“I had no idea my venerable friend, Pelter, could have pursued a lady so cruelly; but rely upon me, I’ll protect you.”
“I think you had better cleanse your house of such persons; at all events, I insist they shan’t be allowed to make their horrible sport of me!” said Lady Alice, darting a fiery glance after the agreeable attorney.
* * *
CHAPTER XVII.
Old Donnie and Lady Jane.
“Can you tell me, child, anything about that horrible fat old Frenchman, who has begun to speak English since his return?” asked Lady Jane Lennox of Beatrix, whom she stopped, just touching her arm with the tip of her finger, as she was passing. Lady Jane was leaning back indolently, and watching the movements of M. Varbarriere with a disagreeable interest.
“That’s Monsieur Varbarriere,” answered Beatrix.
“Yes, I know that; but who is he — what is he? I wish he were gone,” replied she.
“I really know nothing of him,” replied Beatrix, with a smile.
“Yes, you do know something about him: for instance, you know he’s the uncle of that handsome young man who accompanied him.” This Lady Jane spoke with a point which caused on a sudden a beautiful scarlet to tinge the young girl’s cheeks.
Lady Jane looked at her, without a smile, without archness, with a lowering curiosity and something of pain, one might fancy, even of malignity.
Lady Jane hooked her finger in Beatrix’s bracelet, and lowering her eyes to the carpet, remained silent, it seemed to the girl undecided whether to speak or not on some doubtful subject. With a vague interest Beatrix watched her handsome but sombre countenance, till Lady Jane appearing to escape from her thoughts, with a little toss of her beautiful head and a frown, said, looking up —
“Beatrix, I have such frightful dreams sometimes. I am ill, I think; I am horribly nervous tonight.”
“Would you like to go to your room? Maybe if you were to lie down, Lady Jane— “
“By-and-by, perhaps — yes.” She was still stealthily watching Varbarriere.
“I’ll go with you — shall I?” said Beatrix.
“No, you shan’t,” answered Lady Jane, rudely.
“And why, Lady Jane?” asked Beatrix, hurt and surprised.
“You shall never visit my room; you are a good little creature. I could have loved you, Beatrix, but now I can’t.”
“Yet I like you, and you meet me so! why is this?” pleaded Beatrix.
“I can’t say, little fool; who ever knows why they like or dislike? I don’t. The fault, I suppose, is mine, not yours. I never said it was yours. If you were ever so little wicked,” she added, with a strange little laugh, “perhaps I could; but it is not worth talking about,” and with a sudden change from this sinister levity to a seriousness which oscillated strangely between cruelty and sadness, she said —
“Beatrix, you like that young man, Mr. Strangways?” Again poor Beatrix blushed, and was about to falter an exculpation and a protest; but Lady Jane silenced it with a grave and resolute “Yes — you like him;” and after a little pause, she added— “Well, if you don’t marry him, marry no one else;” and shortly after this, Lady Jane sighed heavily.
This speech of hers was delivered in a way that prevented evasion or girlish hypocrisy, and Beatrix had no answer but that blush which became her so; and dropping her eyes to the ground, she fell into a reverie, from which she was called up by Lady Jane, who said suddenly —
“What can that fat Monsieur Varbarriere be? He looks like Torquemada, the Inquisitor — mysterious, plausible, truculent — what do you think? Don’t you fancy he could poison you in an ice or a cup of coffee; or put you into Cardinal Ballue’s cage, and smile on you once a year through the bars?”
Beatrix smiled, and looked on the unctuous old gentleman with an indulgent eye, comparatively.
“I can’t see him so melodramatically, Lady Jane,” she laughed. “To me he seems a much more commonplace individual, a great deal less interesting and atrocious, and less like the abbot.”
“What abbot?” said Lady Jane, sharply, “Now really that’s very odd.”
“I meant,” said Beatrix, laughing, “the Abbot of Quedlinberg, in Canning’s play, who is described, you know, as very corpulent and cruel.”
“Oh, I forgot; I don’t think I ever read it; but it chimed in so oddly with my dreams.”
“How, what do you mean?” cried Beatrix, amused.
“I dreamed some one knocked at night at my door, and when I said ‘come in,’ that Monsieur Varbarriere put in his great face, with a hood on like a friar’s, smiling like — like an assassin; and somehow I have felt a disgust of him ever since.”
“Well, I really think he would look rather well in a friar’s frock and hood,” said Beatrix, glancing at the solemn old man again with a little laugh. “He would do very well for Mrs. Radcliff’s one-handed monk, or Schedone, or some of those awful ecclesiastics that scare us in books.”
“I think him positively odious, and I hate him,” said Lady Jane, quietly rising. “I mean to steal away — will you come with me to the foot of the stair?”
