first one shall be. They shall be all numbered
as they are done; corresponding numbers shall be written inside folded
pieces of card and well mixed together; you shall pick out any one card
you like; you shall declare the number written within; and, good or
bad, the story that answers to that number shall be the story that is
read. Is that fair?”
“Fair!” she exclaimed; “it’s better than fair; it makes _me_ of some
importance; and I must be more or less than woman not to appreciate
that.”
“Then you consent to wait patiently for the next five days?”
“As patiently as I can.”
“And you engage to decide nothing about writing to your aunt until you
have heard the first story?”
“I do,” she said, returning to the writing-table. “Behold the proof of
it.” She raised her hand with theatrical solemnity, and closed the
paper-case with an impressive bang.
I leaned back in my chair with my mind at ease for the first time since
the receipt of my son’s letter.
“Only let George return by the first of November,” I thought to myself,
“and all the aunts in Christendom shall not prevent Jessie Yelverton
from being here to meet him.”
THE TEN DAYS.
THE FIRST DAY.
Showery and unsettled. In spite of the weather, Jessie put on my
Mackintosh cloak and rode off over the hills to one of Owen’s outlying
farms. She was already too impatient to wait quietly for the evening’s
reading in the house, or to enjoy any amusement less exhilarating than
a gallop in the open air.
I was, on my side, as anxious and as uneasy as our guest. Now that the
six weeks of her stay had expired—now that the day had really arrived,
on the evening of which the first story was to be read, I began to
calculate the chances of failure as well as the chances of success.
What if my own estimate of the interest of the stories turned out to be
a false one? What if some unforeseen accident occurred to delay my
son’s return beyond ten days?
The arrival of the newspaper had already become an event of the deepest
importance to me. Unreasonable as it was to expect any tidings of
George at so early a date, I began, nevertheless, on this first of our
days of suspense, to look for the name of his ship in the columns of
telegraphic news. The mere mechanical act of looking was some relief to
my overstrained feelings, although I might have known, and did know,
that the search, for the present, could lead to no satisfactory result.
Toward noon I shut myself up with my collection of manuscripts to
revise them for the last time. Our exertions had thus far produced but
six of the necessary ten stories. As they were only, however, to be
read, one by one, on six successive evenings, and as we could therefore
count on plenty of leisure in the daytime, I was in no fear of our
failing to finish the little series.
Of the six completed stories I had written two, and had found a third
in the form of a collection of letters among my papers. Morgan had only
written one, and this solitary contribution of his had given me more
trouble than both my own put together, in consequence of the perpetual
intrusion of my brother’s eccentricities in every part of his
narrative. The process of removing these quaint turns and frisks of
Morgan’s humor—which, however amusing they might have been in an essay,
were utterly out of place in a story appealing to suspended interest
for its effect—certainly tried my patience and my critical faculty
(such as it is) more severely than any other part of our literary
enterprise which had fallen my share.
Owen’s investigations among his papers had supplied us with the two
remaining narratives. One was contained in a letter, and the other in
the form of a diary, and both had been received by him directly from
the writers. Besides these contributions, he had undertaken to help us
by some work of his own, and had been engaged for the last four days in
molding certain events which had happened within his personal knowledge
into the form of a story. His extreme fastidiousness as a writer
interfered, however, so seriously with his progress that he was still
sadly behindhand, and was likely, though less heavily burdened than
Morgan or myself, to be the last to complete his allotted task.
Such was our position, and such the resources at our command, when the
first of the Ten Days dawned upon us. Shortly after four in the
afternoon I completed my work of revision, numbered the manuscripts
from one to six exactly as they happened to lie under my hand, and
inclosed them all in a portfolio, covered with purple morocco, which
became known from that time by the imposing title of The Purple Volume.
Miss Jessie returned from her expedition just as I was tying the
strings of the portfolio, and, womanlike, instantly asked leave to peep
inside, which favor I, manlike, positively declined to grant.
As soon as dinner was over our guest retired to array herself in
magnificent evening costume. It had been arranged that the readings
were to take place in her own sitting-room; and she was so
enthusiastically desirous to do honor to the occasion, that she
regretted not having brought with her from London the dress in which
she had been presented at court the year before, and not having
borrowed certain materials for additional splendor which she briefly
described as “aunt’s diamonds.”
Toward eight o’clock we assembled in the sitting-room, and a strangely
assorted company we were. At the head of the table, radiant in silk and
jewelry, flowers and furbelows, sat The Queen of Hearts, looking so
handsome and so happy that I secretly congratulated my absent son on
the excellent taste he had shown in falling in love with her. Round
this bright young creature (Owen, at the foot of the table, and Morgan
and I on either side) sat her three wrinkled, gray-headed,
dingily-attired hosts, and just behind her, in still more inappropriate
companionship, towered the spectral figure of the man in armor, which
had so unaccountably attracted her on her arrival. This strange scene
was lighted up by candles in high and heavy brass sconces. Before
Jessie stood a mighty china punch-bowl of the olden time, containing
the folded pieces of card, inside which were written the numbers to be
drawn, and before Owen reposed the Purple Volume from which one of us
was to read. The walls of the room were hung all round with faded
tapestry; the clumsy furniture was black with age; and, in spite of the
light from the sconces, the lofty ceiling was almost lost in gloom. If
Rembrandt could have painted our background, Reynolds our guest, and
Hogarth ourselves, the picture of the scene would have been complete.
When the old clock over the tower gateway had chimed eight, I rose to
inaugurate the proceedings by requesting Jessie to take one of the
pieces of card out of the punch-bowl, and to declare the number.
She laughed; then suddenly became frightened and serious; then looked
at me, and said, “It was dreadfully like business;” and then entreated
Morgan not to stare at her, or, in the present state of her nerves, she
should upset the punch-bowl. At last she summoned resolution enough to
take out one of the pieces of card and to unfold it.
“Declare the number, my dear,” said Owen.
“Number Four,” answered Jessie, making a magnificent courtesy, and
beginning to look like herself again.
Owen opened the Purple Volume, searched through the manuscripts, and
suddenly changed color. The cause of his discomposure was soon
explained. Malicious fate had assigned to the most diffident individual
in the company the trying responsibility of leading the way. Number
Four was one of the two narratives which Owen had found among his own
papers.
“I am almost sorry,” began my eldest brother, confusedly, “that it has
fallen to my turn to read first. I hardly know which I distrust most,
myself or my story.”
“Try and fancy you are in the pulpit again,” said Morgan,
sarcastically. “Gentlemen of your cloth, Owen, seldom seem to distrust
themselves or their manuscripts when they get into that position.”
“The fact is,” continued Owen, mildly impenetrable to his brother’s
cynical remark, “that the little thing I am going to try and read is
hardly a story at all. I am afraid it is only an anecdote. I became
possessed of the letter which contains my narrative under these
circumstances. At the time when I was a clergyman in London, my church
was attended for some months by a lady who was the wife of a large
farmer in the country. She had been obliged to come to town, and to
remain there for the sake of one of her children, a little boy, who
required the best medical advice.”
At the words “medical advice” Morgan shook his head and growled to
himself contemptuously. Owen went on:
“While she was attending in this way to one child, his share in her
love was unexpectedly disputed by another, who came into the world
rather before his time. I baptized the baby, and was asked to the
little christening party afterward. This was my first introduction to
the lady, and I was very favorably impressed by her; not so much on
account of her personal appearance, for she was but a little woman and
had no pretensions to beauty, as on account of a certain simplicity,
and hearty, downright kindness in her manner, as well as of an
excellent frankness and good sense in her conversation. One of the
guests present, who saw how she had interested me, and who spoke of her
in the highest terms, surprised me by inquiring if I should ever have
supposed that quiet, good-humored little woman to be capable of
performing an act of courage which would have tried the nerves of the
boldest man in England? I naturally enough begged for an explanation;
but my neighbor at the table only smiled and said, ‘If you can find an
opportunity, ask her what happened at The Black Cottage, and you will
hear something that will astonish you.’ I acted on the hint as soon as
I had an opportunity of speaking to her privately. The lady answered
that it was too long a story to tell then, and explained, on my
suggesting that she should relate it on some future day, that she was
about to start for her country home the next morning. ‘But,’ she was
good enough to add, ‘as I have been under great obligations to you for
many Sundays past, and as you seem interested in this matter, I will
employ my first leisure time after my return in telling you by writing,
instead of by word of mouth, what really happened to me on one
memorable night of my life in The Black Cottage.’
“She faithfully performed her promise. In a fortnight afterward I
received from her the narrative which I am now about to read.”
BROTHER OWEN’S STORY OF THE SIEGE OF THE BLACK COTTAGE.
To begin at the beginning, I must take you back to the time after my
mother’s death, when my only brother had gone to sea, when my sister
was out at service, and when I lived alone with my father in the midst
of a moor in the west of England.
The moor was covered with great limestone rocks, and intersected here
and there by streamlets. The nearest habitation to ours was situated
about a mile and a half off, where a strip of the fertile land
stretched out into the waste like a tongue. Here the outbuildings of
the great Moor Farm, then in the possession of my husband’s father,
began. The farm-lands stretched down gently into a beautiful rich
valley, lying nicely sheltered by the high platform of the moor. When
the ground began to rise again, miles and miles away, it led up to a
country house called Holme Manor, belonging to a gentleman named
Knifton. Mr. Knifton had lately married a young lady whom my mother had
nursed, and whose kindness and friendship for me, her foster-sister, I
shall remember gratefully to the last day of my life. These and other
slight particulars it is necessary to my story that I should tell you,
and it is also necessary that you should be especially careful to bear
them well in mind.
My father was by trade a stone-mason. His cottage stood a mile and a
half from the nearest habitation. In all other directions we were four
or five times that distance from neighbors. Being very poor people,
this lonely situation had one great attraction for us—we lived rent
free on it. In addition to that advantage, the stones, by shaping which
my father gained his livelihood, lay all about him at his very door, so
that he thought his position, solitary as it was, quite an enviable
one. I can hardly say that I agreed with him, though I never
complained. I was very fond of my father, and managed to make the best
of my loneliness with the thought of being useful to him. Mrs. Knifton
wished to take me into her service when she married, but I declined,
unwillingly enough, for my father’s sake. If I had gone away, he would
have had nobody to live with him; and my mother made me promise on her
death-bed that he should never be left to pine away alone in the midst
of the bleak moor.
Our cottage, small as it was, was stoutly and snugly built, with stone
from the moor as a matter of course. The walls were lined inside and
fenced outside with wood, the gift of Mr. Knifton’s father to my
father. This double covering of cracks and crevices, which would have
been superfluous in a sheltered position, was absolutely necessary, in
our exposed situation, to keep out the cold winds which, excepting just
the summer months, swept over us continually all the year round. The
outside boards, covering our roughly-built stone walls, my father
protected against the wet with pitch and tar. This gave to our little
abode a curiously dark, dingy look, especially when it was seen from a
distance; and so it had come to be called in the neighborhood, even
before I was born, The Black Cottage.
I have now related the preliminary particulars which it is desirable
that you should know, and may proceed at once to the pleasanter task of
telling you my story.
One cloudy autumn day, when I was rather more than eighteen years old,
a herdsman walked over from Moor Farm with a letter which had been left
there for my father. It came from a builder living at our county town,
half a day’s journey off, and it invited my father to come to him and
give his judgment about an estimate for some stonework on a very large
scale. My father’s expenses for loss of time were to be paid, and he
was to have his share of employment afterwards in preparing the stone.
He was only too glad, therefore, to obey the directions which the
letter contained, and to prepare at once for his long walk to the
county town.
Considering the time at which he received the letter, and the necessity
of resting before he attempted to return, it was impossible for him to
avoid being away from home for one night, at least. He proposed to me,
in case I disliked being left alone in the Black Cottage, to lock the
door and to take me to Moor Farm to sleep with any one of the milkmaids
who would give me a share of her bed. I by no means liked the notion of
sleeping with a girl whom I did not know, and I saw no reason to feel
afraid of being left alone for only one night; so I declined. No
thieves had ever come near us; our poverty was sufficient protection
against them; and of other dangers there were none that even the most
timid person could apprehend. Accordingly, I got my father’s dinner,
laughing at the notion of my taking refuge under the protection of a
milkmaid at Moor Farm. He started for his walk as soon as he had done,
saying he should try and be back by dinner-time the next day, and
leaving me and my cat Polly to take care of the house.
I had cleared the table and brightened up the fire, and had sat down to
my work with the cat dozing at my feet, when I heard the trampling of
horses, and, running to the door, saw Mr. and Mrs. Knifton, with their
groom behind them, riding up to the Black Cottage. It was part of the
young lady’s kindness never to neglect an opportunity of coming to pay
me a friendly visit, and her husband was generally willing to accompany
her for his wife’s sake. I made my best courtesy, therefore, with a
great deal of pleasure, but with no particular surprise at seeing them.
They dismounted and entered the cottage, laughing and talking in great
spirits. I soon heard that they were riding to the same county town for
which my father was bound and that they intended to stay with some
friends there for a few days, and to return home on horseback, as they
went out.
I heard this, and I also discovered that they had been having an
argument, in jest, about money-matters, as they rode along to our
cottage. Mrs. Knifton had accused her husband of inveterate
extravagance, and of never being able to go out with money in his
pocket without spending it all, if he possibly could, before he got
home again. Mr. Knifton had laughingly defended himself by declaring
that all his pocket-money went in presents for his wife, and that, if
he spent it lavishly, it was under her sole influence and
superintendence.
“We are going to Cliverton now,” he said to Mrs. Knifton, naming the
county town, and warming himself at our poor fire just as pleasantly as
if he had been standing on his own grand hearth. “You will stop to
admire every pretty thing in every one of the Cliverton shop-windows; I
shall hand you the purse, and you will go in and buy. When we have
reached home again, and you have had time to get tired of your
purchases, you will clasp your hands in amazement, and declare that you
are quite shocked at my habits of inveterate extravagance. I am only
the banker who keeps the money; you, my love, are the spendthrift who
throws it all away!”
“Am I, sir?” said Mrs. Knifton, with a look of mock indignation. “We
will see if I am to be misrepresented in this way with impunity.
Bessie, my dear” (turning to me), “you shall judge how far I deserve
the character which that unscrupulous man has just given to me. _I_ am
the spendthrift, am I? And you are only the banker? Very well. Banker,
give me my money at once, if you please!”
Mr. Knifton laughed, and took some gold and silver from his waistcoat
pocket.
“No, no,” said Mrs. Knifton, “you may want what you have got there for
necessary expenses. Is that all the money you have about you? What do I
feel here?” and she tapped her husband on the chest, just over the
breast-pocket of his coat.
Mr. Knifton laughed again, and produced his pocketbook. His wife
snatched it out of his hand, opened it, and drew out some bank-notes,
put them back again immediately, and, closing the pocketbook, stepped
across the room to my poor mother’s little walnut-wood book-case, the
only bit of valuable furniture we had in the house.
“What are you going to do there?” asked Mr. Knifton, following his
wife.
Mrs. Knifton opened the glass door of the book-case, put the pocketbook
in a vacant place on one of the lower shelves, closed and locked the
door again, and gave me the key.
“You called me a spendthrift just now,” she said. “There is my answer.
Not one farthing of that money shall you spend at Cliverton on _me_.
Keep the key in your pocket, Bessie, and, whatever Mr. Knifton may say,
on no account let him have it until we call again on our way back. No,
sir, I won’t trust you with that money in your pocket in the town of
Cliverton. I will make sure of your taking it all home again, by
leaving it here in more trustworthy hands than yours until we ride
back. Bessie, my dear, what do you say to that as a lesson in economy
inflicted on a prudent husband by a spendthrift wife?”
She took Mr. Knifton’s arm while she spoke, and drew him away to the
door. He protested and made some resistance, but she easily carried her
point, for he was far too fond of her to have a will of his own in any
trifling matter between them. Whatever the men might say, Mr. Knifton
was a model husband in the estimation of all the women who knew him.
