_THE PICTURE OF A WOLF_
I went down that evening to the sitting-room which had been assigned to
Milly and me, in search of a book--my good Mary Quince always attending me.
The door was a little open, and I was startled by the light of a candle
proceeding from the fireside, together with a considerable aroma of tobacco
and brandy.
On my little work-table, which he had drawn beside the hearth, lay Dudley's
pipe, his brandy-flask, and an empty tumbler; and he was sitting with one
foot on the fender, his elbow on his knee, and his head resting in his
hand, weeping. His back being a little toward the door, he did not perceive
us; and we saw him rub his knuckles in his eyes, and heard the sounds of
his selfish lamentation.
Mary and I stole away quietly, leaving him in possession, wondering when
he was to leave the house, according to the sentence which I had heard
pronounced upon him.
I was delighted to see old 'Giblets' quietly strapping his luggage in the
hall, and heard from him in a whisper that he was to leave that evening by
rail--he did not know whither.
About half an hour afterwards, Mary Quince, going out to reconnoitre, heard
from old Wyat in the lobby that he had just started to meet the train.
Blessed be heaven for that deliverance! An evil spirit had been cast out,
and the house looked lighter and happier. It was not until I sat down in
the quiet of my room that the scenes and images of that agitating day began
to move before my memory in orderly procession, and for the first time
I appreciated, with a stunning sense of horror and a perfect rapture of
thanksgiving, the value of my escape and the immensity of the danger which
had threatened me. It may have been miserable weakness--I think it was. But
I was young, nervous, and afflicted with a troublesome sort of conscience,
which occasionally went mad, and insisted, in small things as well as
great, upon sacrifices which my reason now assures me were absurd. Of
Dudley I had a perfect horror; and yet had that system of solicitation,
that dreadful and direct appeal to my compassion, that placing of my feeble
girlhood in the seat of the arbiter of my aged uncle's hope or despair,
been long persisted in, my resistance might have been worn out--who can
tell?--and I self-sacrificed! Just as criminals in Germany are teased, and
watched, and cross-examined, year after year, incessantly, into a sort of
madness; and worn out with the suspense, the iteration, the self-restraint,
and insupportable fatigue, they at last cut all short, accuse themselves,
and go infinitely relieved to the scaffold--you may guess, then, for me,
nervous, self-diffident, and alone, how intense was the comfort of knowing
that Dudley was actually married, and the harrowing importunity which had
just commenced for ever silenced.
That night I saw my uncle. I pitied him, though I feared him. I was longing
to tell him how anxious I was to help him, if only he could point out the
way. It was in substance what I had already said, but now strongly urged.
He brightened; he sat up perpendicularly in his chair with a countenance,
not weak or fatuous now, but resolute and searching, and which contracted
into dark thought or calculation as I talked.
I dare say I spoke confusedly enough. I was always nervous in his presence;
there was, I fancy, something mesmeric in the odd sort of influence which,
without effort, he exercised over my imagination.
Sometimes this grew into a dismal panic, and Uncle Silas--polished,
mild--seemed unaccountably horrible to me. Then it was no longer an
accidental fascination of electro-biology. It was something more. His
nature was incomprehensible by me. He was without the nobleness, without
the freshness, without the softness, without the frivolities of such human
nature as I had experienced, either within myself or in other persons. I
instinctively felt that appeals to sympathies or feelings could no
more affect him than a marble monument. He seemed to accommodate his
conversation to the moral structure of others, just as spirits are said to
assume the shape of mortals. There were the sensualities of the gourmet for
his body, and there ended his human nature, as it seemed to me. Through
that semi-transparent structure I thought I could now and then discern the
light or the glare of his inner life. But I understood it not.
He never scoffed at what was good or noble--his hardest critic could not
nail him to one such sentence; and yet, it seemed somehow to me that his
unknown nature was a systematic blasphemy against it all. If fiend he was,
he was yet something higher than the garrulous, and withal feeble, demon of
Goethe. He assumed the limbs and features of our mortal nature. He shrouded
his own, and was a profoundly reticent Mephistopheles. Gentle he had been
to me--kindly he had nearly always spoken; but it seemed like the mild talk
of one of those goblins of the desert, whom Asiatic superstition tells of,
who appear in friendly shapes to stragglers from the caravan, beckon to
them from afar, call them by their names, and lead them where they are
found no more. Was, then, all his kindness but a phosphoric radiance
covering something colder and more awful than the grave?
'It is very noble of you, Maud--it is angelic; your sympathy with a ruined
and despairing old man. But I fear you will recoil. I tell you frankly that
less than twenty thousand pounds will not extricate me from the quag of
ruin in which I am entangled--lost!'