“Come,” whispered Beatrix; and as Lady Jane lighted her candle, in that arched recess near the foot of the stair, where, in burnished silver, stand the files of candles, awaiting the fingers which are to bear them off to witness the confidences of toilet or of dejection, she said —
“Well, as you won’t take me with you, we must part here. Goodnight, Lady Jane.”
Lady Jane turned as if to kiss her, but only patted her on the cheek, and said coldly —
“Goodbye, little fool — now run back again.”
When Lady Jane reached the gallery at the top of the staircase, she, too, saw Donica Gwynn seated where Varbarriere had spoken to her.
“Ha! Donica,” cried she suddenly, in the accents of early girlhood, “I’m so glad to see you, Donica. You hardly know me now?”
And Lady Jane, in the light of one transient, happy smile, threw her jewelled arms round the neck of the old housekeeper, whose visits of weeks at a time to Wardlock were nearly her happiest remembrances of that staid old mansion.
“You dear old thing! you were always good to me; and I such a madcap and such a fury! Dull enough now, Donnie, but not a bit better.”
“My poor Miss Jennie!” said old Donica Gwynn, with a tender little laugh, her head just a little on one side, looking on her old pet and charge with such a beautiful, soft lighting up of love in her hard old face as you would not have fancied could have beamed there. Oh! most pathetic mystery, how in our poor nature, layer over layer, the angelic and the evil, the mean and the noble, lie alternated. How sometimes, at long intervals, in the wintriest life and darkest face, the love of angels will suddenly beam out, and show you, still unwrecked, the eternal capacity for heaven.
“And grown such a fine ‘oman — bless ye — I allays said she would — didn’t I?”
“You always stood up for me, old Donnie Don. Come into my room with me now, and talk. Yes — come, and talk, and talk, and talk — I have no one, Bonnie, to talk with now. If I had I might be different — I mean better. You remember poor mamma, Donnie — don’t you?”
“Dear! to be sure — yes, and a nice creature, and a pretty — there’s a look in your face sometimes reminds me on her, Miss Jennie. And I allays said you’d do well — didn’t I? — and see what a great match, they tell me, you a’ made! Well well! and how you have grown! — a fine lady, bless you,” and she laughed so softly over those thin, girlish images of memory, you’d have said the laugh was as far away and as sad as the remembrance.
“Sit down, Donnie Don,” she said, when they had entered the room. “Sit down, and tell me everything — how all the old people are, and how the old place looks — you live there now? I have nothing to tell, only I’m married, as you know — and — and I think a most good-for-nothing creature.”
“Ah, no, pretty Miss Jane, there was good in you always, only a little bit hasty, and tha
t anyone as had the patience could see; and I knowed well you’d be better o’ that little folly in time.”
“I’m not better, Donnie — I’m worse — I am worse, Donnie. I know I am — not better.”
“Well, dear! and jewels, and riches, and coaches, and a fine gentleman adoring you — not very young, though. Well, maybe all the better. Did you never hear say, it’s better to be an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave?”
“Yes, Donnie, it’s very well; but let us talk of Wardlock — and he’s not a fine man, Donnie, who put that in your head — he’s old, and ugly, and” — she was going to say stupid, but the momentary bitterness was rebuked by an accidental glimpse of the casket in which his splendid present was secured— “and tell me about Wardlock, and the people — is old Thomas Jones there still?”
“No, he’s living at Glastonhowe now, with his grandson that’s married — very happy; but you would not believe how old he looks, and they say can’t remember nothink as he used to, but very comfortable.”
“And Turpin, the gardener?”
“Old Turpin be dead, miss, two years agone; had a fit a few months before, poor old fellow, and never was strong after. Very deaf he was of late years, and a bit cross sometimes about the vegetables, they do say; but he was a goodnatured fellow, and decent allays; and though he liked a mug of ale, poor fellow, now and then, he was very regular at church.”
“Poor old Turpin dead! I never heard it — and old? he used to wear a kind of flaxen wig.”
“Old! dearie me, that he was, miss, you would not guess how old — there’s eighty-five years on the gravestone that Lady Alice put over him, from the parish register, in Wardlock churchyard, bless ye!”
“And — and as I said just now about my husband, General Lennox, that he was old — well, he is old, but he’s a good man, and kind, and such a gentleman.”
“And you love him — and what more is needed to make you both happy?” added Donica; “and glad I am, miss, to see you so comfortably married — and such a nice, good, grand gentleman; and don’t let them young chaps be coming about you with their compliments, and fine talk, and lovemaking.”
“What do you mean, woman? I should hope I know how to behave myself as well as ever Lady Alice Redcliffe did. It is she who has been talking to you, and, I suppose, to every one, the stupid, wicked hag.”
“Oh, Miss Jennie, dear!”