“You will see us as we come back, Bessie. Till then, you are our
banker, and the pocketbook is yours,” cried Mrs. Knifton, gayly, at the
door. Her husband lifted her into the saddle, mounted himself, and away
they both galloped over the moor as wild and happy as a couple of
children.
Although my being trusted with money by Mrs. Knifton was no novelty (in
her maiden days she always employed me to pay her dress-maker’s bills),
I did not feel quite easy at having a pocketbook full of bank-notes
left by her in my charge. I had no positive apprehensions about the
safety of the deposit placed in my hands, but it was one of the odd
points in my character then (and I think it is still) to feel an
unreasonably strong objection to charging myself with money
responsibilities of any kind, even to suit the convenience of my
dearest friends. As soon as I was left alone, the very sight of the
pocketbook behind the glass door of the book-case began to worry me,
and instead of returning to my work, I puzzled my brains about finding
a place to lock it up in, where it would not be exposed to the view of
any chance passers-by who might stray into the Black Cottage.
This was not an easy matter to compass in a poor house like ours, where
we had nothing valuable to put under lock and key. After running over
various hiding-places in my mind, I thought of my tea-caddy, a present
from Mrs. Knifton, which I always kept out of harm’s way in my own
bedroom. Most unluckily—as it afterward turned out—instead of taking
the pocketbook to the tea-caddy, I went into my room first to take the
tea-caddy to the pocketbook. I only acted in this roundabout way from
sheer thoughtlessness, and severely enough I was punished for it, as
you will acknowledge yourself when you have read a page or two more of
my story.
I was just getting the unlucky tea-caddy out of my cupboard, when I
heard footsteps in the passage, and, running out immediately, saw two
men walk into the kitchen—the room in which I had received Mr. and Mrs.
Knifton. I inquired what they wanted sharply enough, and one of them
answered immediately that they wanted my father. He turned toward me,
of course, as he spoke, and I recognized him as a stone-mason, going
among his comrades by the name of Shifty Dick. He bore a very bad
character for everything but wrestling, a sport for which the working
men of our parts were famous all through the county. Shifty Dick was
champion, and he had got his name from some tricks of wrestling, for
which he was celebrated. He was a tall, heavy man, with a lowering,
scarred face, and huge hairy hands—the last visitor in the whole world
that I should have been glad to see under any circumstances. His
companion was a stranger, whom he addressed by the name of Jerry—a
quick, dapper, wicked-looking man, who took off his cap to me with mock
politeness, and showed, in so doing, a very bald head, with some very
ugly-looking knobs on it. I distrusted him worse than I did Shifty
Dick, and managed to get between his leering eyes and the book-case, as
I told the two that my father was gone out, and that I did not expect
him back till the next day.
The words were hardly out of my mouth before I repented that my anxiety
to get rid of my unwelcome visitors had made me incautious enough to
acknowledge that my father would be away from home for the whole night.
Shifty Dick and his companion looked at each other when I unwisely let
out the truth, but made no remark except to ask me if I would give them
a drop of cider. I answered sharply that I had no cider in the house,
having no fear of the consequences of refusing them drink, because I
knew that plenty of men were at work within hail, in a neighboring
quarry. The two looked at each other again when I denied having any
cider to give them; and Jerry (as I am obliged to call him, knowing no
other name by which to distinguish the fellow) took off his cap to me
once more, and, with a kind of blackguard gentility upon him, said they
would have the pleasure of calling the next day, when my father was at
home. I said good-afternoon as ungraciously as possible, and, to my
great relief, they both left the cottage immediately afterward.
As soon as they were well away, I watched them from the door. They
trudged off in the direction of Moor Farm; and, as it was beginning to
get dusk, I soon lost sight of them.
Half an hour afterward I looked out again.
The wind had lulled with the sunset, but the mist was rising, and a
heavy rain was beginning to fall. Never did the lonely prospect of the
moor look so dreary as it looked to my eyes that evening. Never did I
regret any slight thing more sincerely than I then regretted the
leaving of Mr. Knifton’s pocketbook in my charge. I cannot say that I
suffered under any actual alarm, for I felt next to certain that
neither Shifty Dick nor Jerry had got a chance of setting eyes on so
small a thing as the pocketbook while they were in the kitchen; but
there was a kind of vague distrust troubling me—a suspicion of the
night—a dislike of being left by myself, which I never remember having
experienced before. This feeling so increased after I had closed the
door and gone back to the kitchen, that, when I heard the voices of the
quarrymen as they passed our cottage on their way home to the village
in the valley below Moor Farm, I stepped out into the passage with a
momentary notion of telling them how I was situated, and asking them
for advice and protection.
I had hardly formed this idea, however, before I dismissed it. None of
the quarrymen were intimate friends of mine. I had a nodding
acquaintance with them, and believed them to be honest men, as times
went. But my own common sense told me that what little knowledge of
their characters I had was by no means sufficient to warrant me in
admitting them into my confidence in the matter of the pocketbook. I
had seen enough of poverty and poor men to know what a terrible
temptation a large sum of money is to those whose whole lives are
passed in scraping up sixpences by weary hard work. It is one thing to
write fine sentiments in books about incorruptible honesty, and another
thing to put those sentiments in practice when one day’s work is all
that a man has to set up in the way of an obstacle between starvation
and his own fireside.
The only resource that remained was to carry the pocketbook with me to
Moor Farm, and ask permission to pass the night there. But I could not
persuade myself that there was any real necessity for taking such a
course as this; and, if the truth must be told, my pride revolted at
the idea of presenting myself in the character of a coward before the
people at the farm. Timidity is thought rather a graceful attraction
among ladies, but among poor women it is something to be laughed at. A
woman with less spirit of her own than I had, and always shall have,
would have considered twice in my situation before she made up her mind
to encounter the jokes of plowmen and the jeers of milkmaids. As for
me, I had hardly considered about going to the farm before I despised
myself for entertaining any such notion. “No, no,” thought I, “I am not
the woman to walk a mile and a half through rain, and mist, and
darkness to tell a whole kitchenful of people that I am afraid. Come
what may, here I stop till father gets back.”
Having arrived at that valiant resolution, the first thing I did was to
lock and bolt the back and front doors, and see to the security of
every shutter in the house.
That duty performed, I made a blazing fire, lighted my candle, and sat
down to tea, as snug and comfortable as possible. I could hardly
believe now, with the light in the room, and the sense of security
inspired by the closed doors and shutters, that I had ever felt even
the slightest apprehension earlier in the day. I sang as I washed up
the tea-things; and even the cat seemed to catch the infection of my
good spirits. I never knew the pretty creature so playful as she was
that evening.
The tea-things put by, I took up my knitting, and worked away at it so
long that I began at last to get drowsy. The fire was so bright and
comforting that I could not muster resolution enough to leave it and go
to bed. I sat staring lazily into the blaze, with my knitting on my
lap—sat till the splashing of the rain outside and the fitful, sullen
sobbing of the wind grew fainter and fainter on my ear. The last sounds
I heard before I fairly dozed off to sleep were the cheerful crackling
of the fire and the steady purring of the cat, as she basked
luxuriously in the warm light on the hearth. Those were the last sounds
before I fell asleep. The sound that woke me was one loud bang at the
front door.
I started up, with my heart (as the saying is) in my mouth, with a
frightful momentary shuddering at the roots of my hair—I started up
breathless, cold and motionless, waiting in the silence I hardly knew
for what, doubtful at first whether I had dreamed about the bang at the
door, or whether the blow had really been struck on it.
In a minute or less there came a second bang, louder than the first. I
ran out into the passage.
“Who’s there?”
“Let us in,” answered a voice, which I recognised immediately as the
voice of Shifty Dick.
“Wait a bit, my dear, and let me explain,” said a second voice, in the
low, oily, jeering tones of Dick’s companion—the wickedly clever little
man whom he called Jerry. “You are alone in the house, my pretty little
dear. You may crack your sweet voice with screeching, and there’s
nobody near to hear you. Listen to reason, my love, and let us in. We
don’t want cider this time—we only want a very neat-looking pocketbook
which you happen to have, and your late excellent mother’s four silver
teaspoons, which you keep so nice and clean on the chimney-piece. If
you let us in we won’t hurt a hair of your head, my cherub, and we
promise to go away the moment we have got what we want, unless you
particularly wish us to stop to tea. If you keep us out, we shall be
obliged to break into the house and then—”
“And then,” burst in Shifty Dick, “we’ll _mash_ you!”
“Yes,” said Jerry, “we’ll mash you, my beauty. But you won’t drive us
to doing that, will you? You will let us in?”
This long parley gave me time to recover from the effect which the
first bang at the door had produced on my nerves. The threats of the
two villains would have terrified some women out of their senses, but
the only result they produced on _me_ was violent indignation. I had,
thank God, a strong spirit of my own, and the cool, contemptuous
insolence of the man Jerry effectually roused it.
“You cowardly villains!” I screamed at them through the door. “You
think you can frighten me because I am only a poor girl left alone in
the house. You ragamuffin thieves, I defy you both! Our bolts are
strong, our shutters are thick. I am here to keep my father’s house
safe, and keep it I will against an army of you!”
You may imagine what a passion I was in when I vapored and blustered in
that way. I heard Jerry laugh and Shifty Dick swear a whole mouthful of
oaths. Then there was a dead silence for a minute or two, and then the
two ruffians attacked the door.
I rushed into the kitchen and seized the poker, and then heaped wood on
the fire, and lighted all the candles I could find; for I felt as
though I could keep up my courage better if I had plenty of light.
Strange and improbable as it may appear, the next thing that attracted
my attention was my poor pussy, crouched up, panic-stricken, in a
corner. I was so fond of the little creature that I took her up in my
arms and carried her into my bedroom and put her inside my bed. A
comical thing to do in a situation of deadly peril, was it not? But it
seemed quite natural and proper at the time.
All this while the blows were falling faster and faster on the door.
They were dealt, as I conjectured, with heavy stones picked up from the
ground outside. Jerry sang at his wicked work, and Shifty Dick swore.
As I left the bedroom after putting the cat under cover, I heard the
lower panel of the door begin to crack.
I ran into the kitchen and huddled our four silver spoons into my
pocket; then took the unlucky book with the bank-notes and put it in
the bosom of my dress. I was determined to defend the property confided
to my care with my life. Just as I had secured the pocketbook I heard
the door splintering, and rushed into the passage again with my heavy
kitchen poker lifted in both hands.
I was in time to see the bald head of Jerry, with the ugly-looking
knobs on it, pushed into the passage through a great rent in one of the
lower panels of the door.
“Get out, you villain, or I’ll brain you on the spot!” I screeched,
threatening him with the poker.
Mr. Jerry took his head out again much faster than he put it in.
The next thing that came through the rent was a long pitchfork, which
they darted at me from the outside, to move me from the door. I struck
at it with all my might, and the blow must have jarred the hand of
Shifty Dick up to his very shoulder, for I heard him give a roar of
rage and pain. Before he could catch at the fork with his other hand I
had drawn it inside. By this time even Jerry lost his temper and swore
more awfully than Dick himself.
Then there came another minute of respite. I suspected they had gone to
get bigger stones, and I dreaded the giving way of the whole door.
Running into the bedroom as this fear beset me, I laid hold of my chest
of drawers, dragged it into the passage, and threw it down against the
door. On the top of that I heaped my father’s big tool chest, three
chairs, and a scuttleful of coals; and last, I dragged out the kitchen
table and rammed it as hard as I could against the whole barricade.
They heard me as they were coming up to the door with fresh stones.
Jerry said: “Stop a bit!” and then the two consulted together in
whispers. I listened eagerly, and just caught these words:
“Let’s try it the other way.”
Nothing more was said, but I heard their footsteps retreating from the
door.
Were they going to besiege the back door now?
I had hardly asked myself that question when I heard their voices at
the other side of the house. The back door was smaller than the front,
but it had this advantage in the way of strength—it was made of two
solid oak boards joined lengthwise, and strengthened inside by heavy
cross pieces. It had no bolts like the front door, but was fastened by
a bar of iron running across it in a slanting direction, and fitting at
either end into the wall.
“They must have the whole cottage down before they can break in at that
door!” I thought to myself. And they soon found out as much for
themselves. After five minutes of banging at the back door they gave up
any further attack in that direction and cast their heavy stones down
with curses of fury awful to hear.
I went into the kitchen and dropped on the window-seat to rest for a
moment. Suspense and excitement together were beginning to tell upon
me. The perspiration broke out thick on my forehead, and I began to
feel the bruises I had inflicted on my hands in making the barricade
against the front door. I had not lost a particle of my resolution, but
I was beginning to lose strength. There was a bottle of rum in the
cupboard, which my brother the sailor had left with us the last time he
was ashore. I drank a drop of it. Never before or since have I put
anything down my throat that did me half so much good as that precious
mouthful of rum!
I was still sitting in the window-seat drying my face, when I suddenly
heard their voices close behind me.
They were feeling the outside of the window against which I was
sitting. It was protected, like all the other windows in the cottage,
by iron bars. I listened in dreadful suspense for the sound of filing,
but nothing of the sort was audible. They had evidently reckoned on
frightening me easily into letting them in, and had come unprovided
with house-breaking tools of any kind. A fresh burst of oaths informed
me that they had recognized the obstacle of the iron bars. I listened
breathlessly for some warning of what they were going to do next, but
their voices seemed to die away in the distance. They were retreating
from the window. Were they also retreating from the house altogether?
Had they given up the idea of effecting an entrance in despair?
A long silence followed—a silence which tried my courage even more
severely than the tumult of their first attack on the cottage.
Dreadful suspicions now beset me of their being able to accomplish by
treachery what they had failed to effect by force. Well as I knew the
cottage, I began to doubt whether there might not be ways of cunningly
and silently entering it against which I was not provided. The ticking
of the clock annoyed me; the crackling of the fire startled me. I
looked out twenty times in a minute into the dark corners of the
passage, straining my eyes, holding my breath, anticipating the most
unlikely events, the most impossible dangers. Had they really gone, or
were they still prowling about the house? Oh, what a sum of money I
would have given only to have known what they were about in that
interval of silence!
I was startled at last out of my suspense in the most awful manner. A
shout from one of them reached my ears on a sudden down the kitchen
chimney. It was so unexpected and so horrible in the stillness that I
screamed for the first time since the attack on the house. My worst
forebodings had never suggested to me that the two villains might mount
upon the roof.
“Let us in, you she-devil!” roared a voice down the chimney.
There was another pause. The smoke from the wood fire, thin and light
as it was in the red state of the embers at that moment, had evidently
obliged the man to take his face from the mouth of the chimney. I
counted the seconds while he was, as I conjectured, getting his breath
again. In less than half a minute there came another shout:
“Let us in, or we’ll burn the place down over your head!”
Burn it? Burn what? There was nothing easily combustible but the thatch
on the roof; and that had been well soaked by the heavy rain which had
now fallen incessantly for more than six hours. Burn the place over my
head? How?
While I was still casting about wildly in my mind to discover what
possible danger there could be of fire, one of the heavy stones placed
on the thatch to keep it from being torn up by high winds came
thundering down the chimney. It scattered the live embers on the hearth
all over the room. A richly-furnished place, with knickknacks and fine
muslin about it, would have been set on fire immediately. Even our bare
floor and rough furniture gave out a smell of burning at the first
shower of embers which the first stone scattered.
For an instant I stood quite horror-struck before this new proof of the
devilish ingenuity of the villains outside. But the dreadful danger I
was now in recalled me to my senses immediately. There was a large
canful of water in my bedroom, and I ran in at once to fetch it. Before
I could get back to the kitchen a second stone had been thrown down the
chimney, and the floor was smoldering in several places.
I had wit enough to let the smoldering go on for a moment or two more,
and to pour the whole of my canful of water over the fire before the
third stone came down the chimney. The live embers on the floor I
easily disposed of after that. The man on the roof must have heard the
hissing of the fire as I put it out, and have felt the change produced
in the air at the mouth of the chimney, for after the third stone had
descended no more followed it. As for either of the ruffians themselves
dropping down by the same road along which the stones had come, that
was not to be dreaded. The chimney, as I well knew by our experience in
cleaning it, was too narrow to give passage to any one above the size
of a small boy.
