nothing; then he turned to his master and said, "I can see nothing; some
one more near to this gentleman must look; this other gentleman," he
said suddenly, and turning to John Inglesant, "if he looks will be able
to see."
The astrologer started. "Ah!" he said, "why do you say that, boy?"
"I can tell who will see aught in the crystal, and who will not,"
replied the boy; "this gentleman will see."
The astrologer seemed surprised and sceptical, but he made a sign to
Inglesant to rise from his knees, and to take his place by the crystal.
He did so, and looked steadily into it for some seconds, then he shook
his head.
"I can see nothing," he said.
"Nothing!" said the boy; "can you see nothing?"
"No. I see clouds and mist."
"You have been engaged," said the boy, "in something that was not
good--something that was not true; and it has dimmed the crystal sight.
Look steadily, and if it is as I think, that your motive was not false,
you will see more."
Inglesant looked again; and in a moment or two gave a start,
saying,--"The mist is breaking! I see;--I see a large room, with a
chimney of carved stone, and a high window at the end; in the window and
on the carved stone is the same coat many times repeated--three running
greyhounds proper, on a field vert."
"I know the room," said Eustace; "it is the inn parlour at Mintern, not
six miles from Oulton. It was the manor of the Vinings before the wars,
but is now an inn; that was their coat."
"Do you see aught else?" said the adept.
Inglesant gave a long look; then he stepped back, and gazed at the
astrologer, and from him to his brother, with a faltering and ashy look.
"I see a man's figure lie before the hearth, and the hearthstone is
stained, as if with blood. Eustace, it is either you or I!"
"Look again," said the adept eagerly, "look again!"
"I will look no more!" said Inglesant, fiercely; "this is the work of a
fiend, to lure men to madness or despair!"
As he spoke, a blast of wind--sudden and strong--swept through the room;
the lamp burnt dim; and the fire in the brazier went out. A deathly
coldness filled the apartment, and the floor and the walls seemed to
heave and shake. A loud whisper, or muffled cry, seemed to fill the
air; and a terrible awe struck at the hearts of the young men. Seizing
the rod from the table, the adept assumed a commanding attitude, and
waved it to and fro in the air; gradually the wind ceased, the dread
coldness abated, and the fire burned again of its own accord. The adept
gazed at Inglesant with a stern and set look.
"You are of a strange spirit, young sir," he said; "pure in heart enough
to see things which many holy men have desired in vain to see; and yet
so wild and rebellious as to anger the blessed spirits with your
self-will and perverse thoughts. You will suffer fatal loss, both here
and hereafter, if you learn not to give up your own will, and your own
fancies, before the heavenly will and call."
Inglesant stared at the man in silence. His words seemed to him to mean
far more than perhaps he himself knew. They seemed to come into his
mind, softened with anxiety for his brother, and shaken by these
terrible events, with the light of a revelation. Surely this was the
true secret of his wasted life, however strange might be the place and
action which revealed it to him. Whatever he might think afterwards of
this night, it might easily stand to him as an allegory of his own
spirit, set down before him in a figure. Doubtless he was perverse and
headstrong under the pressure of the Divine Hand; doubtless he had
followed his own notions rather than the voice of the inward monitor he
professed to hear: henceforth, surely, he would give himself up more
entirely to the heavenly voice.
Eustace appeared to have seen enough of the future, and to be anxious to
go. He left a purse of gold upon the wizard's table; and hurried his
brother to take his leave.
Outside the air was perfectly still; a thick motionless fog hung over
the marsh and the river; not a breath of wind stirred.
"That was a strange wind that swept by as you refused to look," said
Eustace to his brother; "do you really think the spirits were near, and
were incensed?"
Inglesant did not reply; he was thinking of another spirit than that the
wizard had evoked.
They made their way through the fog to Lambeth, and took boat again to
the Temple stairs.
*CHAPTER XVI.*
The next morning, when the brothers awoke and spoke to each other of the
events of the night, Eustace did not seem to have been much impressed by
them; he ridiculed the astrologer, and made light of the visions in the
crystal; he, however, acknowledged to his brother that it might be
better to avoid the inn parlour at Mintern, and said they might reach
Oulton by another route.
"There is a road," he said, "after you leave Cern Abbas, which turns off
five or six miles before you come to Mintern; it is not much farther,
but it is not so good a road, and not much frequented. It will be quite
good enough for us, however, and will not delay us above an hour. But I
own I feel ashamed of taking it."
John Inglesant, however, encouraged him to do so; and towards middle day
they left London on the Windsor Road. Inglesant noticed, as they
started, that his brother's favourite servant was absent, and asked his
brother where he was. He replied that he had sent him forward early in
the morning to inform his wife of their coming.
"I would not have let them know of your intention," said Johnny.