'Recoil! Far from it. I'll do it. There must be some way.'
'Enough, my fair young protectress--celestial enthusiast, enough. Though
you do not, yet I recoil. I could not bring myself to accept this
sacrifice. What signifies, even to me, my extrication? I lie a mangled
wretch, with fifty mortal wounds on my crown; what avails the healing of
one wound, when there are so many beyond all cure? Better to let me perish
where I fall; and reserve your money for the worthier objects whom,
perhaps, hereafter may avail to save.'
'But I _will_ do this. I must. I cannot see you suffer with the power in my
hands unemployed to help you,' I exclaimed.
'Enough, dear Maud; the will is here--enough: there is balm in your
compassion and good-will. Leave me, ministering angel; for the present I
cannot. If you _will_, we can talk of it again. Good-night.'
And so we parted.
The attorney from Feltram, I afterwards heard, was with him nearly all that
night, trying in vain to devise by their joint ingenuity any means by which
I might tie myself up. But there were none. I could not bind myself.
I was myself full of the hope of helping him. What was this sum to me,
great as it seemed? Truly nothing. I could have spared it, and never felt
the loss.
I took up a large quarto with coloured prints, one of the few books I had
brought with me from dear old Knowl. Too much excited to hope for sleep in
bed, I opened it, and turned over the leaves, my mind still full of Uncle
Silas and the sum I hoped to help him with.
Unaccountably one of those coloured engravings arrested my attention.
It represented the solemn solitude of a lofty forest; a girl, in Swiss
costume, was flying in terror, and as she fled flinging a piece of meat
behind her which she had taken from a little market-basket hanging upon her
arm. Through the glade a pack of wolves were pursuing her.
The narrative told, that on her return homeward with her marketing, she had
been chased by wolves, and barely escaped by flying at her utmost speed,
from time to time retarding, as she did so, the pursuit, by throwing, piece
by piece, the contents of her basket, in her wake, to be devoured and
fought for by the famished beasts of prey.
This print had seized my imagination. I looked with a curious interest on
the print: something in the disposition of the trees, their great height,
and rude boughs, interlacing, and the awful shadow beneath, reminded me of
a portion of the Windmill Wood where Milly and I had often rambled. Then I
looked at the figure of the poor girl, flying for her life, and glancing
terrified over her shoulder. Then I gazed on the gaping, murderous pack,
and the hoary brute that led the van; and then I leaned back in my chair,
and I thought--perhaps some latent association suggested what seemed a
thing so unlikely--of a fine print in my portfolio from Vandyke's noble
picture of Belisarius. Idly I traced with my pencil, as I leaned back, on
an envelope that lay upon the table, this little inscription. It was mere
fiddling; and, absurd as it looked, there was nothing but an honest meaning
in it:--'20,000_l_. Date Obolum Belisario!' My dear father had translated
the little Latin inscription for me, and I had written it down as a sort
of exercise of memory; and also, perhaps, as expressive of that sort of
compassion which my uncle's fall and miserable fate excited invariably in
me. So I threw this queer little memorandum upon the open leaf of the book,
and again the flight, the pursuit, and the bait to stay it, engaged my eye.
And I heard a voice near the hearthstone, as I thought, say, in a stern
whisper, 'Fly the fangs of Belisarius!'
'What's that?' said I, turning sharply to Mary Quince.
Mary rose from her work at the fireside, staring at me with that odd sort
of frown that accompanies fear and curiosity.
'You spoke? Did you speak?' I said, catching her by the arm, very much
frightened myself.
'No, Miss; no, dear!' answered she, plainly thinking that I was a little
wrong in my head.
There could be no doubt it was a trick of the imagination, and yet to this
hour I could recognise that clear stern voice among a thousand, were it to
speak again.
Jaded after a night of broken sleep and much agitation, I was summoned next
morning to my uncle's room.
He received me _oddly_, I thought. His manner had changed, and made an
uncomfortable impression upon me. He was gentle, kind, smiling, submissive,
as usual; but it seemed to me that he experienced henceforth toward me the
same half-superstitous repulsion which I had always felt from him. Dream,
or voice, or vision--which had done it? There seemed to be an unconscious
antipathy and fear. When he thought I was not looking, his eyes were
sometimes grimly fixed for a moment upon me. When I looked at him, his eyes
were upon the book before him; and when he spoke, a person not heeding what
he uttered would have fancied that he was reading aloud from it.