I looked upward as that comforting reflection crossed my mind—I looked
up, and saw, as plainly as I see the paper I am now writing on, the
point of a knife coming through the inside of the roof just over my
head. Our cottage had no upper story, and our rooms had no ceilings.
Slowly and wickedly the knife wriggled its way through the dry inside
thatch between the rafters. It stopped for a while, and there came a
sound of tearing. That, in its turn, stopped too; there was a great
fall of dry thatch on the floor; and I saw the heavy, hairy hand of
Shifty Dick, armed with the knife, come through after the fallen
fragments. He tapped at the rafters with the back of the knife, as if
to test their strength. Thank God, they were substantial and close
together! Nothing lighter than a hatchet would have sufficed to remove
any part of them.
The murderous hand was still tapping with the knife when I heard a
shout from the man Jerry, coming from the neighborhood of my father’s
stone-shed in the back yard. The hand and knife disappeared instantly.
I went to the back door and put my ear to it, and listened.
Both men were now in the shed. I made the most desperate efforts to
call to mind what tools and other things were left in it which might be
used against me. But my agitation confused me. I could remember nothing
except my father’s big stone-saw, which was far too heavy and unwieldy
to be used on the roof of the cottage. I was still puzzling my brains,
and making my head swim to no purpose, when I heard the men dragging
something out of the shed. At the same instant that the noise caught my
ear, the remembrance flashed across me like lightning of some beams of
wood which had lain in the shed for years past. I had hardly time to
feel certain that they were removing one of these beams before I heard
Shifty Dick say to Jerry.
“Which door?”
“The front,” was the answer. “We’ve cracked it already; we’ll have it
down now in no time.”
Senses less sharpened by danger than mine would have understood but too
easily, from these words, that they were about to use the beam as a
battering-ram against the door. When that conviction overcame me, I
lost courage at last. I felt that the door must come down. No such
barricade as I had constructed could support it for more than a few
minutes against such shocks as it was now to receive.
“I can do no more to keep the house against them,” I said to myself,
with my knees knocking together, and the tears at last beginning to wet
my cheeks. “I must trust to the night and the thick darkness, and save
my life by running for it while there is yet time.”
I huddled on my cloak and hood, and had my hand on the bar of the back
door, when a piteous mew from the bedroom reminded me of the existence
of poor Pussy. I ran in, and huddled the creature up in my apron.
Before I was out in the passage again, the first shock from the beam
fell on the door.
The upper hinge gave way. The chairs and coal-scuttle, forming the top
of my barricade, were hurled, rattling, on to the floor, but the lower
hinge of the door, and the chest of drawers and the tool-chest still
kept their places.
“One more!” I heard the villains cry—“one more run with the beam, and
down it comes!”
Just as they must have been starting for that “one more run,” I opened
the back door and fled into the night, with the bookful of banknotes in
my bosom, the silver spoons in my pocket, and the cat in my arms. I
threaded my way easily enough through the familiar obstacles in the
backyard, and was out in the pitch darkness of the moor before I heard
the second shock, and the crash which told me that the whole door had
given way.
In a few minutes they must have discovered the fact of my flight with
the pocketbook, for I heard shouts in the distance as if they were
running out to pursue me. I kept on at the top of my speed, and the
noise soon died away. It was so dark that twenty thieves instead of two
would have found it useless to follow me.
How long it was before I reached the farmhouse—the nearest place to
which I could fly for refuge—I cannot tell you. I remember that I had
just sense enough to keep the wind at my back (having observed in the
beginning of the evening that it blew toward Moor Farm), and to go on
resolutely through the darkness. In all other respects I was by this
time half crazed by what I had gone through. If it had so happened that
the wind had changed after I had observed its direction early in the
evening, I should have gone astray, and have probably perished of
fatigue and exposure on the moor. Providentially, it still blew
steadily as it had blown for hours past, and I reached the farmhouse
with my clothes wet through, and my brain in a high fever. When I made
my alarm at the door, they had all gone to bed but the farmer’s eldest
son, who was sitting up late over his pipe and newspaper. I just
mustered strength enough to gasp out a few words, telling him what was
the matter, and then fell down at his feet, for the first time in my
life in a dead swoon.
That swoon was followed by a severe illness. When I got strong enough
to look about me again, I found myself in one of the farmhouse beds—my
father, Mrs. Knifton, and the doctor were all in the room—my cat was
asleep at my feet, and the pocketbook that I had saved lay on the table
by my side.
There was plenty of news for me to hear as soon as I was fit to listen
to it. Shifty Dick and the other rascal had been caught, and were in
prison, waiting their trial at the next assizes. Mr. and Mrs. Knifton
had been so shocked at the danger I had run—for which they blamed their
own want of thoughtfulness in leaving the pocketbook in my care—that
they had insisted on my father’s removing from our lonely home to a
cottage on their land, which we were to inhabit rent free. The
bank-notes that I had saved were given to me to buy furniture with, in
place of the things that the thieves had broken. These pleasant tidings
assisted so greatly in promoting my recovery, that I was soon able to
relate to my friends at the farmhouse the particulars that I have
written here. They were all surprised and interested, but no one, as I
thought, listened to me with such breathless attention as the farmer’s
eldest son. Mrs. Knifton noticed this too, and began to make jokes
about it, in her light-hearted way, as soon as we were alone. I thought
little of her jesting at the time; but when I got well, and we went to
live at our new home, “the young farmer,” as he was called in our
parts, constantly came to see us, and constantly managed to meet me out
of doors. I had my share of vanity, like other young women, and I began
to think of Mrs. Knifton’s jokes with some attention. To be brief, the
young farmer managed one Sunday—I never could tell how—to lose his way
with me in returning from church, and before we found out the right
road home again he had asked me to be his wife.
His relations did all they could to keep us asunder and break off the
match, thinking a poor stonemason’s daughter no fit wife for a
prosperous yeoman. But the farmer was too obstinate for them. He had
one form of answer to all their objections. “A man, if he is worth the
name, marries according to his own notions, and to please himself,” he
used to say. “My notion is, that when I take a wife I am placing my
character and my happiness—the most precious things I have to trust—in
one woman’s care. The woman I mean to marry had a small charge confided
to her care, and showed herself worthy of it at the risk of her life.
That is proof enough for me that she is worthy of the greatest charge I
can put into her hands. Rank and riches are fine things, but the
certainty of getting a good wife is something better still. I’m of age,
I know my own mind, and I mean to marry the stone-mason’s daughter.”
And he did marry me. Whether I proved myself worthy or not of his good
opinion is a question which I must leave you to ask my husband. All
that I had to relate about myself and my doings is now told. Whatever
interest my perilous adventure may excite, ends, I am well aware, with
my escape to the farmhouse. I have only ventured on writing these few
additional sentences because my marriage is the moral of my story. It
has brought me the choicest blessings of happiness and prosperity, and
I owe them all to my night-adventure in _The Black Cottage_.
THE SECOND DAY.
A clear, cloudless, bracing autumn morning. I rose gayly, with the
pleasant conviction on my mind that our experiment had thus far been
successful beyond our hopes.
Short and slight as the first story had been, the result of it on
Jessie’s mind had proved conclusive. Before I could put the question to
her, she declared of her own accord, and with her customary
exaggeration, that she had definitely abandoned all idea of writing to
her aunt until our collection of narratives was exhausted.
“I am in a fever of curiosity about what is to come,” she said, when we
all parted for the night; “and, even if I wanted to leave you, I could
not possibly go away now, without hearing the stories to the end.”
So far, so good. All my anxieties from this time were for George’s
return. Again to-day I searched the newspapers, and again there were no
tidings of the ship.
Miss Jessie occupied the second day by a drive to our county town to
make some little purchases. Owen, and Morgan, and I were all hard at
work, during her absence, on the stories that still remained to be
completed. Owen desponded about ever getting done; Morgan grumbled at
what he called the absurd difficulty of writing nonsense. I worked on
smoothly and contentedly, stimulated by the success of the first night.
We assembled as before in our guest’s sitting-room. As the clock struck
eight she drew out the second card. It was Number Two. The lot had
fallen on me to read next.
“Although my story is told in the first person,” I said, addressing
Jessie, “you must not suppose that the events related in this
particular case happened to me. They happened to a friend of mine, who
naturally described them to me from his own personal point of view. In
producing my narrative from the recollection of what he told me some
years since, I have supposed myself to be listening to him again, and
have therefore written in his character, and, whenever my memory would
help me, as nearly as possible in his language also. By this means I
hope I have succeeded in giving an air of reality to a story which has
truth, at any rate, to recommend it. I must ask you to excuse me if I
enter into no details in offering this short explanation. Although the
persons concerned in my narrative have ceased to exist, it is necessary
to observe all due delicacy toward their memories. Who they were, and
how I became acquainted with them, are matters of no moment. The
interest of the story, such as it is, stands in no need, in this
instance, of any assistance from personal explanations.”
With those words I addressed myself to my task, and read as follows:
BROTHER GRIFFITH’S STORY of THE FAMILY SECRET.
CHAPTER I.
Was it an Englishman or a Frenchman who first remarked that every
family had a skeleton in its cupboard? I am not learned enough to know,
but I reverence the observation, whoever made it. It speaks a startling
truth through an appropriately grim metaphor—a truth which I have
discovered by practical experience. Our family had a skeleton in the
cupboard, and the name of it was Uncle George.
I arrived at the knowledge that this skeleton existed, and I traced it
to the particular cupboard in which it was hidden, by slow degrees. I
was a child when I first began to suspect that there was such a thing,
and a grown man when I at last discovered that my suspicions were true.
My father was a doctor, having an excellent practice in a large country
town. I have heard that he married against the wishes of his family.
They could not object to my mother on the score of birth, breeding, or
character—they only disliked her heartily. My grandfather, grandmother,
uncles, and aunts all declared that she was a heartless, deceitful
woman; all disliked her manners, her opinions, and even the expression
of her face—all, with the exception of my father’s youngest brother,
George.
George was the unlucky member of our family. The rest were all clever;
he was slow in capacity. The rest were all remarkably handsome; he was
the sort of man that no woman ever looks at twice. The rest succeeded
in life; he failed. His profession was the same as my father’s, but he
never got on when he started in practice for himself. The sick poor,
who could not choose, employed him, and liked him. The sick rich, who
could—especially the ladies—declined to call him in when they could get
anybody else. In experience he gained greatly by his profession; in
money and reputation he gained nothing.
There are very few of us, however dull and unattractive we may be to
outward appearance, who have not some strong passion, some germ of what
is called romance, hidden more or less deeply in our natures. All the
passion and romance in the nature of my Uncle George lay in his love
and admiration for my father.
He sincerely worshipped his eldest brother as one of the noblest of
human beings. When my father was engaged to be married, and when the
rest of the family, as I have already mentioned, did not hesitate to
express their unfavorable opinion of the disposition of his chosen
wife, Uncle George, who had never ventured on differing with anyone
before, to the amazement of everybody, undertook the defense of his
future sister-in-law in the most vehement and positive manner. In his
estimation, his brother’s choice was something sacred and indisputable.
The lady might, and did, treat him with unconcealed contempt, laugh at
his awkwardness, grow impatient at his stammering—it made no difference
to Uncle George. She was to be his brother’s wife, and, in virtue of
that one great fact, she became, in the estimation of the poor surgeon,
a very queen, who, by the laws of the domestic constitution, could do
no wrong.
When my father had been married a little while, he took his youngest
brother to live with him as his assistant.
If Uncle George had been made president of the College of Surgeons, he
could not have been prouder and happier than he was in his new
position. I am afraid my father never understood the depth of his
brother’s affection for him. All the hard work fell to George’s share:
the long journeys at night, the physicking of wearisome poor people,
the drunken cases, the revolting cases—all the drudging, dirty business
of the surgery, in short, was turned over to him; and day after day,
month after month, he struggled through it without a murmur. When his
brother and his sister-in-law went out to dine with the county gentry,
it never entered his head to feel disappointed at being left unnoticed
at home. When the return dinners were given, and he was asked to come
in at tea-time, and left to sit unregarded in a corner, it never
occurred to him to imagine that he was treated with any want of
consideration or respect. He was part of the furniture of the house,
and it was the business as well as the pleasure of his life to turn
himself to any use to which his brother might please to put him.
So much for what I have heard from others on the subject of my Uncle
George. My own personal experience of him is limited to what I remember
as a mere child. Let me say something, however, first about my parents,
my sister and myself.
My sister was the eldest born and the best loved. I did not come into
the world till four years after her birth, and no other child followed
me. Caroline, from her earliest days, was the perfection of beauty and
health. I was small, weakly, and, if the truth must be told, almost as
plain-featured as Uncle George himself. It would be ungracious and
undutiful in me to presume to decide whether there was any foundation
or not for the dislike that my father’s family always felt for my
mother. All I can venture to say is, that her children never had any
cause to complain of her.
Her passionate affection for my sister, her pride in the child’s
beauty, I remember well, as also her uniform kindness and indulgence
toward me. My personal defects must have been a sore trial to her in
secret, but neither she nor my father ever showed me that they
perceived any difference between Caroline and myself. When presents
were made to my sister, presents were made to me. When my father and
mother caught my sister up in their arms and kissed her they
scrupulously gave me my turn afterward. My childish instinct told me
that there was a difference in their smiles when they looked at me and
looked at her; that the kisses given to Caroline were warmer than the
kisses given to me; that the hands which dried her tears in our
childish griefs, touched her more gently than the hands which dried
mine. But these, and other small signs of preference like them, were
such as no parents could be expected to control. I noticed them at the
time rather with wonder than with repining. I recall them now without a
harsh thought either toward my father or my mother. Both loved me, and
both did their duty by me. If I seem to speak constrainedly of them
here, it is not on my own account. I can honestly say that, with all my
heart and soul.
Even Uncle George, fond as he was of me, was fonder of my beautiful
child-sister.
When I used mischievously to pull at his lank, scanty hair, he would
gently and laughingly take it out of my hands, but he would let
Caroline tug at it till his dim, wandering gray eyes winked and watered
again with pain. He used to plunge perilously about the garden, in
awkward imitation of the cantering of a horse, while I sat on his
shoulders; but he would never proceed at any pace beyond a slow and
safe walk when Caroline had a ride in her turn. When he took us out
walking, Caroline was always on the side next the wall. When we
interrupted him over his dirty work in the surgery, he used to tell me
to go and play until he was ready for me; but he would put down his
bottles, and clean his clumsy fingers on his coarse apron, and lead
Caroline out again, as if she had been the greatest lady in the land.
Ah! how he loved her! and, let me be honest and grateful, and add, how
he loved me, too!
When I was eight years old and Caroline was twelve, I was separated
from home for some time. I had been ailing for many months previously;
had got benefit from being taken to the sea-side, and had shown
symptoms of relapsing on being brought home again to the midland county
in which we resided. After much consultation, it was at last resolved
that I should be sent to live, until my constitution got stronger, with
a maiden sister of my mother’s, who had a house at a watering-place on
the south coast.
I left home, I remember, loaded with presents, rejoicing over the
prospect of looking at the sea again, as careless of the future and as
happy in the present as any boy could be. Uncle George petitioned for a
holiday to take me to the seaside, but he could not be spared from the
surgery. He consoled himself and me by promising to make me a
magnificent model of a ship.
I have that model before my eyes now while I write. It is dusty with
age; the paint on it is cracked; the ropes are tangled; the sails are
moth-eaten and yellow. The hull is all out of proportion, and the rig
has been smiled at by every nautical friend of mine who has ever looked
at it. Yet, worn-out and faulty as it is—inferior to the cheapest
miniature vessel nowadays in any toy-shop window—I hardly know a
possession of mine in this world that I would not sooner part with than
Uncle George’s ship.
