Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu

by J. Sheridan le Fanu

  Thus saying, Garvey placed some gold in the fellow’s hand, and stealing out lightly, for fear of awaking the slumbering landlady, he gladly found himself once more in the protection of the public street.

  Meanwhile, in the countess’s bower, Jeremiah Tisdal was left wholly alone. There was that in the subject of his recent conversation, and above all in its result, so horrific, that spite of all his stoicism, he trembled in every joint, while he remembered it. With the scowl of fear-stricken villainy, he sate looking down movelessly upon the floor: when he did move, at last, his first impulse, strangely, was to stride to the outer door, close it, and draw the bolt. He next shut that which communicated with the closet, of which we have so often spoken, and secured it with one of the massive chairs, sloped prop-wise against it, making these arrangements with a breathless flurry and a jealousy, which would have argued the immediate apprehension of assault or arrest.

  No longer restraining his agony, he smote his clenched hand upon his breast and his head, and groaned as if his very heart were bursting, while he walked distractedly from wall to wall of the ruinous old chamber. Jeremiah Tisdal was not a hypocrite: we have failed to represent him justly, if the reader has so esteemed him. He was one who would have given any thing he possessed on earth, save his life, to be assured that heaven was reconciled with him — anything but his life, for he had learned to fear to die. Through years of profligacy and crime, the principles instilled in his childhood had followed him, ever returning to his memory, and whispering terrors unspeakable to his conscience.

  Remorse had for years been the passion of his life the old nature of the man was indeed still there, but all subdued by the ghastly presence of a secret terror — moroseness and avarice, perhaps, because so entirely unlike the sins of his guilty youth, he had suffered unconsciously to creep into his heart; but living in constant remembrance of his evil deeds, and in ceaseless terror of the judgment to come, he did, with all the zeal of abject fear, seek in his own dark and fanatical way to propitiate heaven, and to earn safety from the doom, whose dread never ceased to haunt him night and day; the fear of death, except when overwhelmed in the instinctive excitement of actual conflict, had become with him a positive disease. He dared not die — and hence the dreadful power of the threat which that night had tom him from his hopes — the hopes to which he clung frantically, as the murderer of old might to the horns of the altar, and dragged him from the very sanctuary back again into all the terrors of retributive destruction: it was sin inexorably demanding back his bondman.

  The remorseless claim he felt as though it had been thundered in his ears. To defer the evil day, he paid the price of his respite — betrayed his benefactor — bore false witness against the life of his friend. Oh, madness! that the work of years should be in one brief hour undone, and he once more the murderous slave of Satan. In his frenzy, he cast himself on his knees — threw himself wallowing on the floor, and called in his agony upon the Almighty, for pardon, at one time, and at another for destruction, in frantic incoherence.

  At last, by a violent effort, he resolved to review, as closely as his memory would serve him, the whole substance and material of the statement to which he had that night subscribed his oath, with a desire of ascertaining the amount of mischief to Sir Hugh, involved in the perjury into which he had been coerced. This review, however, more than ever persuaded him that he had nothing to hope for — that he had ruined his friend.

  Cold as stone, and shivering violently, as a man in an ague fit, Tis dal stood for nigh half an hour, by the fireplace — his damp hand clutched upon the mantelpiece. The agony of his mind was now increased by nearer terrors — the fear that he was ill, and, perhaps, about to die. Upon the projecting ledge of the mantelpiece, there stood a flask of brandy, scarcely half emptied, the only surviving relic of-his ill-omened carousal. He swallowed nearly the whole of it at a draught, and threw himself into a chair by the fire. The overwhelming dram he had just taken speedily produced its effect; the floor rocked and heaved beneath him, like a labouring sea; the candles flickered and danced, and crossed and multiplied themselves; all was confusion and giddiness, until gradually darkness swallowed the chaos, and he lay snoring in heavy and helpless stupor.