Eustace shrugged his shoulders with a peculiar gesture, saying in
French,--
"It is not convenient for me to come into my family unannounced. I do
not know what I might find going forward."
Johnny thought that his brother had bought his fortune rather dear; but
he said nothing more upon the subject.
They slept that night at Windsor, and hoped to have reached Andover the
next day; but their servants' horses, and those with the mails, were not
equal to so long a distance, and they slept at Basingstoke, not being
able to get farther. The weather was pleasant for the season and, to
Inglesant especially--so long confined within stone walls--the journey
was very agreeable. It reminded him of his ride up to London with the
Jesuit long ago when a boy, when everything was new and delightful to
him, and the future open and promising. The way had then been enlivened
and every interest doubled by the conversation of his friend, who had
known how to extract interest and amusement from the most trivial
incidents; but it was not less made pleasant now by the society of his
brother. A great change seemed to be coming over Eustace. He was
affectionate and serious. He spoke much of past years, of their
grandfather, and of the old life at Westacre; of his early Court life,
before Johnny came to London, and of the day when he came down to
Westacre with his father and the Jesuit, and saw his brother again. He
asked Johnny much about his own life, and listened attentively to all
Inglesant thought proper to tell him of his religious inquiries. He
asked about the Ferrars, and told Inglesant some of the things that had
been said at Court about him and them. A sense of danger--even though
it made little impression upon him--seemed to have called forth kindly
feelings which had been latent before; or perhaps some foreboding sense
hung over him, and--by a gracious Providence--fitted and tuned his mind
for an approaching fate. Inglesant felt his heart drawn towards him with
an intensity which he had never felt before. The whole world seemed for
the time to be centred in this brother; and he looked forward to life
associated with him.
They slept at Andover; and the next day made a shorter journey to
Salisbury, where they slept again. The stately cathedral was closed and
melancholy-looking, and knowing no one in the town, they passed the long
evening alone in the inn. The next morning early they set out. They
halted at Cern Abbas about one o'clock, and dined. Eustace made some
inquiries about the road he had mentioned to his brother, but seemed
more and more unwilling to take it, and it required all Inglesant's
persuasion to keep him to his promise. The people at the inn seemed
surprised that anyone should think of taking it, and made out that the
delay would be very great, and the chance of missing the way altogether
not a little. At this, however, Eustace laughed, saying that he knew
the country very well. Indeed, his desire to show the truth of this
assertion rather assisted his brother's purpose, and they left Cern
Abbas with the full intention of taking the unusual route. The country
was thickly wooded, many parts of the ancient forest remaining, and here
and there rather hilly. In descending one of these hills John
Inglesant's horse cast a shoe, just as they reached the point where the
two roads diverged, the right hand one of which they were to take. As
it was impossible for them to proceed with the horse as it was, Johnny
proposed sending it back with one of the servants to Cern Abbas, and
taking the man's horse instead, who could easily follow them. As they
were about to put in practice this scheme, however, one of the men said
there was a forge about a mile beyond, on the road before them, where it
would be easy to get the shoe put on. Eustace immediately approved of
this plan, and Johnny was obliged at last reluctantly to yield. It
seemed to him as though the impending fate came nearer and nearer at
every step. The man proved himself to be an uncertain guide as to
distance, and it was fully two miles before they reached the forge.
When they reached it they found that a gentleman's coach, large and
unwieldy, had broken some portion of its complicated machinery, and was
taxing all the efforts of the smith and his assistants to repair it.
The gentlemen dismounted and accosted the two ladies who had alighted
from the coach, and whom Eustace remembered to have met before at
Dorchester. The coach was soon mended, and the ladies drove off; but by
this time Eustace had grown impatient, and, saying carelessly to his
brother, "You will follow immediately," he mounted, and turned his
horse's head still along the main road, his men mounting also.
"You are not going on that way," said Johnny; "you said we should turn
back to the other road."
"Oh, we cannot turn back now," said his brother; "we have come farther
than I expected. We will not stop at Mintern," he added significantly.
And so saying, he rode away after the carriage, followed by his men.
Inglesant looked after him anxiously, a heavy foreboding filling his
mind. He saw his brother mount the little hill before the forge,
between the bare branches of the trees on either side of the road; then
a slight turn of the way concealed him, but, for a moment or two more,
he could see glimpses of the figures as the leafless boughs permitted,
then, when he could see even these no longer, he went back into the
forge. It was some ten minutes before the horse was ready, and then
Inglesant himself mounted, and rode off quickly after his brother. He
had felt all the day, and during the one preceding it, a weariness and
dulness of sense, the result, no doubt, of fatigue acting upon his only
partially recovered health, and on a frame shattered by what he had gone
through. As he rode on, his brain became more and more confused, so
that for some moments together he was almost unconscious, and only by an
effort regained his sense of passing events. The woods seemed to pass
by him as in a dream, the thick winter air to hang about him like the
heavy drapery of a pall; whether he was sleeping or waking he could
scarcely tell. What added to his distress was an abiding sense of
crisis and danger to his brother, which required him at that moment,
above all others, to exert a strength and a prescience of which he felt
himself becoming more and more incapable. He was continually making
violent efforts to retain his recollection of what was passing, and of
what it behoved him to do,--efforts which each time became more and more
painful, and of the futility of which he became more and more
despairingly conscious. Words cannot describe the torture of such a
condition as this.