My life at the sea-side was a very happy one. I remained with my aunt
more than a year. My mother often came to see how I was going on, and
at first always brought my sister with her; but during the last eight
months of my stay Caroline never once appeared. I noticed also, at the
same period, a change in my mother’s manner. She looked paler and more
anxious at each succeeding visit, and always had long conferences in
private with my aunt. At last she ceased to come and see us altogether,
and only wrote to know how my health was getting on. My father, too,
who had at the earlier periods of my absence from home traveled to the
sea-side to watch the progress of my recovery as often as his
professional engagements would permit, now kept away like my mother.
Even Uncle George, who had never been allowed a holiday to come and see
me, but who had hitherto often written and begged me to write to him,
broke off our correspondence.
I was naturally perplexed and amazed by these changes, and persecuted
my aunt to tell me the reason of them. At first she tried to put me off
with excuses; then she admitted that there was trouble in our house;
and finally she confessed that the trouble was caused by the illness of
my sister. When I inquired what that illness was, my aunt said it was
useless to attempt to explain it to me. I next applied to the servants.
One of them was less cautious than my aunt, and answered my question,
but in terms that I could not comprehend. After much explanation, I was
made to understand that “something was growing on my sister’s neck that
would spoil her beauty forever, and perhaps kill her, if it could not
be got rid of.” How well I remember the shudder of horror that ran
through me at the vague idea of this deadly “something”! A fearful,
awe-struck curiosity to see what Caroline’s illness was with my own
eyes troubled my inmost heart, and I begged to be allowed to go home
and help to nurse her. The request was, it is almost needless to say,
refused.
Weeks passed away, and still I heard nothing, except that my sister
continued to be ill. One day I privately wrote a letter to Uncle
George, asking him, in my childish way, to come and tell me about
Caroline’s illness.
I knew where the post-office was, and slipped out in the morning
unobserved and dropped my letter in the box. I stole home again by the
garden, and climbed in at the window of a back parlor on the ground
floor. The room above was my aunt’s bedchamber, and the moment I was
inside the house I heard moans and loud convulsive sobs proceeding from
it. My aunt was a singularly quiet, composed woman. I could not imagine
that the loud sobbing and moaning came from her, and I ran down
terrified into the kitchen to ask the servants who was crying so
violently in my aunt’s room.
I found the housemaid and the cook talking together in whispers with
serious faces. They started when they saw me as if I had been a
grown-up master who had caught them neglecting their work.
“He’s too young to feel it much,” I heard one say to the other. “So far
as he is concerned, it seems like a mercy that it happened no later.”
In a few minutes they had told me the worst. It was indeed my aunt who
had been crying in the bedroom. Caroline was dead.
I felt the blow more severely than the servants or anyone else about me
supposed. Still I was a child in years, and I had the blessed
elasticity of a child’s nature. If I had been older I might have been
too much absorbed in grief to observe my aunt so closely as I did, when
she was composed enough to see me later in the day.
I was not surprised by the swollen state of her eyes, the paleness of
her cheeks, or the fresh burst of tears that came from her when she
took me in her arms at meeting. But I was both amazed and perplexed by
the look of terror that I detected in her face. It was natural enough
that she should grieve and weep over my sister’s death, but why should
she have that frightened look as if some other catastrophe had
happened?
I asked if there was any more dreadful news from home besides the news
of Caroline’s death.
My aunt, said No in a strange, stifled voice, and suddenly turned her
face from me. Was my father dead? No. My mother? No. Uncle George? My
aunt trembled all over as she said No to that also, and bade me cease
asking any more questions. She was not fit to bear them yet she said,
and signed to the servant to lead me out of the room.
The next day I was told that I was to go home after the funeral, and
was taken out toward evening by the housemaid, partly for a walk,
partly to be measured for my mourning clothes. After we had left the
tailor’s, I persuaded the girl to extend our walk for some distance
along the sea-beach, telling her, as we went, every little anecdote
connected with my lost sister that came tenderly back to my memory in
those first days of sorrow. She was so interested in hearing and I in
speaking that we let the sun go down before we thought of turning back.
The evening was cloudy, and it got on from dusk to dark by the time we
approached the town again. The housemaid was rather nervous at finding
herself alone with me on the beach, and once or twice looked behind her
distrustfully as we went on. Suddenly she squeezed my hand hard, and
said:
“Let’s get up on the cliff as fast as we can.”
The words were hardly out of her mouth before I heard footsteps behind
me—a man came round quickly to my side, snatched me away from the girl,
and, catching me up in his arms without a word, covered my face with
kisses. I knew he was crying, because my cheeks were instantly wet with
his tears; but it was too dark for me to see who he was, or even how he
was dressed. He did not, I should think, hold me half a minute in his
arms. The housemaid screamed for help. I was put down gently on the
sand, and the strange man instantly disappeared in the darkness.
When this extraordinary adventure was related to my aunt, she seemed at
first merely bewildered at hearing of it; but in a moment more there
came a change over her face, as if she had suddenly recollected or
thought of something. She turned deadly pale, and said, in a hurried
way, very unusual with her:
“Never mind; don’t talk about it any more. It was only a mischievous
trick to frighten you, I dare say. Forget all about it, my dear—forget
all about it.”
It was easier to give this advice than to make me follow it. For many
nights after, I thought of nothing but the strange man who had kissed
me and cried over me.
Who could he be? Somebody who loved me very much, and who was very
sorry. My childish logic carried me to that length. But when I tried to
think over all the grown-up gentlemen who loved me very much, I could
never get on, to my own satisfaction, beyond my father and my Uncle
George.
CHAPTER II.
I was taken home on the appointed day to suffer the trial—a hard one
even at my tender years—of witnessing my mother’s passionate grief and
my father’s mute despair. I remember that the scene of our first
meeting after Caroline’s death was wisely and considerately shortened
by my aunt, who took me out of the room. She seemed to have a confused
desire to keep me from leaving her after the door had closed behind us;
but I broke away and ran downstairs to the surgery, to go and cry for
my lost playmate with the sharer of all our games, Uncle George.
I opened the surgery door and could see nobody. I dried my tears and
looked all round the room—it was empty. I ran upstairs again to Uncle
George’s garret bedroom—he was not there; his cheap hairbrush and old
cast-off razor-case that had belonged to my grandfather were not on the
dressing-table. Had he got some other bedroom? I went out on the
landing and called softly, with an unaccountable terror and sinking at
my heart:
“Uncle George!”
Nobody answered; but my aunt came hastily up the garret stairs.
“Hush!” she said. “You must never call that name out here again!”
She stopped suddenly, and looked as if her own words had frightened
her.
“Is Uncle George dead?” I asked. My aunt turned red and pale, and
stammered.
I did not wait to hear what she said. I brushed past her, down the
stairs. My heart was bursting—my flesh felt cold. I ran breathlessly
and recklessly into the room where my father and mother had received
me. They were both sitting there still. I ran up to them, wringing my
hands, and crying out in a passion of tears:
“Is Uncle George dead?”
My mother gave a scream that terrified me into instant silence and
stillness. My father looked at her for a moment, rang the bell that
summoned the maid, then seized me roughly by the arm and dragged me out
of the room.
He took me down into the study, seated himself in his accustomed chair,
and put me before him between his knees. His lips were awfully white,
and I felt his two hands, as they grasped my shoulders, shaking
violently.
“You are never to mention the name of Uncle George again,” he said, in
a quick, angry, trembling whisper. “Never to me, never to your mother,
never to your aunt, never to anybody in this world! Never—never—never!”
The repetition of the word terrified me even more than the suppressed
vehemence with which he spoke. He saw that I was frightened, and
softened his manner a little before he went on.
“You will never see Uncle George again,” he said. “Your mother and I
love you dearly; but if you forget what I have told you, you will be
sent away from home. Never speak that name again—mind, never! Now kiss
me, and go away.”
How his lips trembled—and oh, how cold they felt on mine!
I shrunk out of the room the moment he had kissed me, and went and hid
myself in the garden.
“Uncle George is gone. I am never to see him any more; I am never to
speak of him again”—those were the words I repeated to myself, with
indescribable terror and confusion, the moment I was alone. There was
something unspeakably horrible to my young mind in this mystery which I
was commanded always to respect, and which, so far as I then knew, I
could never hope to see revealed. My father, my mother, my aunt, all
appeared to be separated from me now by some impassable barrier. Home
seemed home no longer with Caroline dead, Uncle George gone, and a
forbidden subject of talk perpetually and mysteriously interposing
between my parents and me.
Though I never infringed the command my father had given me in his
study (his words and looks, and that dreadful scream of my mother’s,
which seemed to be still ringing in my ears, were more than enough to
insure my obedience), I also never lost the secret desire to penetrate
the darkness which clouded over the fate of Uncle George.
For two years I remained at home and discovered nothing. If I asked the
servants about my uncle, they could only tell me that one morning he
disappeared from the house. Of the members of my father’s family I
could make no inquiries. They lived far away, and never came to see us;
and the idea of writing to them, at my age and in my position, was out
of the question. My aunt was as unapproachably silent as my father and
mother; but I never forgot how her face had altered when she reflected
for a moment after hearing of my extraordinary adventure while going
home with the servant over the sands at night. The more I thought of
that change of countenance in connection with what had occurred on my
return to my father’s house, the more certain I felt that the stranger
who had kissed me and wept over me must have been no other than Uncle
George.
At the end of my two years at home I was sent to sea in the merchant
navy by my own earnest desire. I had always determined to be a sailor
from the time when I first went to stay with my aunt at the sea-side,
and I persisted long enough in my resolution to make my parents
recognize the necessity of acceding to my wishes.
My new life delighted me, and I remained away on foreign stations more
than four years. When I at length returned home, it was to find a new
affliction darkening our fireside. My father had died on the very day
when I sailed for my return voyage to England.
Absence and change of scene had in no respect weakened my desire to
penetrate the mystery of Uncle George’s disappearance. My mother’s
health was so delicate that I hesitated for some time to approach the
forbidden subject in her presence. When I at last ventured to refer to
it, suggesting to her that any prudent reserve which might have been
necessary while I was a child, need no longer be persisted in now that
I was growing to be a young man, she fell into a violent fit of
trembling, and commanded me to say no more. It had been my father’s
will, she said, that the reserve to which I referred should be always
adopted toward me; he had not authorized her, before he died, to speak
more openly; and, now that he was gone, she would not so much as think
of acting on her own unaided judgment. My aunt said the same thing in
effect when I appealed to her. Determined not to be discouraged even
yet, I undertook a journey, ostensibly to pay my respects to my
father’s family, but with the secret intention of trying what I could
learn in that quarter on the subject of Uncle George.
My investigations led to some results, though they were by no means
satisfactory. George had always been looked upon with something like
contempt by his handsome sisters and his prosperous brothers, and he
had not improved his position in the family by his warm advocacy of his
brother’s cause at the time of my father’s marriage. I found that my
uncle’s surviving relatives now spoke of him slightingly and
carelessly. They assured me that they had never heard from him, and
that they knew nothing about him, except that he had gone away to
settle, as they supposed, in some foreign place, after having behaved
very basely and badly to my father. He had been traced to London, where
he had sold out of the funds the small share of money which he had
inherited after his father’s death, and he had been seen on the deck of
a packet bound for France later on the same day. Beyond this nothing
was known about him. In what the alleged baseness of his behavior had
consisted none of his brothers and sisters could tell me. My father had
refused to pain them by going into particulars, not only at the time of
his brother’s disappearance, but afterward, whenever the subject was
mentioned. George had always been the black sheep of the flock, and he
must have been conscious of his own baseness, or he would certainly
have written to explain and to justify himself.
Such were the particulars which I gleaned during my visit to my
father’s family. To my mind, they tended rather to deepen than to
reveal the mystery. That such a gentle, docile, affectionate creature
as Uncle George should have injured the brother he loved by word or
deed at any period of their intercourse, seemed incredible; but that he
should have been guilty of an act of baseness at the very time when my
sister was dying was simply and plainly impossible. And yet there was
the incomprehensible fact staring me in the face that the death of
Caroline and the disappearance of Uncle George had taken place in the
same week! Never did I feel more daunted and bewildered by the family
secret than after I had heard all the particulars in connection with it
that my father’s relatives had to tell me.
I may pass over the events of the next few years of my life briefly
enough.
My nautical pursuits filled up all my time, and took me far away from
my country and my friends. But, whatever I did, and wherever I went,
the memory of Uncle George, and the desire to penetrate the mystery of
his disappearance, haunted me like familiar spirits. Often, in the
lonely watches of the night at sea, did I recall the dark evening on
the beach, the strange man’s hurried embrace, the startling sensation
of feeling his tears on my cheeks, the disappearance of him before I
had breath or self-possession enough to say a word. Often did I think
over the inexplicable events that followed, when I had returned, after
my sister’s funeral, to my father’s house; and oftener still did I
puzzle my brains vainly, in the attempt to form some plan for inducing
my mother or my aunt to disclose the secret which they had hitherto
kept from me so perseveringly. My only chance of knowing what had
really happened to Uncle George, my only hope of seeing him again,
rested with those two near and dear relatives. I despaired of ever
getting my mother to speak on the forbidden subject after what had
passed between us, but I felt more sanguine about my prospects of
ultimately inducing my aunt to relax in her discretion. My
anticipations, however, in this direction were not destined to be
fulfilled. On my next visit to England I found my aunt prostrated by a
paralytic attack, which deprived her of the power of speech. She died
soon afterward in my arms, leaving me her sole heir. I searched
anxiously among her papers for some reference to the family mystery,
but found no clew to guide me. All my mother’s letters to her sister at
the time of Caroline’s illness and death had been destroyed.
CHAPTER III.
More years passed; my mother followed my aunt to the grave, and still I
was as far as ever from making any discoveries in relation to Uncle
George. Shortly after the period of this last affliction my health gave
way, and I departed, by my doctor’s advice, to try some baths in the
south of France.
I traveled slowly to my destination, turning aside from the direct
road, and stopping wherever I pleased. One evening, when I was not more
than two or three days’ journey from the baths to which I was bound, I
was struck by the picturesque situation of a little town placed on the
brow of a hill at some distance from the main road, and resolved to
have a nearer look at the place, with a view to stopping there for the
night, if it pleased me. I found the principal inn clean and
quiet—ordered my bed there—and, after dinner, strolled out to look at
the church. No thought of Uncle George was in my mind when I entered
the building; and yet, at that very moment, chance was leading me to
the discovery which, for so many years past, I had vainly endeavored to
make—the discovery which I had given up as hopeless since the day of my
mother’s death.
I found nothing worth notice in the church, and was about to leave it
again, when I caught a glimpse of a pretty view through a side door,
and stopped to admire it.
The churchyard formed the foreground, and below it the hill-side sloped
away gently into the plain, over which the sun was setting in full
glory. The cure of the church was reading his breviary, walking up and
down a gravel-path that parted the rows of graves. In the course of my
wanderings I had learned to speak French as fluently as most
Englishmen, and when the priest came near me I said a few words in
praise of the view, and complimented him on the neatness and prettiness
of the churchyard. He answered with great politeness, and we got into
conversation together immediately.
As we strolled along the gravel-walk, my attention was attracted by one
of the graves standing apart from the rest. The cross at the head of it
differed remarkably, in some points of appearance, from the crosses on
the other graves. While all the rest had garlands hung on them, this
one cross was quite bare; and, more extraordinary still, no name was
inscribed on it.
The priest, observing that I stopped to look at the grave, shook his
head and sighed.
“A countryman of yours is buried there,” he said. “I was present at his
death. He had borne the burden of a great sorrow among us, in this
town, for many weary years, and his conduct had taught us to respect
and pity him with all our hearts.”
“How is it that his name is not inscribed over his grave?” I inquired.
“It was suppressed by his own desire,” answered the priest, with some
little hesitation. “He confessed to me in his last moments that he had
lived here under an assumed name. I asked his real name, and he told it
to me, with the particulars of his sad story. He had reasons for
desiring to be forgotten after his death. Almost the last words he
spoke were, ‘Let my name die with me.’ Almost the last request he made
was that I would keep that name a secret from all the world excepting
only one person.”
“Some relative, I suppose?” said I.