  Strange to say, it was not dreamless: he had slept, he knew not how long, when he was visited by a wild and awful vision. He dreamed that it was night — just such a night as that on which Deveril had so unexpectedly greeted him in the Grange of Drumgunniol. He was, he thought, returning to his house; and as he passed, he looked through the Window into the glowing kitchen. His little niece, Phebe, was standing by the fire, and before her a man — gracious God! — with his throat cut from ear to ear; the girl’s murdered father, with rapid and awful gestures, telling his tale of mortal wrongs. In his fearful dream, Tisdal thought he strove to move from the window, but without the power to stir, until the dead man, seeming to have ended his horrible story, pointed slowly at him where he stood; and thereupon, in his dream, the girl turned round, and with a measured step, walked toward him, while her features, once so pretty and innocent, grew ghastly and demoniac, and she cried aloud, as she came on— “JUDGMENT!”

  With a start he wakened. He must have slept long; for the fire was now expiring, and one of the candles had burned out, and the other was flaring in the socket, and so faintly that its unequal flashes scarce reached the distant walls of the old chamber. Every thing was still, except for the soft fall of rain upon the windows. Such were the circumstances under which, on raising his eyes, he saw, as clearly as the uncertain and fluctuating light would allow, a mysterious and ill-defined form arrayed in some thin, fantastic festoonery of rags, which waved and fluttered strangely, moving backward and forward, toward the expiring candle and from it, in a sort of crazed and hovering dance — sometimes scarcely distinguishable from a flickering shadow upon the wall, and sometimes again, for the least imaginable point of time, just catching the light, and — merciful Heaven! showing, as it seemed, the terrific features of the dead — the face which had haunted him in his dream — wearing, at once, a look of terror, and malignity, and vengeance, in hideous incongruity with its fantastic movements. This fearful apparition, sometimes a shadow, and sometimes, for a second, a thing so distinctly terrific — and then, again, but a flaunting, flickering mist, seemed to flutter and hover in a strange sympathy with the expiring and uncertain light; and not the least horrible part of the infernal dance was, that it was all absolutely soundless. A sudden breath moved the dying flame — it trembled, flashed up, and expired, leaving Tisdal in utter darkness. For hours he sate, afraid to move — unable to pray, almost to breathe. The cold sweat burst from every pore — thrill after thrill of horror froze him — rigid and cold as stone he sate, unable to count the terrible hours, which, in their hideous monotony, seemed drawn out into whole years of unearthly agony. Gradually, however, the grey light of morning streamed into the dreary chamber, and Tisdal skulked, terror-stricken, from his seat. With a deep conviction that the dreadful apparition which had visited him in the night-time foreboded his own coming ruin, he hurriedly snatched his hat, and, not waiting to draw his mantle about him, unbolted the chamber door, and quitted an apartment, every object in which had now grown insupportably horrible. Dizzy and feverish from the unwonted excesses and frightful agitation of the previous night, he walked forth without interruption into the grey light and still breath of morning.

  Where is the stoic who can, unmoved, await the slow but steady approach of an inevitable danger — a danger stupendous, inexorable — which no exertion of his can frustrate, and no ingenuity escape? As the tired sailor, clinging to the torn shrouds of a wreck, watches the onward roll of the mountainous wave, that towers and blackens but the wilder, and vaster, the nearer it comes, so did old Sir Hugh, in the dreadful calmness of suspense, await the arrival of the day which was finally to determine his doom — to dispose of his fortune and his life. Days passed, and weeks; and at last the long-dreaded crisis was at hand. It was now the eve
of that morn on which Sir Hugh Willoughby was to be arraigned for high treason.

  The sun was just going down as Grace sate in mournful companionship with her father, in the dusky chamber of “the carbrie,” and in the fitful pauses of their melancholy conversation, full many a wandering thought carried her back again to the pleasant woods and winding river, and the grey towers of Glindarragh; and sometimes, with a transient interest, she wondered how her old companions, her fond nurse, and gentle little Phebe fared; and whether they knew of the fearful danger in which the knightly master of Glindarragh at that moment stood. But no tidings had reached them. In those suspicious and terrible times, when letters were liable to be intercepted, read, and severely construed by the government, it had been judged most prudent for Sir Hugh, in his perilous position, to attempt no correspondence with his absent friends. While thus her fond fancy carried her back in many a flitting thought, to her loved home, the same sunset was gilding its grev walls. Within the deep shadow of a low-arched casement, pushed open to receive the fragrant breath of evening, sits a pale invalid, a young man, negligently but elegantly dressed — it is Percy Neville; and see, outside, arrested in her return with her troop of merry milkmaids, close by the grey windowsill, stands the graceful, artless, beautiful girl we have seen before, Phebe Tisdal, half reluctant, half gratified, blushing in reproachful confusion, and smiling with all her soft innocent dimples; so true, and withal so touching a smile, that one knew not whether to smile again or to sigh as he looked on it. But here we must not linger; back again to “the Carbrie” our story calls us.