At last he overtook some of his brother's servants with the led horses,
whom he scarcely recognized, so far were his senses obscured. Their
master had ridden on before with two servants, they told him; he would
have to ride hard to overtake them. He seemed eager, they said, to be
at home. Inglesant could scarcely sit his horse, much less expect to
overtake his brother--who was well mounted and an impetuous
rider--nevertheless he gave his horse the spur, and the animal, also a
good roadster, soon left the servants far behind. The confusion of mind
which he suffered increased more and more as he rode along, and the
events of his past life came up before his eyes as clearly and palpably
as the objects through which he was riding, so that he could not
distinguish the real from the imaginary, the present from the past,
which added extremely to his distress. He stood again amid the
confusion and carnage of Naseby field; once more he saw the throng of
heads, and heard that terrible cry that had welcomed him to the
scaffold; again he looked into the fatal crystal, and strange visions
and ghostly shapes of death and corruption came out from it, and walked
to and fro along the hedgerows and across the road before him, making
terrible the familiar English fields; a tolling of the passing bell rang
continually in his ear, and his horse's footfalls sounded strange and
funereal to his diseased sense. He knew nothing of the road, nor of
what happened as he rode along, nor what people he passed; but he missed
the direct turning, and reached Mintern at last by another lane which
led him some distance round. The servants with the led horses were
there before him, standing before the inn door, and other strange
servants in his brother's liveries, and several horses stood about.
The old manor that was now an inn stood close to the Church, at the
opening of the village, with a little green before it and a wall, in the
centre of which was a pair of gates flanked with pillars. The iron
gates were closed, but the wall had been thrown down for some yards on
either side, thus giving ample access to the house within. It was a
handsome house with a large high window over the porch, in the upper
panes of which Inglesant could see coats of arms. Amid the tracery of
the iron gates running greyhounds were interlaced.
John Inglesant saw all this as in a dream, and he saw besides creatures
that were not real walking among the living men; haggard figures in long
robes, and others beneath the grave shrouds, ghostly phantoms of his
disordered brain. He made a desperate effort for the hundredth time to
clear his sense of these terrible distracting sights, of this death of
the brain that disabled all his faculties, and for the hundredth time in
vain. It appeared to him--whether it was a vision or a reality, he did
not know--that one of his brother's servants came to his horse's side,
and told him something of a gentleman of his lady's, a foreign
physician, having met his master purposely, and that they were within
together. Inglesant dismounted mechanically and entered the hotel,
telling the servant to come with him. He had some dim feeling of
dragging his brother away from a great danger, and a desire of gathering
about him, if he could but distinguish them, such as would assist him
and were of human flesh and blood. Inside the porch, and in the narrow
hall beyond, the place swarmed with these distracting visions walking to
and fro; the staircase at the farther end was crowded with them going up
and down. He saw, as he thought, his brother, attended by a dark,
handsome man, in the gown of a physician, come down the stairs to meet
him, but when they came nearer they dissolved themselves and vanished
into air.
The host came to meet him, saying that his brother and the foreign
gentleman were upstairs in the parlour; he had thought they were having
some words a while ago, but they were quiet now. The whole house,
Inglesant thought, was deadly quiet, though seemingly to him so full of
life. To what terrible deed were all these strange witnesses and
assistants summoned? He told the host to follow him, as he had told the
man before; and he did so, supposing he meant to order something. They
went up the two flights of the oak stairs, and entered the room over the
hall and porch. It was a large and narrow room, and was seemingly
empty. Opposite them, in the high window, and on the great carved
chimney to the right, running greyhounds coursed each other, as it
seemed to Inglesant, round the room. A long table hid the hearth as
they came in. With a fatal certainty, as if mechanically, Inglesant
walked round it towards the fire, the others with him; there they
stopped--sudden and still. On the white hearthstone--his hair and
clothes steeped in blood--lay Eustace Inglesant, the Italian's stiletto
in his heart.
*CHAPTER XVII.*
The sight of his brother's corpse seemed to steady Inglesant's nerves,
and clear his brain. He turned to the host, and said, "What way can the
murderer have escaped?"
The host shook his head; he was incapable of speech, or even thought.