“Yes—a nephew,” said the priest.
The moment the last word was out of his mouth, my heart gave a strange
answering bound. I suppose I must have changed color also, for the cure
looked at me with sudden attention and interest.
“A nephew,” the priest went on, “whom he had loved like his own child.
He told me that if this nephew ever traced him to his burial-place, and
asked about him, I was free in that case to disclose all I knew. ‘I
should like my little Charley to know the truth,’ he said. ‘In spite of
the difference in our ages, Charley and I were playmates years ago.’”
My heart beat faster, and I felt a choking sensation at the throat the
moment I heard the priest unconsciously mention my Christian name in
mentioning the dying man’s last words.
As soon as I could steady my voice and feel certain of my
self-possession, I communicated my family name to the cure, and asked
him if that was not part of the secret that he had been requested to
preserve.
He started back several steps, and clasped his hands amazedly.
“Can it be?” he said, in low tones, gazing at me earnestly, with
something like dread in his face.
I gave him my passport, and looked away toward the grave. The tears
came into my eyes as the recollections of past days crowded back on me.
Hardly knowing what I did, I knelt down by the grave, and smoothed the
grass over it with my hand. Oh, Uncle George, why not have told your
secret to your old playmate? Why leave him to find you _here?_
The priest raised me gently, and begged me to go with him into his own
house. On our way there, I mentioned persons and places that I thought
my uncle might have spoken of, in order to satisfy my companion that I
was really the person I represented myself to be. By the time we had
entered his little parlor, and had sat down alone in it, we were almost
like old friends together.
I thought it best that I should begin by telling all that I have
related here on the subject of Uncle George, and his disappearance from
home. My host listened with a very sad face, and said, when I had done:
“I can understand your anxiety to know what I am authorized to tell
you, but pardon me if I say first that there are circumstances in your
uncle’s story which it may pain you to hear—” He stopped suddenly.
“Which it may pain me to hear as a nephew?” I asked.
“No,” said the priest, looking away from me, “as a son.”
I gratefully expressed my sense of the delicacy and kindness which had
prompted my companion’s warning, but I begged him, at the same time, to
keep me no longer in suspense and to tell me the stern truth, no matter
how painfully it might affect me as a listener.
“In telling me all you knew about what you term the Family Secret,”
said the priest, “you have mentioned as a strange coincidence that your
sister’s death and your uncle’s disappearance took place at the same
time. Did you ever suspect what cause it was that occasioned your
sister’s death?”
“I only knew what my father told me, and what all our friends
believed—that she had a tumor in the neck, or, as I sometimes heard it
stated, from the effect on her constitution of a tumor in the neck.”
“She died under an operation for the removal of that tumor,” said the
priest, in low tones; “and the operator was your Uncle George.”
In those few words all the truth burst upon me.
“Console yourself with the thought that the long martyrdom of his life
is over,” the priest went on. “He rests; he is at peace. He and his
little darling understand each other, and are happy now. That thought
bore him up to the last on his death-bed. He always spoke of your
sister as his ‘little darling.’ He firmly believed that she was waiting
to forgive and console him in the other world—and who shall say he was
deceived in that belief?”
Not I! Not anyone who has ever loved and suffered, surely!
“It was out of the depths of his self-sacrificing love for the child
that he drew the fatal courage to undertake the operation,” continued
the priest. “Your father naturally shrank from attempting it. His
medical brethren whom he consulted all doubted the propriety of taking
any measures for the removal of the tumor, in the particular condition
and situation of it when they were called in. Your uncle alone differed
with them. He was too modest a man to say so, but your mother found it
out. The deformity of her beautiful child horrified her. She was
desperate enough to catch at the faintest hope of remedying it that
anyone might hold out to her; and she persuaded your uncle to put his
opinion to the proof. Her horror at the deformity of the child, and her
despair at the prospect of its lasting for life, seem to have utterly
blinded her to all natural sense of the danger of the operation. It is
hard to know how to say it to you, her son, but it must be told,
nevertheless, that one day, when your father was out, she untruly
informed your uncle that his brother had consented to the performance
of the operation, and that he had gone purposely out of the house
because he had not nerve enough to stay and witness it. After that,
your uncle no longer hesitated. He had no fear of results, provided he
could be certain of his own courage. All he dreaded was the effect on
him of his love for the child when he first found himself face to face
with the dreadful necessity of touching her skin with the knife.”
I tried hard to control myself, but I could not repress a shudder at
those words.
“It is useless to shock you by going into particulars,” said the
priest, considerately. “Let it be enough if I say that your uncle’s
fortitude failed to support him when he wanted it most. His love for
the child shook the firm hand which had never trembled before. In a
word, the operation failed. Your father returned, and found his child
dying. The frenzy of his despair when the truth was told him carried
him to excesses which it shocks me to mention—excesses which began in
his degrading his brother by a blow, which ended in his binding himself
by an oath to make that brother suffer public punishment for his fatal
rashness in a court of law. Your uncle was too heartbroken by what had
happened to feel those outrages as some men might have felt them. He
looked for one moment at his sister-in-law (I do not like to say your
mother, considering what I have now to tell you), to see if she would
acknowledge that she had encouraged him to attempt the operation, and
that she had deceived him in saying that he had his brother’s
permission to try it. She was silent, and when she spoke, it was to
join her husband in denouncing him as the murderer of their child.
Whether fear of your father’s anger, or revengeful indignation against
your uncle most actuated her, I cannot presume to inquire in your
presence. I can only state facts.”
The priest paused and looked at me anxiously. I could not speak to him
at that moment—I could only encourage him to proceed by pressing his
hand.
He resumed in these terms:
“Meanwhile, your uncle turned to your father, and spoke the last words
he was ever to address to his eldest brother in this world. He said, ‘I
have deserved the worst your anger can inflict on me, but I will spare
you the scandal of bringing me to justice in open court. The law, if it
found me guilty, could at the worst but banish me from my country and
my friends. I will go of my own accord. God is my witness that I
honestly believed I could save the child from deformity and suffering.
I have risked all and lost all. My heart and spirit are broken. I am
fit for nothing but to go and hide myself, and my shame and misery,
from all eyes that have ever looked on me. I shall never come back,
never expect your pity or forgiveness. If you think less harshly of me
when I am gone, keep secret what has happened; let no other lips say of
me what yours and your wife’s have said. I shall think that forbearance
atonement enough—atonement greater than I have deserved. Forget me in
this world. May we meet in another, where the secrets of all hearts are
opened, and where the child who is gone before may make peace between
us!’ He said those words and went out. Your father never saw him or
heard from him again.”
I knew the reason now why my father had never confided the truth to
anyone, his own family included. My mother had evidently confessed all
to her sister under the seal of secrecy, and there the dreadful
disclosure had been arrested.
“Your uncle told me,” the priest continued, “that before he left
England he took leave of you by stealth, in a place you were staying at
by the sea-side. He had not the heart to quit his country and his
friends forever without kissing you for the last time. He followed you
in the dark, and caught you up in his arms, and left you again before
you had a chance of discovering him. The next day he quitted England.”
“For this place?” I asked.
“Yes. He had spent a week here once with a student friend at the time
when he was a pupil in the Hotel Dieu, and to this place he returned to
hide, to suffer, and to die. We all saw that he was a man crushed and
broken by some great sorrow, and we respected him and his affliction.
He lived alone, and only came out of doors toward evening, when he used
to sit on the brow of the hill yonder, with his head on his hand,
looking toward England. That place seemed a favorite with him, and he
is buried close by it. He revealed the story of his past life to no
living soul here but me, and to me he only spoke when his last hour was
approaching. What he had suffered during his long exile no man can
presume to say. I, who saw more of him than anyone, never heard a word
of complaint fall from his lips. He had the courage of the martyrs
while he lived, and the resignation of the saints when he died. Just at
the last his mind wandered. He said he saw his little darling waiting
by the bedside to lead him away, and he died with a smile on his
face—the first I had ever seen there.”
The priest ceased, and we went out together in the mournful twilight,
and stood for a little while on the brow of the hill where Uncle George
used to sit, with his face turned toward England. How my heart ached
for him as I thought of what he must have suffered in the silence and
solitude of his long exile! Was it well for me that I had discovered
the Family Secret at last? I have sometimes thought not. I have
sometimes wished that the darkness had never been cleared away which
once hid from me the fate of Uncle George.
THE THIRD DAY.
Fine again. Our guest rode out, with her ragged little groom, as usual.
There was no news yet in the paper—that is to say, no news of George or
his ship.
On this day Morgan completed his second story, and in two or three days
more I expected to finish the last of my own contributions. Owen was
still behindhand and still despondent.
The lot drawing to-night was Five. This proved to be the number of the
first of Morgan’s stories, which he had completed before we began the
readings. His second story, finished this day, being still uncorrected
by me, could not yet be added to the common stock.
On being informed that it had come to his turn to occupy the attention
of the company, Morgan startled us by immediately objecting to the
trouble of reading his own composition, and by coolly handing it over
to me, on the ground that my numerous corrections had made it, to all
intents and purposes, my story.
Owen and I both remonstrated; and Jessie, mischievously persisting in
her favorite jest at Morgan’s expense, entreated that he would read, if
it was only for her sake. Finding that we were all determined, and all
against him, he declared that, rather than hear our voices any longer,
he would submit to the minor inconvenience of listening to his own.
Accordingly, he took his manuscript back again, and, with an air of
surly resignation, spread it open before him.
“I don’t think you will like this story, miss,” he began, addressing
Jessie, “but I shall read it, nevertheless, with the greatest pleasure.
It begins in a stable—it gropes its way through a dream—it keeps
company with a hostler—and it stops without an end. What do you think
of that?”
After favoring his audience with this promising preface, Morgan
indulged himself in a chuckle of supreme satisfaction, and then began
to read, without wasting another preliminary word on any one of us.
BROTHER MORGAN’S STORY of THE DREAM-WOMAN.
CHAPTER I.
I had not been settled much more than six weeks in my country practice
when I was sent for to a neighboring town, to consult with the resident
medical man there on a case of very dangerous illness.
My horse had come down with me at the end of a long ride the night
before, and had hurt himself, luckily, much more than he had hurt his
master. Being deprived of the animal’s services, I started for my
destination by the coach (there were no railways at that time), and I
hoped to get back again, toward the afternoon, in the same way.
After the consultation was over, I went to the principal inn of the
town to wait for the coach. When it came up it was full inside and out.
There was no resource left me but to get home as cheaply as I could by
hiring a gig. The price asked for this accommodation struck me as being
so extortionate, that I determined to look out for an inn of inferior
pretensions, and to try if I could not make a better bargain with a
less prosperous establishment.
I soon found a likely-looking house, dingy and quiet, with an
old-fashioned sign, that had evidently not been repainted for many
years past. The landlord, in this case, was not above making a small
profit, and as soon as we came to terms he rang the yard-bell to order
the gig.
“Has Robert not come back from that errand?” asked the landlord,
appealing to the waiter who answered the bell.
“No, sir, he hasn’t.”
“Well, then, you must wake up Isaac.”
“Wake up Isaac!” I repeated; “that sounds rather odd. Do your hostlers
go to bed in the daytime?”
“This one does,” said the landlord, smiling to himself in rather a
strange way.
“And dreams too,” added the waiter; “I shan’t forget the turn it gave
me the first time I heard him.”
“Never you mind about that,” retorted the proprietor; “you go and rouse
Isaac up. The gentleman’s waiting for his gig.”
The landlord’s manner and the waiter’s manner expressed a great deal
more than they either of them said. I began to suspect that I might be
on the trace of something professionally interesting to me as a medical
man, and I thought I should like to look at the hostler before the
waiter awakened him.
“Stop a minute,” I interposed; “I have rather a fancy for seeing this
man before you wake him up. I’m a doctor; and if this queer sleeping
and dreaming of his comes from anything wrong in his brain, I may be
able to tell you what to do with him.”
“I rather think you will find his complaint past all doctoring, sir,”
said the landlord; “but, if you would like to see him, you’re welcome,
I’m sure.”
He led the way across a yard and down a passage to the stables, opened
one of the doors, and, waiting outside himself, told me to look in.
I found myself in a two-stall stable. In one of the stalls a horse was
munching his corn; in the other an old man was lying asleep on the
litter.
I stooped and looked at him attentively. It was a withered, woe-begone
face. The eyebrows were painfully contracted; the mouth was fast set,
and drawn down at the corners.
The hollow wrinkled cheeks, and the scanty grizzled hair, told their
own tale of some past sorrow or suffering. He was drawing his breath
convulsively when I first looked at him, and in a moment more he began
to talk in his sleep.
“Wake up!” I heard him say, in a quick whisper, through his clinched
teeth. “Wake up there! Murder!”
He moved one lean arm slowly till it rested over his throat, shuddered
a little, and turned on his straw. Then the arm left his throat, the
hand stretched itself out, and clutched at the side toward which he had
turned, as if he fancied himself to be grasping at the edge of
something. I saw his lips move, and bent lower over him. He was still
talking in his sleep.
“Light gray eyes,” he murmured, “and a droop in the left eyelid; flaxen
hair, with a gold-yellow streak in it—all right, mother—fair white
arms, with a down on them—little lady’s hand, with a reddish look under
the finger nails. The knife—always the cursed knife—first on one side,
then on the other. Aha! you she-devil, where’s the knife?”
At the last word his voice rose, and he grew restless on a sudden. I
saw him shudder on the straw; his withered face became distorted, and
he threw up both his hands with a quick hysterical gasp. They struck
against the bottom of the manger under which he lay, and the blow
awakened him. I had just time to slip through the door and close it
before his eyes were fairly open, and his senses his own again.
“Do you know anything about that man’s past life?” I said to the
landlord.
“Yes, sir, I know pretty well all about it,” was the answer, “and an
uncommon queer story it is. Most people don’t believe it. It’s true,
though, for all that. Why, just look at him,” continued the landlord,
opening the stable door again. “Poor devil! he’s so worn out with his
restless nights that he’s dropped back into his sleep already.”
“Don’t wake him,” I said; “I’m in no hurry for the gig. Wait till the
other man comes back from his errand; and, in the meantime, suppose I
have some lunch and a bottle of sherry, and suppose you come and help
me to get through it?”
The heart of mine host, as I had anticipated, warmed to me over his own
wine. He soon became communicative on the subject of the man asleep in
the stable, and by little and little I drew the whole story out of him.
Extravagant and incredible as the events must appear to everybody, they
are related here just as I heard them and just as they happened.
CHAPTER II.
Some years ago there lived in the suburbs of a large seaport town on
the west coast of England a man in humble circumstances, by name Isaac
Scatchard. His means of subsistence were derived from any employment
that he could get as an hostler, and occasionally, when times went well
with him, from temporary engagements in service as stable-helper in
private houses. Though a faithful, steady, and honest man, he got on
badly in his calling. His ill luck was proverbial among his neighbors.
He was always missing good opportunities by no fault of his own, and
always living longest in service with amiable people who were not
punctual payers of wages. “Unlucky Isaac” was his nickname in his own
neighborhood, and no one could say that he did not richly deserve it.
With far more than one man’s fair share of adversity to endure, Isaac
had but one consolation to support him, and that was of the dreariest
and most negative kind. He had no wife and children to increase his
anxieties and add to the bitterness of his various failures in life. It
might have been from mere insensibility, or it might have been from
generous unwillingness to involve another in his own unlucky destiny,
but the fact undoubtedly was, that he had arrived at the middle term of
life without marrying, and, what is much more remarkable, without once
exposing himself, from eighteen to eight-and-thirty, to the genial
imputation of ever having had a sweetheart.
When he was out of service he lived alone with his widowed mother. Mrs.
Scatchard was a woman above the average in her lowly station as to
capacity and manners. She had seen better days, as the phrase is, but
she never referred to them in the presence of curious visitors; and,
though perfectly polite to every one who approached her, never
cultivated any intimacies among her neighbors. She contrived to
provide, hardly enough, for her simple wants by doing rough work for
the tailors, and always managed to keep a decent home for her son to
return to whenever his ill luck drove him out helpless into the world.