  Till midnight the old knight sate with his daughter, who read to him from time to time such passages as he desired from the Bible; and in the intervals they communed with what cheerfulness they might assume. Willing, however, that his child, whose pale looks filled him with new anxieties, should have some repose, of which she seemed to stand sorely in need, he bade her goodnight, with a mournful serenity, and commending her to God’s keeping, shut himself into his chamber.

  Heart-sick, fearful, and well nigh despairing, poor Grace, seated by the window of her apartment, counted the weary hours. The hum of conviviality and the noises of riot had now sunk into profound silence, and every sound of human bustle, business, and pleasure, was hushed. It was a dark, moonless night of heavy plashing rain. There were no street-lamps in those days, and the dense obscurity of all without deepened, with a sort of depressing sympathy, the gloom which reigned within her mind. As she sate thus sorrowfully, she heard the rumble of carriage wheels, and the clang of horses’ hoofs on the pavement, almost beneath the window where she sate. It stopped some little way up the street, at the same side; and almost at the same moment a lantern issued from one of the entrances, and moved irregularly, sometimes faster and sometimes slower, over the little interval which interposed between the line of the houses and the coach, in accordance with what might be the movements of some one engaged in engrossing conferencc with a companion. At last it stopped, and twice or thrice was darkened, as by the passing of persons between her and the light. Trifling as was all this, she became insensibly interested in what was passing — the more so, perhaps, on account of the utter loneliness of the hour, and the extreme darkness, as well as the tempestuous character of the night, which conspired to throw an air of mystery over these proceedings. It might be a hearse for a secret funeral, or a coach full of state conspirators; it might, in short, be anything dark, sinister, or guilty.

  Oh! night, sweet, sad herald of repose, of dewy shadows and soft serenades, and mystic glorious dreams, how many minstrels have sung from earliest ages, when the world was young, thy wondrous gentleness and celestial beauties! — how many lovers have sighed, and wished thy shadows endless! and yet, oh, night! in all the chastened glories of thy starry court, for how many dost thou rise a queen of terrors!

  She pushed the casement gently open; the buzz of men’s voices in suppressed tones reached her ear through the night air, followed by the sound of the opening of the coach door; then came a stifled scream, as if through the folds of many mufflings; then it rose loud and piercing, and once more stifled as before. This was accompanied by the sound of feet, as of men staggering and stumbling over the pavement under a struggling load. The sounds seemed to follow the lantern into the entrance whence it had at first issued. The door was shut, and in the darkness the vehicle rumbled off as it had come, leaving all once mere in profound obscurity and silence.

  Chilled with a feeling akin to horror, the young lady hastily closed the window, and drew further into the security of the chamber. Had she but known fully the story in which that scream was a single incident, wild work it would have wrought with her heart and brain that night. Even as it was, in the intervals of her own immediate anxieties and fears, as she lay awake through the tedious hours of darkness, the shriek which had startled her still rang in her ears, and made her heart beat fast.

  It was, as we have said, a dark and stormy night, and heavy drifts of rain, from time to time, rode upon the blast; muddy streams scoured the gutters, and the wet lay so deep in every rut and hollow of the pavement, that the foot passenger, as he plodded through the dusky streets, gave up in sulky despair the idle attempt to pick his steps, and recklessly plunged on through the pools and mire.

  Few pedestrians trod the streets; all who could avoid exposure to the ungenial weather, were snugly housed; every place of entertainment in the city was crowded, and the guests seemed resolved to make amends by the boisterous riot of their mirth for the restraints to which the storm and rain subjected them.