There was nothing tangible but this shrinking from the encounter of our
eyes. I said he was kind as usual. He was even more so. But there was this
new sign of our silently repellant natures. Dislike it could not be. He
knew I longed to serve him. Was it shame? Was there not a shade of horror
in it?
'I have not slept,' said he. 'For me the night has passed in thought, and
the fruit of it is this--I _cannot_, Maud, accept your noble offer.'
'I am _very_ sorry,' exclaimed I, in all honesty.
'I know it, my dear niece, and appreciate your goodness; but there are
many reasons--none of them, I trust, ignoble--and which together render
it impossible. No. It would be misunderstood--my honour shall not be
impugned.'
'But, sir, that could not be; you have never proposed it. It would be all,
from first to last, _my_ doing.'
'True, dear Maud, but I know, alas! more of this evil and slanderous world
than your happy inexperience can do. Who will receive our testimony?
None--no, not one. The difficulty--the insuperable moral difficulty is
this--that I should expose myself to the plausible imputation of having
worked upon you, unduly, for this end; and more, that I could not hold
myself quite free from blame. It is your voluntary goodness, Maud. But you
are young, inexperienced; and it is, I hold it, my duty to stand between
you and any dealing with your property at so unripe an age. Some people may
call this Quixotic. In my mind it is an imperious mandate of conscience;
and I peremptorily refuse to disobey it, although within three weeks an
execution will be in this house!'
I did not quite know what an execution meant; but from two harrowing
novels, with whose distresses I was familiar, I knew that it indicated some
direful process of legal torture and spoliation.
'Oh, uncle I--oh, sir!--you cannot allow this to happen. What will people
say of me? And--and there is poor Milly--and _everything_! Think what it
will be.'
'It cannot be helped--_you_ cannot help it, Maud. Listen to me. There will
be an execution here, I cannot say exactly how soon, but, I think, in a
little more than a fortnight. I must provide for your comfort. You must
leave. I have arranged that you shall join Milly, for the present, in
France, till I have time to look about me. You had better, I think, write
to your cousin, Lady Knollys. She, with all her oddities, has a heart. Can
you say, Maud, that I have been kind?'
'You have never been anything but kind,' I exclaimed.
'That I've been self-denying when you made me a generous offer?' he
continued. 'That I now act to spare you pain? You may tell her, not as a
message from me, but as a fact, that I am seriously thinking of vacating my
guardianship--that I feel I have done her an injustice, and that, so
soon as my mind is a little less tortured, I shall endeavour to effect a
reconciliation with her, and would wish ultimately to transfer the care
of your person and education to _her_. You may say I have no longer an
interest even in vindicating my name. My son has wrecked himself by a
marriage. I forgot to tell you he stopped at Feltram, and this morning
wrote to pray a parting interview. If I grant it, it shall be the last. I
shall never see him or correspond with him more.'
The old man seemed much overcome, and held his hankerchief to his eyes.
'He and his wife are, I understand, about to emigrate; the sooner the
better,' he resumed, bitterly. 'Deeply, Maud, I regret having tolerated his
suit to you, even for a moment. Had I thought it over, as I did the whole
case last night, nothing could have induced me to permit it. But I have
lived for so long like a monk in his cell, my wants and observation limited
to the narrow compass of this chamber, that my knowledge of the world has
died out with my youth and my hopes: and I did not, as I ought to have
done, consider many objections. Therefore, dear Maud, on this one subject,
I entreat, be silent; its discussion can effect nothing now. I was wrong,
and frankly ask you to forget my mistake.'
I had been on the point of writing to Lady Knollys on this odious subject,
when, happily, it was set at rest by the disclosure of yesterday; and being
so, I could have no difficulty in acceding to my uncle's request. He was
conceding so much that I could not withhold so trifling a concession in
return.
'I hope Monica will continue to be kind to poor Milly after I am gone.'
Here there were a few seconds of meditation.
'Maud, you will not, I think, refuse to convey the substance of what I
have just said in a letter to Lady Knollys, and perhaps you would have
no objection to let me see it when it is written. It will prevent the
possibility of its containing any misconception of what I have just spoken:
and, Maud, you won't forget to say whether I have been kind. It would be
a satisfaction to me to know that Monica was assured that I never either
teased or bullied my young ward.'
With these words he dismissed me; and forthwith I completed such a letter
as would quite embody what he had said; and in my own glowing terms,
being in high good-humour with Uncle Silas, recorded my estimate of his
gentleness and good-nature; and when I submitted it to him, he expressed
his admiration of what he was pleased to call my cleverness in so exactly
conveying what he wished, and his gratitude for the handsome terms in which
I had spoken of my old guardian.