One bleak autumn when Isaac was getting on fast toward forty and when
he was as usual out of place through no fault of his own, he set forth,
from his mother’s cottage on a long walk inland to a gentleman’s seat
where he had heard that a stable-helper was required.
It wanted then but two days of his birthday; and Mrs. Scatchard, with
her usual fondness, made him promise, before he started, that he would
be back in time to keep that anniversary with her, in as festive a way
as their poor means would allow. It was easy for him to comply with
this request, even supposing he slept a night each way on the road.
He was to start from home on Monday morning, and, whether he got the
new place or not, he was to be back for his birthday dinner on
Wednesday at two o’clock.
Arriving at his destination too late on the Monday night to make
application for the stablehelper’s place, he slept at the village inn,
and in good time on the Tuesday morning presented himself at the
gentleman’s house to fill the vacant situation. Here again his ill luck
pursued him as inexorably as ever. The excellent written testimonials
to his character which he was able to produce availed him nothing; his
long walk had been taken in vain: only the day before the
stable-helper’s place had been given to another man.
Isaac accepted this new disappointment resignedly and as a matter of
course. Naturally slow in capacity, he had the bluntness of sensibility
and phlegmatic patience of disposition which frequently distinguish men
with sluggishly-working mental powers. He thanked the gentleman’s
steward with his usual quiet civility for granting him an interview,
and took his departure with no appearance of unusual depression in his
face or manner.
Before starting on his homeward walk he made some inquiries at the inn,
and ascertained that he might save a few miles on his return by
following the new road. Furnished with full instructions, several times
repeated, as to the various turnings he was to take, he set forth on
his homeward journey and walked on all day with only one stoppage for
bread and cheese. Just as it was getting toward dark, the rain came on
and the wind began to rise, and he found himself, to make matters
worse, in a part of the country with which he was entirely
unacquainted, though he knew himself to be some fifteen miles from
home. The first house he found to inquire at was a lonely roadside inn,
standing on the outskirts of a thick wood. Solitary as the place
looked, it was welcome to a lost man who was also hungry, thirsty,
footsore and wet. The landlord was civil and respectable-looking, and
the price he asked for a bed was reasonable enough. Isaac therefore
decided on stopping comfortably at the inn for that night.
He was constitutionally a temperate man.
His supper consisted of two rashers of bacon, a slice of home-made
bread and a pint of ale. He did not go to bed immediately after this
moderate meal, but sat up with the landlord, talking about his bad
prospects and his long run of ill-luck, and diverging from these topics
to the subjects of horse-flesh and racing. Nothing was said either by
himself, his host, or the few laborers who strayed into the tap-room,
which could, in the slightest degree, excite the very small and very
dull imaginative faculty which Isaac Scatchard possessed.
At a little after eleven the house was closed. Isaac went round with
the landlord and held the candle while the doors and lower windows were
being secured. He noticed with surprise the strength of the bolts and
bars, and iron-sheathed shutters.
“You see, we are rather lonely here,” said the landlord. “We never have
had any attempts made to break in yet, but it’s always as well to be on
the safe side. When nobody is sleeping here, I am the only man in the
house. My wife and daughter are timid, and the servant-girl takes after
her missuses. Another glass of ale before you turn in? No! Well, how
such a sober man as you comes to be out of place is more than I can
make out, for one. Here’s where you’re to sleep. You’re our only lodger
to-night, and I think you’ll say my missus has done her best to make
you comfortable. You’re quite sure you won’t have another glass of ale?
Very well. Good-night.”
It was half-past eleven by the clock in the passage as they went
upstairs to the bedroom, the window of which looked on to the wood at
the back of the house.
Isaac locked the door, set his candle on the chest of drawers, and
wearily got ready for bed.
The bleak autumn wind was still blowing, and the solemn, monotonous,
surging moan of it in the wood was dreary and awful to hear through the
night-silence. Isaac felt strangely wakeful.
He resolved, as he lay down in bed, to keep the candle alight until he
began to grow sleepy, for there was something unendurably depressing in
the bare idea of lying awake in the darkness, listening to the dismal,
ceaseless moaning of the wind in the wood.
Sleep stole on him before he was aware of it. His eyes closed, and he
fell off insensibly to rest without having so much as thought of
extinguishing the candle.
The first sensation of which he was conscious after sinking into
slumber was a strange shivering that ran through him suddenly from head
to foot, and a dreadful sinking pain at the heart, such as he had never
felt before. The shivering only disturbed his slumbers; the pain woke
him instantly. In one moment he passed from a state of sleep to a state
of wakefulness—his eyes wide open—his mental perceptions cleared on a
sudden, as if by a miracle.
The candle had burned down nearly to the last morsel of tallow, but the
top of the unsnuffed wick had just fallen off, and the light in the
little room was, for the moment, fair and full.
Between the foot of his bed and the closed door there stood a woman
with a knife in her hand, looking at him.
He was stricken speechless with terror, but he did not lose the
preternatural clearness of his faculties, and he never took his eyes
off the woman. She said not a word as they stared each other in the
face, but she began to move slowly toward the left-hand side of the
bed.
His eyes followed her. She was a fair, fine woman, with yellowish
flaxen hair and light gray eyes, with a droop in the left eyelid. He
noticed those things and fixed them on his mind before she was round at
the side of the bed. Speechless, with no expression in her face, with
no noise following her footfall, she came closer and closer—stopped—and
slowly raised the knife. He laid his right arm over his throat to save
it; but, as he saw the knife coming down, threw his hand across the bed
to the right side, and jerked his body over that way just as the knife
descended on the mattress within an inch of his shoulder.
His eyes fixed on her arm and hand as she slowly drew her knife out of
the bed: a white, well-shaped arm, with a pretty down lying lightly
over the fair skin—a delicate lady’s hand, with the crowning beauty of
a pink flush under and round the finger-nails.
She drew the knife out, and passed back again slowly to the foot of the
bed; stopped there for a moment looking at him; then came on—still
speechless, still with no expression on the blank, beautiful face,
still with no sound following the stealthy footfalls—came on to the
right side of the bed, where he now lay.
As she approached, she raised the knife again, and he drew himself away
to the left side. She struck, as before, right into the mattress, with
a deliberate, perpendicularly downward action of the arm. This time his
eyes wandered from her to the knife. It was like the large clasp-knives
which he had often seen laboring men use to cut their bread and bacon
with. Her delicate little fingers did not conceal more than two-thirds
of the handle: he noticed that it was made of buck-horn, clean and
shining as the blade was, and looking like new.
For the second time she drew the knife out, concealed it in the wide
sleeve of her gown, then stopped by the bedside, watching him. For an
instant he saw her standing in that position, then the wick of the
spent candle fell over into the socket; the flame diminished to a
little blue point, and the room grew dark.
A moment, or less, if possible, passed so, and then the wick flamed up,
smokingly, for the last time. His eyes were still looking eagerly over
the right-hand side of the bed when the final flash of light came, but
they discovered nothing. The fair woman with the knife was gone.
The conviction that he was alone again weakened the hold of the terror
that had struck him dumb up to this time. The preternatural sharpness
which the very intensity of his panic had mysteriously imparted to his
faculties left them suddenly. His brain grew confused—his heart beat
wildly—his ears opened for the first time since the appearance of the
woman to a sense of the woeful ceaseless moaning of the wind among the
trees. With the dreadful conviction of the reality of what he had seen
still strong within him, he leaped out of bed, and screaming “Murder!
Wake up, there! wake up!” dashed headlong through the darkness to the
door.
It was fast locked, exactly as he had left it on going to bed.
His cries on starting up had alarmed the house. He heard the terrified,
confused exclamations of women; he saw the master of the house
approaching along the passage with his burning rush-candle in one hand
and his gun in the other.
“What is it?” asked the landlord, breathlessly. Isaac could only answer
in a whisper. “A woman, with a knife in her hand,” he gasped out. “In
my room—a fair, yellow-haired woman; she jobbed at me with the knife
twice over.”
The landlord’s pale cheeks grew paler. He looked at Isaac eagerly by
the flickering light of his candle, and his face began to get red
again; his voice altered, too, as well as his complexion.
“She seems to have missed you twice,” he said.
“I dodged the knife as it came down,” Isaac went on, in the same scared
whisper. “It struck the bed each time.”
The landlord took his candle into the bedroom immediately. In less than
a minute he came out again into the passage in a violent passion.
“The devil fly away with you and your woman with the knife! There isn’t
a mark in the bedclothes anywhere. What do you mean by coming into a
man’s place and frightening his family out of their wits about a
dream?”
“I’ll leave your house,” said Isaac, faintly. “Better out on the road,
in rain and dark, on my road home, than back again in that room, after
what I’ve seen in it. Lend me a light to get my clothes by, and tell me
what I’m to pay.”
“Pay!” cried the landlord, leading the way with his light sulkily into
the bedroom. “You’ll find your score on the slate when you go
downstairs. I wouldn’t have taken you in for all the money you’ve got
about you if I’d known your dreaming, screeching ways beforehand. Look
at the bed. Where’s the cut of a knife in it? Look at the window—is the
lock bursted? Look at the door (which I heard you fasten yourself)—is
it broke in? A murdering woman with a knife in my house! You ought to
be ashamed of yourself!”
Isaac answered not a word. He huddled on his clothes, and then they
went downstairs together.
“Nigh on twenty minutes past two!” said the landlord, as they passed
the clock. “A nice time in the morning to frighten honest people out of
their wits!”
Isaac paid his bill, and the landlord let him out at the front door,
asking, with a grin of contempt, as he undid the strong fastenings,
whether “the murdering woman got in that way.”
They parted without a word on either side. The rain had ceased, but the
night was dark, and the wind bleaker than ever. Little did the
darkness, or the cold, or the uncertainty about the way home matter to
Isaac. If he had been turned out into a wilderness in a thunder-storm
it would have been a relief after what he had suffered in the bedroom
of the inn.
What was the fair woman with the knife? The creature of a dream, or
that other creature from the unknown world called among men by the name
of ghost? He could make nothing of the mystery—had made nothing of it,
even when it was midday on Wednesday, and when he stood, at last, after
many times missing his road, once more on the doorstep of home.
CHAPTER III.
His mother came out eagerly to receive him. His face told her in a
moment that something was wrong.
“I’ve lost the place; but that’s my luck. I dreamed an ill dream last
night, mother—or maybe I saw a ghost. Take it either way, it scared me
out of my senses, and I’m not my own man again yet.”
“Isaac, your face frightens me. Come in to the fire—come in, and tell
mother all about it.”
He was as anxious to tell as she was to hear; for it had been his hope,
all the way home, that his mother, with her quicker capacity and
superior knowledge, might be able to throw some light on the mystery
which he could not clear up for himself. His memory of the dream was
still mechanically vivid, though his thoughts were entirely confused by
it.
His mother’s face grew paler and paler as he went on. She never
interrupted him by so much as a single word; but when he had done, she
moved her chair close to his, put her arm round his neck, and said to
him:
“Isaac, you dreamed your ill dream on this Wednesday morning. What time
was it when you saw the fair woman with the knife in her hand?” Isaac
reflected on what the landlord had said when they had passed by the
clock on his leaving the inn; allowed as nearly as he could for the
time that must have elapsed between the unlocking of his bedroom door
and the paying of his bill just before going away, and answered:
“Somewhere about two o’clock in the morning.”
His mother suddenly quitted her hold of his neck, and struck her hands
together with a gesture of despair.
“This Wednesday is your birthday, Isaac, and two o’clock in the morning
was the time when you were born.”
Isaac’s capacities were not quick enough to catch the infection of his
mother’s superstitious dread. He was amazed, and a little startled,
also, when she suddenly rose from her chair, opened her old
writing-desk, took pen, ink and paper, and then said to him:
“Your memory is but a poor one, Isaac, and, now I’m an old woman,
mine’s not much better. I want all about this dream of yours to be as
well known to both of us, years hence, as it is now. Tell me over again
all you told me a minute ago, when you spoke of what the woman with the
knife looked like.”
Isaac obeyed, and marveled much as he saw his mother carefully set down
on paper the very words that he was saying.
“Light gray eyes,” she wrote, as they came to the descriptive part,
“with a droop in the left eyelid; flaxen hair, with a gold-yellow
streak in it; white arms, with a down upon them; little lady’s hand,
with a reddish look about the finger nails; clasp-knife with a
buck-horn handle, that seemed as good as new.” To these particulars
Mrs. Scatchard added the year, month, day of the week, and time in the
morning when the woman of the dream appeared to her son. She then
locked up the paper carefully in her writing-desk.
Neither on that day nor on any day after could her son induce her to
return to the matter of the dream. She obstinately kept her thoughts
about it to herself, and even refused to refer again to the paper in
her writing-desk. Ere long Isaac grew weary of attempting to make her
break her resolute silence; and time, which sooner or later wears out
all things, gradually wore out the impression produced on him by the
dream. He began by thinking of it carelessly, and he ended by not
thinking of it at all.
The result was the more easily brought about by the advent of some
important changes for the better in his prospects which commenced not
long after his terrible night’s experience at the inn. He reaped at
last the reward of his long and patient suffering under adversity by
getting an excellent place, keeping it for seven years, and leaving it,
on the death of his master, not only with an excellent character, but
also with a comfortable annuity bequeathed to him as a reward for
saving his mistress’s life in a carriage accident. Thus it happened
that Isaac Scatchard returned to his old mother, seven years after the
time of the dream at the inn, with an annual sum of money at his
disposal sufficient to keep them both in ease and independence for the
rest of their lives.
The mother, whose health had been bad of late years, profited so much
by the care bestowed on her and by freedom from money anxieties, that
when Isaac’s birthday came round she was able to sit up comfortably at
table and dine with him.
On that day, as the evening drew on, Mrs. Scatchard discovered that a
bottle of tonic medicine which she was accustomed to take, and in which
she had fancied that a dose or more was still left, happened to be
empty. Isaac immediately volunteered to go to the chemist’s and get it
filled again. It was as rainy and bleak an autumn night as on the
memorable past occasion when he lost his way and slept at the road-side
inn.
On going into the chemist’s shop he was passed hurriedly by a
poorly-dressed woman coming out of it. The glimpse he had of her face
struck him, and he looked back after her as she descended the
door-steps.
“You’re noticing that woman?” said the chemist’s apprentice behind the
counter. “It’s my opinion there’s something wrong with her. She’s been
asking for laudanum to put to a bad tooth. Master’s out for half an
hour, and I told her I wasn’t allowed to sell poison to strangers in
his absence. She laughed in a queer way, and said she would come back
in half an hour. If she expects master to serve her, I think she’ll be
disappointed. It’s a case of suicide, sir, if ever there was one yet.”
These words added immeasurably to the sudden interest in the woman
which Isaac had felt at the first sight of her face. After he had got
the medicine-bottle filled, he looked about anxiously for her as soon
as he was out in the street. She was walking slowly up and down on the
opposite side of the road. With his heart, very much to his own
surprise, beating fast, Isaac crossed over and spoke to her.
He asked if she was in any distress. She pointed to her torn shawl, her
scanty dress, her crushed, dirty bonnet; then moved under a lamp so as
to let the light fall on her stern, pale, but still most beautiful
face.
“I look like a comfortable, happy woman, don’t I?” she said, with a
bitter laugh.
She spoke with a purity of intonation which Isaac had never heard
before from other than ladies’ lips. Her slightest actions seemed to
have the easy, negligent grace of a thoroughbred woman. Her skin, for
all its poverty-stricken paleness, was as delicate as if her life had
been passed in the enjoyment of every social comfort that wealth can
purchase. Even her small, finely-shaped hands, gloveless as they were,
had not lost their whiteness.
Little by little, in answer to his questions, the sad story of the
woman came out. There is no need to relate it here; it is told over and
over again in police reports and paragraphs about attempted suicides.
“My name is Rebecca Murdoch,” said the woman, as she ended. “I have
nine-pence left, and I thought of spending it at the chemist’s over the
way in securing a passage to the other world. Whatever it is, it can’t
be worse to me than this, so why should I stop here?”