  Upon this dismal night, lights gleamed from the castle windows; one of those brilliant drawingrooms which assembled all that was gay, and brave, and beautiful in the Jacobite cause, within the stately chambers of the royal residence, was then proceeding; and through the long rows of gleaming windows, in the intervals of the howling gusts, were faintly heard, the softened harmonies of merry music.

  At the side of the quadrangle, most remote from those sights and crowds, wrapped closely in his mantle, and filled with ruminations by no means congenial with the spirit of revelry and mirth which reigned so near him, stood a tall, dark figure. He had twice walked to the dim lamp which overhung a doorway close by, to consult his watch, and twice returned with hasty strides to the shelter of the arched entrance, within whose shadow he had ensconced himself. At last, having satisfied himself that the appointed hour had arrived, this personage groped his way to the further end of the dark lobby, in which he stood, and knocked sharply at a door. It was opened by a servant who, on hearing Miles Garrett’s name, ushered that gentleman — for he was the expectant in the cloak — up stairs, and into an apartment, where he left him in utter solitude. A fire was nearly expiring in the hearth, and four w’ax candles, in massive silver candlesticks, illuminated the chamber. It was furnished in the richest fashion, and hung with gorgeous tapestry. A portrait of the then Duchess of Tyrconnel — taken in all the splendour of her early beauty, before her first marriage — graced the wall, in a massive frame. A table, on which stood a large writing-desk, jealously locked, and a silver tray, with coffee cup and ewer, in the confusion in which a hurried enjoyment of that refection had left them, gave further token of the recent occupation of the chamber. A couteau de chase, moreover, dangled by its belt from the back of the tall chair that stood close by it.

  Garrett removed his hat and cloak, and even went so far as to wipe his soiled boots in the skirt of the latter; he adjusted his wardrobe with the utmost care, and altogether exhibited a good deal of fidgetty uneasiness about the approaching interview, whatever its object might be. He listened for the sound of approaching steps — and hearing none, consulted his watch; and then again listened, with every manifestation of anxious and excited impatience, tempered, however, and in some sort subdued, by a certain awe and uneasiness, resulting from a consciousness alike of the uncertainty of his reception, and of the momentous importance of his success

  CHAPTER XXVIII.

  TY
RCONNEL.

  A CONSIDERABLE time elapsed, and found Garrett still alone, in the stately apartment in which our last chapter left him.

  “It’s two-and-forty minutes past the appointed hour,” he muttered, as he glanced at his watch; “I fear he has forgotten it, or, perhaps, the insolence which they say has grown upon him, prompts him to treat poor gentlemen, as I am, like link-boys, or lackeys — as fit only to wait his pleasure, and dance attendance upon his caprice. S’life but it’s growing bitter cold,” he added with a shudder, and, acquiring courage with the irritation of disappointment and discomfort, he ventured to rake the embers of the fire together, and to throw on a fragment or two of wood; how far this new accession of hardihood might have carried him, it were not easy to say; his next proceeding would have probably essayed the daring sacrilege, of seating himself at his ease, in one of the rich, luxurious chairs, which seemed made to receive a ducal, or a royal pressure only; he was, however, effectually startled, and recalled alike from this meditated enormity, and from his mutinous temper, by the opening of a door in the further end of the chamber, and the entrance of the Duke of Tyrconnel.

  Few forms could be more imposing; his stature was commanding, exceeding six feet in height, and, at the time of which we write, though not actually un wieldly through corpulence, as he afterwards became, he was full and large in a proportion which gave majestic effect to his towering figure; his complexion was a ruddy brown — his eyes of the darkest grey, and his features, though not prominent, eminently masculine and handsome, and over-clouded by a prodigious flowing periwig, of sombre brown. The expression of the countenance was grave, haughty, and even insolent — and there was a sternness in the compressed and down-drawn mouth, and a certain inflexibility and domineering pride in the whole character of the face, which, accompanied with the grand and massive proportions of his figure, and the gorgeous accessories of his splendid attire, rendered the coup d’œil absolutely overawing.