The three men stood looking at each other without a word. Then
Inglesant knelt down by the body, and raised the head; there was no
doubt that life was extinct--indeed, the body must have been nearly
drained of blood; the fine line of steel had done its work fully, and
with no loss of time. Inglesant rose from the ground; his sight, his
recollection, his senses were speedily failing him; nothing kept him
conscious but the terrible shock acting with galvanic effect upon his
frame. The back of the premises was searched, and mounted messengers
were sent to the neighbouring towns and to the cross roads, and notice
sent to the nearest Justice of the Peace. The country rose in great
numbers, and came pouring in to Mintern before the early evening set in.
The body was deposited on the long table in the parlour where the deed
was committed; and more than one Justice examined the room that
afternoon. Inglesant saw that the guard was set, and proper care taken;
and then he mounted to ride to Oulton. He was not fit to ride; but to
stay in the house all night was impossible--to lie down equally so. In
the night air he rode to Oulton, through the long wild chase, by the
pools of water--from which the flocks of birds rose startled as he
passed, and by the herds of deer. The ride settled his nerves, and when
he reached the house he was still master of himself. The news had
preceded him; Lady Cardiff was said to be in a paroxysm of grief; but,
as no one had seen her for days except her immediate servants, Inglesant
did not attempt to obtain an interview with her. He was received by Dr.
More and the superior servants, and sat down to supper. Not a word was
spoken during that sombre meal except by the doctor, who pressed
Inglesant to eat and drink, and offered to introduce him to Van Helmont,
who was not present. The doctor said grace after supper; but when he
had done, one of the female servants, a Quakeress, stood up, and spoke
some words recommending patience and a feeling after God, if perchance
He might be found to be present, and a help in such a terrible need.
The singularity of this proceeding roused Inglesant from the lethargy in
which he was, and the words seemed to strike upon his heart with a
familiar and not uncongenial sense. The mystical doctrine which he had
studied was not unlike much that he would hear from Quaker lips. He
went to his room after supper, intending to rise early next morning; but
before daybreak he was delirious and in a high fever, and Van Helmont
was sent for to his room, and bled him freely, and administered cordials
and narcotic draughts. The skilful treatment caused him to sleep
quietly for many hours; and when he awoke, though prostrate with
weakness, he was free from fever, and his brain was calm and clear.
From inquiries which he made, it appeared that the Italian had been
making preparations for leaving for several days, probably doubting the
success of his attempt to win over Eustace to tolerate his continued
stay at Oulton. Inglesant was told that it was supposed that he had not
intended to murder his brother; but that Eustace had probably threatened
him, and that in the heat of contention the blow was struck. The
Italian had destroyed all his papers, and everything that could give any
clue to his conduct or history; but he had left a very bad reputation
behind him, independently of his last murderous act; and his influence
with Lady Cardiff was attributed to witchcraft.
The funeral of Eustace Inglesant took place a few days after, at the
Church on the borders of the chase. Snow had fallen in the meanwhile;
and the train of black mourners passed over the waste of white that
covered the park. A multitude of people filled the churchyard, and
crowded round the outside of the hall. Lady Cardiff, by lavish
almsgiving and other vagaries, had always attracted a number of vagrant
and masterless people to Oulton; and there were always some encampments
of such people in the chase. She particularly favoured mountebanks and
quacks of all kinds, and numbers of them were present at the funeral.
Some few of the country gentry attended; but Eustace being almost
unknown in the county, and his wife by no means popular, many who
otherwise would have been present were not so. The Puritan authorities
of the neighbourhood suspected Lady Cardiff's establishment as a haunt
of recusants. Dr. More was a known Royalist; Eustace had been only
restrained from active exertion on the same side by his love of pleasure
and his wife's prudence; and the Puritans regarded the Quakers with no
favour. The herd of idle and vicious people, as the authorities
considered them, who frequented Oulton, was an abomination in their
eyes; and understanding that a number of them would be at the funeral,
two or three Puritan magistrates, with armed servants and constables,
assembled to keep order, as they said; but, as it proved, to provoke a
riot. To make matters worse, Dr. More began to read the Prayer Book
service, which was forbidden by law. The Justices interposed; the mob
of mountebanks, and players, and idle people sided with the Church
party, which had always given them a friendly toleration, and commenced
an assault upon the constables and Justices' servants, driving them from
the grave side with a storm of snowballs. The funeral was completed
with great haste, and the mourning party returned to the house, whither
the mob also resorted, and were regaled with provisions of all kinds
during the afternoon, being with difficulty induced to disperse at
night.
Inglesant took no part in this riot, being indeed still too weak and ill
to exert himself at all. He expected to be arrested and sent back to
London; but the authorities did not take much notice of the riot,
contenting themselves with dispersing the people, and seeing that most
of them left the neighbourhood, which they were induced to do by being
set in the village stocks, and otherwise imprisoned and intimidated.