Besides the natural compassion and sadness moved in his heart by what
he heard, Isaac felt within him some mysterious influence at work all
the time the woman was speaking which utterly confused his ideas and
almost deprived him of his powers of speech. All that he could say in
answer to her last reckless words was that he would prevent her from
attempting her own life, if he followed her about all night to do it.
His rough, trembling earnestness seemed to impress her.
“I won’t occasion you that trouble,” she answered, when he repeated his
threat. “You have given me a fancy for living by speaking kindly to me.
No need for the mockery of protestations and promises. You may believe
me without them. Come to Fuller’s Meadow to-morrow at twelve, and you
will find me alive, to answer for myself—No!—no money. My ninepence
will do to get me as good a night’s lodging as I want.”
She nodded and left him. He made no attempt to follow—he felt no
suspicion that she was deceiving him.
“It’s strange, but I can’t help believing her,” he said to himself, and
walked away, bewildered, toward home.
On entering the house, his mind was still so completely absorbed by its
new subject of interest that he took no notice of what his mother was
doing when he came in with the bottle of medicine. She had opened her
old writing-desk in his absence, and was now reading a paper
attentively that lay inside it. On every birthday of Isaac’s since she
had written down the particulars of his dream from his own lips, she
had been accustomed to read that same paper, and ponder over it in
private.
The next day he went to Fuller’s Meadow.
He had done only right in believing her so implicitly. She was there,
punctual to a minute, to answer for herself. The last-left faint
defenses in Isaac’s heart against the fascination which a word or look
from her began inscrutably to exercise over him sank down and vanished
before her forever on that memorable morning.
When a man, previously insensible to the influence of women, forms an
attachment in middle life, the instances are rare indeed, let the
warning circumstances be what they may, in which he is found capable of
freeing himself from the tyranny of the new ruling passion. The charm
of being spoken to familiarly, fondly, and gratefully by a woman whose
language and manners still retained enough of their early refinement to
hint at the high social station that she had lost, would have been a
dangerous luxury to a man of Isaac’s rank at the age of twenty. But it
was far more than that—it was certain ruin to him—now that his heart
was opening unworthily to a new influence at that middle time of life
when strong feelings of all kinds, once implanted, strike root most
stubbornly in a man’s moral nature. A few more stolen interviews after
that first morning in Fuller’s Meadow completed his infatuation. In
less than a month from the time when he first met her, Isaac Scatchard
had consented to give Rebecca Murdoch a new interest in existence, and
a chance of recovering the character she had lost by promising to make
her his wife.
She had taken possession, not of his passions only, but of his
faculties as well. All the mind he had he put into her keeping. She
directed him on every point—even instructing him how to break the news
of his approaching marriage in the safest manner to his mother.
“If you tell her how you met me and who I am at first,” said the
cunning woman, “she will move heaven and earth to prevent our marriage.
Say I am the sister of one of your fellow-servants—ask her to see me
before you go into any more particulars—and leave it to me to do the
rest. I mean to make her love me next best to you, Isaac, before she
knows anything of who I really am.” The motive of the deceit was
sufficient to sanctify it to Isaac. The stratagem proposed relieved him
of his one great anxiety, and quieted his uneasy conscience on the
subject of his mother. Still, there was something wanting to perfect
his happiness, something that he could not realize, something
mysteriously untraceable, and yet something that perpetually made
itself felt; not when he was absent from Rebecca Murdoch, but, strange
to say, when he was actually in her presence! She was kindness itself
with him. She never made him feel his inferior capacities and inferior
manners. She showed the sweetest anxiety to please him in the smallest
trifles; but, in spite of all these attractions, he never could feel
quite at his ease with her. At their first meeting, there had mingled
with his admiration, when he looked in her face, a faint, involuntary
feeling of doubt whether that face was entirely strange to him. No
after familiarity had the slightest effect on this inexplicable,
wearisome uncertainty.
Concealing the truth as he had been directed, he announced his marriage
engagement precipitately and confusedly to his mother on the day when
he contracted it. Poor Mrs. Scatchard showed her perfect confidence in
her son by flinging her arms round his neck, and giving him joy of
having found at last, in the sister of one of his fellow-servants, a
woman to comfort and care for him after his mother was gone. She was
all eagerness to see the woman of her son’s choice, and the next day
was fixed for the introduction.
It was a bright sunny morning, and the little cottage parlor was full
of light as Mrs. Scatchard, happy and expectant, dressed for the
occasion in her Sunday gown, sat waiting for her son and her future
daughter-in-law.
Punctual to the appointed time, Isaac hurriedly and nervously led his
promised wife into the room. His mother rose to receive her—advanced a
few steps, smiling—looked Rebecca full in the eyes, and suddenly
stopped. Her face, which had been flushed the moment before, turned
white in an instant; her eyes lost their expression of softness and
kindness, and assumed a blank look of terror; her outstretched hands
fell to her sides, and she staggered back a few steps with a low cry to
her son.
“Isaac,” she whispered, clutching him fast by the arm when he asked
alarmedly if she was taken ill, “Isaac, does that woman’s face remind
you of nothing?”
Before he could answer—before he could look round to where Rebecca
stood, astonished and angered by her reception, at the lower end of the
room, his mother pointed impatiently to her writing-desk, and gave him
the key.
“Open it,” she said, in a quick breathless whisper.
“What does this mean? Why am I treated as if I had no business here?
Does your mother want to insult me?” asked Rebecca, angrily.
“Open it, and give me the paper in the left-hand drawer. Quick! quick,
for Heaven’s sake!” said Mrs. Scatchard, shrinking further back in
terror.
Isaac gave her the paper. She looked it over eagerly for a moment, then
followed Rebecca, who was now turning away haughtily to leave the room,
and caught her by the shoulder—abruptly raised the long, loose sleeve
of her gown, and glanced at her hand and arm. Something like fear began
to steal over the angry expression of Rebecca’s face as she shook
herself free from the old woman’s grasp. “Mad!” she said to herself;
“and Isaac never told me.” With these few words she left the room.
Isaac was hastening after her when his mother turned and stopped his
further progress. It wrung his heart to see the misery and terror in
her face as she looked at him.
“Light gray eyes,” she said, in low, mournful, awe-struck tones,
pointing toward the open door; “a droop in the left eyelid; flaxen
hair, with a gold-yellow streak in it; white arms, with a down upon
them; little lady’s hand, with a reddish look under the finger
nails—The Dream-Woman, Isaac, the Dream-Woman!”
That faint cleaving doubt which he had never been able to shake off in
Rebecca Murdoch’s presence was fatally set at rest forever. He had seen
her face, then, before—seven years before, on his birthday, in the
bedroom of the lonely inn.
“Be warned! oh, my son, be warned! Isaac, Isaac, let her go, and do you
stop with me!”
Something darkened the parlor window as those words were said. A sudden
chill ran through him, and he glanced sidelong at the shadow. Rebecca
Murdoch had come back. She was peering in curiously at them over the
low window-blind.
“I have promised to marry, mother,” he said, “and marry I must.”
The tears came into his eyes as he spoke and dimmed his sight, but he
could just discern the fatal face outside moving away again from the
window.
His mother’s head sank lower.
“Are you faint?” he whispered.
“Broken-hearted, Isaac.”
He stooped down and kissed her. The shadow, as he did so, returned to
the window, and the fatal face peered in curiously once more.
CHAPTER IV.
Three weeks after that day Isaac and Rebecca were man and wife. All
that was hopelessly dogged and stubborn in the man’s moral nature
seemed to have closed round his fatal passion, and to have fixed it
unassailably in his heart.
After that first interview in the cottage parlor no consideration would
induce Mrs. Scatchard to see her son’s wife again or even to talk of
her when Isaac tried hard to plead her cause after their marriage.
This course of conduct was not in any degree occasioned by a discovery
of the degradation in which Rebecca had lived. There was no question of
that between mother and son. There was no question of anything but the
fearfully-exact resemblance between the living, breathing woman and the
specter-woman of Isaac’s dream.
Rebecca on her side neither felt nor expressed the slightest sorrow at
the estrangement between herself and her mother-in-law. Isaac, for the
sake of peace, had never contradicted her first idea that age and long
illness had affected Mrs. Scatchard’s mind. He even allowed his wife to
upbraid him for not having confessed this to her at the time of their
marriage engagement, rather than risk anything by hinting at the truth.
The sacrifice of his integrity before his one all-mastering delusion
seemed but a small thing, and cost his conscience but little after the
sacrifices he had already made.
The time of waking from this delusion—the cruel and the rueful time—was
not far off. After some quiet months of married life, as the summer was
ending, and the year was getting on toward the month of his birthday,
Isaac found his wife altering toward him. She grew sullen and
contemptuous; she formed acquaintances of the most dangerous kind in
defiance of his objections, his entreaties, and his commands; and,
worst of all, she learned, ere long, after every fresh difference with
her husband, to seek the deadly self-oblivion of drink. Little by
little, after the first miserable discovery that his wife was keeping
company with drunkards, the shocking certainty forced itself on Isaac
that she had grown to be a drunkard herself.
He had been in a sadly desponding state for some time before the
occurrence of these domestic calamities. His mother’s health, as he
could but too plainly discern every time he went to see her at the
cottage, was failing fast, and he upbraided himself in secret as the
cause of the bodily and mental suffering she endured. When to his
remorse on his mother’s account was added the shame and misery
occasioned by the discovery of his wife’s degradation, he sank under
the double trial—his face began to alter fast, and he looked what he
was, a spirit-broken man.
His mother, still struggling bravely against the illness that was
hurrying her to the grave, was the first to notice the sad alteration
in him, and the first to hear of his last worst trouble with his wife.
She could only weep bitterly on the day when he made his humiliating
confession, but on the next occasion when he went to see her she had
taken a resolution in reference to his domestic afflictions which
astonished and even alarmed him. He found her dressed to go out, and on
asking the reason received this answer:
“I am not long for this world, Isaac,” she said, “and I shall not feel
easy on my death-bed unless I have done my best to the last to make my
son happy. I mean to put my own fears and my own feelings out of the
question, and to go with you to your wife, and try what I can do to
reclaim her. Give me your arm, Isaac, and let me do the last thing I
can in this world to help my son before it is too late.”
He could not disobey her, and they walked together slowly toward his
miserable home.
It was only one o’clock in the afternoon when they reached the cottage
where he lived. It was their dinner-hour, and Rebecca was in the
kitchen. He was thus able to take his mother quietly into the parlor,
and then prepare his wife for the interview. She had fortunately drunk
but little at that early hour, and she was less sullen and capricious
than usual.
He returned to his mother with his mind tolerably at ease. His wife
soon followed him into the parlor, and the meeting between her and Mrs.
Scatchard passed off better than he had ventured to anticipate, though
he observed with secret apprehension that his mother, resolutely as she
controlled herself in other respects, could not look his wife in the
face when she spoke to her. It was a relief to him, therefore, when
Rebecca began to lay the cloth.
She laid the cloth, brought in the bread-tray, and cut a slice from the
loaf for her husband, then returned to the kitchen. At that moment,
Isaac, still anxiously watching his mother, was startled by seeing the
same ghastly change pass over her face which had altered it so awfully
on the morning when Rebecca and she first met. Before he could say a
word, she whispered, with a look of horror:
“Take me back—home, home again, Isaac. Come with me, and never go back
again.”
He was afraid to ask for an explanation; he could only sign to her to
be silent, and help her quickly to the door. As they passed the
breadtray on the table she stopped and pointed to it.
“Did you see what your wife cut your bread with?” she asked, in a low
whisper.
“No, mother—I was not noticing—what was it?”
“Look!”
He did look. A new clasp-knife with a buckhorn handle lay with the loaf
in the bread-tray. He stretched out his hand shudderingly to possess
himself of it; but, at the same time, there was a noise in the kitchen,
and his mother caught at his arm.
“The knife of the dream! Isaac, I’m faint with fear. Take me away
before she comes back.”
He was hardly able to support her. The visible, tangible reality of the
knife struck him with a panic, and utterly destroyed any faint doubts
that he might have entertained up to this time in relation to the
mysterious dream-warning of nearly eight years before. By a last
desperate effort, he summoned self-possession enough to help his mother
out of the house—so quietly that the “Dream-woman” (he thought of her
by that name now) did not hear them departing from the kitchen.
“Don’t go back, Isaac—don’t go back!” implored Mrs. Scatchard, as he
turned to go away, after seeing her safely seated again in her own
room.
“I must get the knife,” he answered, under his breath. His mother tried
to stop him again, but he hurried out without another word.
On his return he found that his wife had discovered their secret
departure from the house. She had been drinking, and was in a fury of
passion. The dinner in the kitchen was flung under the grate; the cloth
was off the parlor table. Where was the knife?
Unwisely, he asked for it. She was only too glad of the opportunity of
irritating him which the request afforded her. “He wanted the knife,
did he? Could he give her a reason why? No! Then he should not have
it—not if he went down on his knees to ask for it.” Further
recriminations elicited the fact that she had bought it a bargain, and
that she considered it her own especial property. Isaac saw the
uselessness of attempting to get the knife by fair means, and
determined to search for it, later in the day, in secret. The search
was unsuccessful. Night came on, and he left the house to walk about
the streets. He was afraid now to sleep in the same room with her.
Three weeks passed. Still sullenly enraged with him, she would not give
up the knife; and still that fear of sleeping in the same room with her
possessed him. He walked about at night, or dozed in the parlor, or sat
watching by his mother’s bedside. Before the expiration of the first
week in the new month his mother died. It wanted then but ten days of
her son’s birthday. She had longed to live till that anniversary. Isaac
was present at her death, and her last words in this world were
addressed to him:
“Don’t go back, my son, don’t go back!” He was obliged to go back, if
it were only to watch his wife. Exasperated to the last degree by his
distrust of her, she had revengefully sought to add a sting to his
grief, during the last days of his mother’s illness, by declaring that
she would assert her right to attend the funeral. In spite of any thing
he could do or say, she held with wicked pertinacity to her word, and
on the day appointed for the burial forced herself—inflamed and
shameless with drink—into her husband’s presence, and declared that she
would walk in the funeral procession to his mother’s grave.
This last worst outrage, accompanied by all that was most insulting in
word and look, maddened him for the moment. He struck her.
The instant the blow was dealt he repented it. She crouched down,
silent, in a corner of the room, and eyed him steadily; it was a look
that cooled his hot blood and made him tremble. But there was no time
now to think of a means of making atonement. Nothing remained but to
risk the worst till the funeral was over. There was but one way of
making sure of her. He locked her into her bedroom.
When he came back some hours after, he found her sitting, very much
altered in look and bearing, by the bedside, with a bundle on her lap.
She rose, and faced him quietly, and spoke with a strange stillness in
her voice, a strange repose in her eyes, a strange composure in her
manner.
“No man has ever struck me twice,” she said, “and my husband shall have
no second opportunity. Set the door open and let me go. From this day
forth we see each other no more.”
Before he could answer she passed him and left the room. He saw her
walk away up the street.
Would she return?
All that night he watched and waited, but no footstep came near the
house. The next night, overpowered by fatigue, he lay down in bed in
his clothes, with the door locked, the key on the table, and the candle
burning. His slumber was not disturbed. The third night, the fourth,
the fifth, the sixth passed, and nothing happened.
He lay down on the seventh, still in his clothes, still with the door
locked, the key on the table, and the candle burning, but easier in his
mind.
Easier in his mind, and in perfect health of body when he fell off to
sleep. But his rest was disturbed. He woke twice without any sensation
of uneasiness. But the third time it was that never-to-be-forgotten
shivering of the night at the lonely inn, that dreadful sinking pain at
the heart, which once more aroused him in an instant.
His eyes opened toward the left-hand side of the bed, and there
stood—The Dream-Woman again? No! His wife; the living reality, with the
dream-specter’s face, in the dream-specter’s attitude; the fair arm up,
the knife clasped in the delicate white hand.
He sprang upon her almost at the instant of seeing her, and yet not
quickly enough to prevent her from hiding the knife. Without a word
from him—without a cry from her—he pinioned her in a chair. With one
hand he felt up her sleeve, and there, where the Dream-Woman had hidden
the knife, his wife had hidden it—the knife with the buckhorn handle,
that looked like new.
In the despair of that fearful moment his brain was steady, his heart
was calm. He looked at her fixedly with the knife in his hand, and said
these last words:
“You told me we should see each other no more, and you have come back.
It is my turn now to go, and to go forever. I say that we shall see
each other no more, and my word shall not be broken.”
He left her, and set forth into the night. There was a bleak wind
abroad, and the smell of recent rain was in the air. The distant
church-clocks chimed the quarter as he walked rapidly beyond the last
houses in the suburb. He asked the first policeman he met what hour
that was of which the quarter past had just struck.
The man referred sleepily to his watch, and answered, “Two o’clock.”
Two in the morning. What day of the month was this day that had just
begun? He reckoned it up from the date of his mother’s funeral. The
fatal parallel was complete: it was his birthday!
Had he escaped the mortal peril which his dream foretold? or had he
only received a second warning?
As that ominous doubt forced itself on his mind, he stopped, reflected,
and turned back again toward the city. He was still resolute to hold to
his word, and never to let her see him more; but there was a thought
now in his mind of having her watched and followed. The knife was in
his possession; the world was before him; but a new distrust of her—a
vague, unspeakable, superstitious dread had overcome him.
“I must know where she goes, now she thinks I have left her,” he said
to himself, as he stole back wearily to the precincts of his house.
It was still dark. He had left the candle burning in the bedchamber;
but when he looked up to the window of the room now there was no light
in it. He crept cautiously to the house door. On going away, he
remembered to have closed it; on trying it now, he found it open.
He waited outside, never losing sight of the house, till daylight. Then
he ventured indoors—listened, and heard nothing—looked into kitchen,
scullery, parlor and found nothing; went up at last into the bedroom—it
was empty. A picklock lay on the floor betraying how she had gained
entrance in the night, and that was the only trace of her.
Whither had she gone? That no mortal tongue could tell him. The
darkness had covered her flight; and when the day broke, no man could
say where the light found her.
Before leaving the house and the town forever, he gave instructions to
a friend and neighbor to sell his furniture for anything that it would
fetch, and apply the proceeds to employing the police to trace her. The
directions were honestly followed, and the money was all spent, but the
inquiries led to nothing. The picklock on the bedroom floor remained
the one last useless trace of the Dream-Woman.
At this point of the narrative the landlord paused, and, turning toward
the window of the room in which we were sitting, looked in the
direction of the stable-yard.
“So far,” he said, “I tell you what was told to me. The little that
remains to be added lies within my own experience. Between two and
three months after the events I have just been relating, Isaac
Scatchard came to me, withered and old-looking before his time, just as
you saw him to-day. He had his testimonials to character with him, and
he asked for employment here. Knowing that my wife and he were
distantly related, I gave him a trial in consideration of that
relationship, and liked him in spite of his queer habits. He is as
sober, honest, and willing a man as there is in England. As for his
restlessness at night, and his sleeping away his leisure time in the
day, who can wonder at it after hearing his story? Besides, he never
objects to being roused up when he’s wanted, so there’s not much
inconvenience to complain of, after all.”
“I suppose he is afraid of a return of that dreadful dream, and of
waking out of it in the dark?” said I.
“No,” returned the landlord. “The dream comes back to him so often that
he has got to bear with it by this time resignedly enough. It’s his
wife keeps him waking at night as he has often told me.”
“What! Has she never been heard of yet?”
“Never. Isaac himself has the one perpetual thought about her, that she
is alive and looking for him. I believe he wouldn’t let himself drop
off to sleep toward two in the morning for a king’s ransom. Two in the
morning, he says, is the time she will find him, one of these days. Two
in the morning is the time all the year round when he likes to be most
certain that he has got that clasp-knife safe about him. He does not
mind being alone as long as he is awake, except on the night before his
birthday, when he firmly believes himself to be in peril of his life.
The birthday has only come round once since he has been here, and then
he sat up along with the night-porter. ‘She’s looking for me,’ is all
he says when anybody speaks to him about the one anxiety of his life;
‘she’s looking for me.’ He may be right. She may be looking for him.
Who can tell?”
“Who can tell?” said I.
THE FOURTH DAY.
The sky once more cloudy and threatening. No news of George. I
corrected Morgan’s second story to-day; numbered it Seven, and added it
to our stock.
Undeterred by the weather, Miss Jessie set off this morning on the
longest ride she had yet undertaken. She had heard—through one of my
brother’s laborers, I believe—of the actual existence, in this
nineteenth century, of no less a personage than a Welsh Bard, who was
to be found at a distant farmhouse far beyond the limits of Owen’s
property. The prospect of discovering this remarkable relic of past
times hurried her off, under the guidance of her ragged groom, in a
high state of excitement, to see and hear the venerable man. She was
away the whole day, and for the first time since her visit she kept us
waiting more than half an hour for dinner. The moment we all sat down
to table, she informed us, to Morgan’s great delight, that the bard was
a rank impostor.
“Why, what did you expect to see?” I asked.
“A Welsh patriarch, to be sure, with a long white beard, flowing robes,
and a harp to match,” answered Miss Jessie.
“And what did you find?”
“A highly-respectable middle-aged rustic; a smiling, smoothly-shaven,
obliging man, dressed in a blue swallow-tailed coat, with brass
buttons, and exhibiting his bardic legs in a pair of extremely stout
and comfortable corduroy trousers.”
“But he sang old Welsh songs, surely?”
“Sang! I’ll tell you what he did. He sat down on a Windsor chair,
without a harp; he put his hands in his pockets, cleared his throat,
looked up at the ceiling, and suddenly burst into a series of the
shrillest falsetto screeches I ever heard in my life. My own private
opinion is that he was suffering from hydrophobia. I have lost all
belief, henceforth and forever, in bards—all belief in everything, in
short, except your very delightful stories and this remarkably good
dinner.”
Ending with that smart double fire of compliments to her hosts, the
Queen of Hearts honored us all three with a smile of approval, and
transferred her attention to her knife and fork.
The number drawn to-night was One. On examination of the Purple Volume,
it proved to be my turn to read again.
“Our story to-night,” I said, “contains the narrative of a very
remarkable adventure which really befell me when I was a young man. At
the time of my life when these events happened I was dabbling in
literature when I ought to have been studying law, and traveling on the
Continent when I ought to have been keeping my terms at Lincoln’s Inn.
At the outset of the story, you will find that I refer to the county in
which I lived in my youth, and to a neighboring family possessing a
large estate in it. That county is situated in a part of England far
away from The Glen Tower, and that family is therefore not to be
associated with any present or former neighbors of ours in this part of
the world.”
After saying these necessary words of explanation, I opened the first
page, and began the story of my Own Adventure. I observed that my
audience started a little as I read the title, which I must add, in my
own defense, had been almost forced on my choice by the peculiar
character of the narrative. It was “MAD MONKTON.”
BROTHER GRIFFITH’S STORY of MAD MONKTON
CHAPTER I.
The Monktons of Wincot Abbey bore a sad character for want of
sociability in our county. They never went to other people’s houses,
and, excepting my father, and a lady and her daughter living near them,
never received anybody under their own roof.
Proud as they all certainly were, it was not pride, but dread, which
kept them thus apart from their neighbors. The family had suffered for
generations past from the horrible affliction of hereditary insanity,
and the members of it shrank from exposing their calamity to others, as
they must have exposed it if they had mingled with the busy little
world around them. There is a frightful story of a crime committed in
past times by two of the Monktons, near relatives, from which the first
appearance of the insanity was always supposed to date, but it is
needless for me to shock any one by repeating it. It is enough to say
that at intervals almost every form of madness appeared in the family,
monomania being the most frequent manifestation of the affliction among
them. I have these particulars, and one or two yet to be related, from
my father.
At the period of my youth but three of the Monktons were left at the
Abbey—Mr. and Mrs. Monkton and their only child Alfred, heir to the
property. The one other member of this, the elder branch of the family,
who was then alive, was Mr. Monkton’s younger brother, Stephen. He was
an unmarried man, possessing a fine estate in Scotland; but he lived
almost entirely on the Continent, and bore the reputation of being a
shameless profligate. The family at Wincot held almost as little
communication with him as with their neighbors.
I have already mentioned my father, and a lady and her daughter, as the
only privileged people who were admitted into Wincot Abbey.
My father had been an old school and college friend of Mr. Monkton, and
accident had brought them so much together in later life that their
continued intimacy at Wincot was quite intelligible. I am not so well
able to account for the friendly terms on which Mrs. Elmslie (the lady
to whom I have alluded) lived with the Monktons. Her late husband had
been distantly related to Mrs. Monkton, and my father was her
daughter’s guardian. But even these claims to friendship and regard
never seemed to me strong enough to explain the intimacy between Mrs.
Elmslie and the inhabitants of the Abbey. Intimate, however, they
certainly were, and one result of the constant interchange of visits
between the two families in due time declared itself: Mr. Monkton’s son
and Mrs. Elmslie’s daughter became attached to each other.
I had no opportunities of seeing much of the young lady; I only
remember her at that time as a delicate, gentle, lovable girl, the very
opposite in appearance, and apparently in character also, to Alfred
Monkton. But perhaps that was one reason why they fell in love with
each other. The attachment was soon discovered, and was far from being
disapproved by the parents on either side. In all essential points
except that of wealth, the Elmslies were nearly the equals of the
Monktons, and want of money in a bride was of no consequence to the
heir of Wincot. Alfred, it was well known, would succeed to thirty
thousand a year on his father’s death.
Thus, though the parents on both sides thought the young people not old
enough to be married at once, they saw no reason why Ada and Alfred
should not be engaged to each other, with the understanding that they
should be united when young Monkton came of age, in two years’ time.
The person to be consulted in the matter, after the parents, was my
father, in his capacity of Ada’s guardian. He knew that the family
misery had shown itself many years ago in Mrs. Monkton, who was her
husband’s cousin. The _illness,_ as it was significantly called, had
been palliated by careful treatment, and was reported to have passed
away. But my father was not to be deceived. He knew where the
hereditary taint still lurked; he viewed with horror the bare
possibility of its reappearing one day in the children of his friend’s
only daughter; and he positively refused his consent to the marriage
engagement.
The result was that the doors of the Abbey and the doors of Mrs.
Elmslie’s house were closed to him. This suspension of friendly
intercourse had lasted but a very short time when Mrs. Monkton died.
Her husband, who was fondly attached to her, caught a violent cold
while attending her funeral. The cold was neglected, and settled on his
lungs. In a few months’ time he followed his wife to the grave, and
Alfred was left master of the grand old Abbey and the fair lands that
spread all around it.
At this period Mrs. Elmslie had the indelicacy to endeavor a second
time to procure my father’s consent to the marriage engagement. He
refused it again more positively than before. More than a year passed
away. The time was approaching fast when Alfred would be of age. I
returned from college to spend the long vacation at home, and made some
advances toward bettering my acquaintance with young Monkton. They were
evaded—certainly with perfect politeness, but still in such a way as to
prevent me from offering my friendship to him again. Any mortification
I might have felt at this petty repulse under ordinary circumstances
was dismissed from my mind by the occurrence of a real misfortune in
our household. For some months past my father’s health had been
failing, and, just at the time of which I am now writing, his sons had
to mourn the irreparable calamity of his death.
This event, through some informality or error in the late Mr. Elmslie’s
will, left the future of Ada’s life entirely at her mother’s disposal.
The consequence was the immediate ratification of the marriage
engagement to which my father had so steadily refused his consent. As
soon as the fact was publicly announced, some of Mrs. Elmslie’s more
intimate friends, who were acquainted with the reports affecting the
Monkton family, ventured to mingle with their formal congratulations
one or two significant references to the late Mrs. Monkton and some
searching inquiries as to the disposition of her son.
Mrs. Elmslie always met these polite hints with one bold form of
answer. She first admitted the existence of these reports about the
Monktons which her friends were unwilling to specify distinctly, and
then declared that they were infamous calumnies. The hereditary taint
had died out of the family generations back. Alfred was the best, the
kindest, the sanest of human beings. He loved study and retirement; Ada
sympathized with his tastes, and had made her choice unbiased; if any
more hints were dropped about sacrificing her by her marriage, those
hints would be viewed as so many insults to her mother, whose affection
for her it was monstrous to call in question. This way of talking
silenced people, but did not convince them. They began to suspect, what
was indeed the actual truth, that Mrs. Elmslie was a selfish, worldly,
grasping woman, who wanted to get her daughter well married, and cared
nothing for consequences as long as she saw Ada mistress of the
greatest establishment in the whole county.
It seemed, however, as if there was some fatality at work to prevent
the attainment of Mrs. Elmslie’s great object in life. Hardly was one
obstacle to the ill-omened marriage removed by my father’s death before
another succeeded it in the shape of anxieties and difficulties caused
by the delicate state of Ada’s health. Doctors were consulted in all
directions, and the result of their advice was that the marriage must
be deferred, and that Miss Elmslie must leave England for a certain
time, to reside in a warmer climate—the south of France, if I remember
rightly. Thus it happened that just before Alfred came of age Ada and
her mother departed for the Continent, and the union of the two young
people was understood to be indefinitely postponed. Some curiosity was
felt in the neighborhood as to what Alfred Monkton would do under these
circumstances. Would he follow his lady-love? would he go yachting?
would he throw open the doors of the old Abbey at last, and endeavor to
forget the absence of Ada and the postponement of his marriage in a
round of gayeties? He did none of these things. He simply remained at
Wincot, living as suspiciously strange and solitary a life as his
father had lived before him. Literally, there was now no companion for
him at the Abbey but the old priest—the Monktons, I should have
mentioned before, were Roman Catholics—who had held the office of tutor
to Alfred from his earliest years. He came of age, and there was not
even so much as a private dinner-party at Wincot to celebrate the
event. Families in the neighborhood determined to forget the offense
which his father’s reserve had given them, and invited him to their
houses. The invitations were politely declined. Civil visitors called
resolutely at the Abbey, and were as resolutely bowed away from the
doors as soon as they had left their cards. Under this combination of
sinister and aggravating circumstances people in all directions took to
shaking their heads mysteriously when the name of Mr. Alfred Monkton
was mentioned, hinting at the family calamity, and wondering peevishly
or sadly, as their tempers inclined them, what he could possibly do to
occupy himself month after month in the lonely old house.
The right answer to this question was not easy to find. It was quite
useless, for example, to apply to the priest for it. He was a very
quiet, polite old gentleman; his replies were always excessively ready
and civil, and appeared at the time to convey an immense quantity of
information; but when they came to be reflected on, it was universally
observed that nothing tangible could ever be got out of them. The
housekeeper, a weird old woman, with a very abrupt and repelling
manner, was too fierce and taciturn to be safely approached. The few
indoor servants had all been long enough in the family to have learned
to hold their tongues in public as a regular habit. It was only from
the farm-servants who supplied the table at the Abbey that any
information could be obtained, and vague enough it was when they came
to communicate it.
Some of them had observed the “young master” walking about the library
with heaps of dusty papers in his hands. Others had heard odd noises in
the uninhabited parts of the Abbey, had looked up, and had seen him
forcing open the old windows, as if to let light and air into the rooms
supposed to have been shut close for years and years, or had discovered
him standing on the perilous summit of one of the crumbling turrets,
never ascended before within their memories, and popularly considered
to be inhabited by the ghosts of the monks who had once possessed the
building. The result of these observations and discoveries, when they
were communicated to others, was of course to impress every one with a
firm belief that “poor young Monkton was going the way that the rest of
the family had gone before him,” which opinion always appeared to be
immensely strengthened in the popular mind by a conviction—founded on
no particle of evidence—that the priest was at the bottom of all the
mischief.
Thus far I have spoken from hearsay evidence mostly. What I have next
to tell will be the result of my own personal experience.