* * *
CHAPTER XVIII.
Alone — Yet not alone.
“Well, Donnie, don’t talk about her; talk about Wardlock, and the people, and the garden, and the trees, and old Wardlock church,” said Lady Jane, subsiding almost as suddenly as she flamed up. “Do you remember the brass tablet about Eleanor Faukes, well-beloved and godly, who died in her twenty-second year, in the year of grace sixteen hundred and thirty-four? See how I remember it! Poor Eleanor Faukes! I often think of her — and do you remember how you used to make me read the two lines at the end of the epitaph? ‘What you are I was; what I am you shall be.’ Do you remember?”
“Ay, miss, that I do. I wish I could think o’ them sorts o’ things allays — it’s very good, miss.”
“Perhaps it is, Donnie. It’s very sad and very horrible, at all events, death and judgment,” answered Lady Jane.
“Have you your old Bible yet, miss?”
“Not here,” answered Lady Jane, colouring a little; but recollecting, she said, “I have got a very pretty one, though,” and she produced a beautiful volume bound in velvet and gold.
“A deal handsomer, Miss Jennie, but not so well read, I’m afeared,” said Donica Gwynn, looking at the fresh binding and shining gilt leaves.
“There it is, Donnie Don; but I feel like you, and I do like the old one best, blurred and battered; poor old thing, it looked friendly, and this like a fashionable chaplain. I have not seen it for a long time, Donnie; perhaps it’s lost, and this is only a show one, as you see.”
And after a few seconds she added, a little bitterly, almost angrily, “I never read my Bible now. I never open it,” and then came an unnatural little laugh.
“Oh! Miss Jennie, dear — I mean my Lady Jane — don’t say that, darling — that way, anyhow, don’t say it. Why should not you read your Bible, and love it, better now nor ever, miss — the longer you live the more you’ll want it, and when sorrow comes, what have you but that?”
“It’s all denunciation, all hard names, and threats, Donnie. If people believed themselves what they say every Sunday in church, miserable sinners, and I dare say they are, they’d sicken and quake at sight of it. I hope I may come to like it some day, Donnie,” she added, with a short sigh.
“I mind, Miss Jennie — I mean my Lady Jane.”
“No, you’re to call me Jennie still, or I’ll drop Donnie Don, and call you Mrs. Gwynn,” said Lady Jane, with her hands on Donica’s thin shoulders, playfully, but with a very pensive face and tone.
Donica smiled for a moment, and then her face saddened too, and she said —
“And I mind, Miss Jennie, when it was the same way with me, only with better reason, for I was older than you, and had lived longer than ever you did without a thought of God; but I tell you, miss, you’ll find your only comfort there at last; it is not much, maybe, to the like o’ me, that can’t lay her mind down to it, but it’s somethink; ay, I mind the time I durst not open it, thinking I’d only meet summat there to vex me. But ’tisn’t so: there’s a deal o’ good nature in the Bible, and ye’ll be sure to stumble on somethink kind whenever you open it.”
Lady Jane made no answer. She looked down with a careworn gaze on her white hand, the fleeting tenement of clay; jewelled rings glimmered on its fingers — the vanities of the world, and under it lay the Bible, the eternal word. She was patting the volume with a little movement that made the brilliants flash. You would have thought she was admiring her rings, but that her eyes were so sad and her gaze so dreamy.
“And I hear the mistress, Lady Alice, acoming up — yes, ’tis her voice. Goodnight, Miss Jennie, dear.”
“Goodnight, dear old Donnie.”
“And you’ll promise me you’ll read a bit in it every night.”
“Where’s the use in promising, Donnie? Don’t we promise everything — the whole Christian religion, at our baptism — and how do we keep it?”
“You must promise you’ll read, if ’twas only a verse every night, Miss Jennie, dear — it may be the makin’ o’ ye. I hear Lady Alice acalling.”
“You’re a good old thing — I like you, Donnie — you’d like to make me better — happier, that is — and I love you — and I promise for this night, at all events, I will read a verse, and maybe more, if it turns out goodnatured, as you say. Goodnight.”
And she shook old Gwynn by both hands, and kissed her; and as she parted with her, said —
“And, Donnie, you must tell my maid I shan’t want her tonight — and I will read, Donnie — and now, goodnight again.”
So handsome Lady Jane was alone.
“It seems to me as if I had not time to think — God help me, God help me,” said Lady Jane. “Shall I read it? That odious book, that puts impossibilities before us, and calls eternal damnation eternal justice!”
“Goodnight, Jane,” croaked Lady Alice’s voice, and the key turned in the door.
With a pallid glance from the corners of her eyes, of intense contempt — hatred, even, at the moment, she gazed on the door, as she sate with her fingers under her chin; and if a look could have pierced the panels, hers would have shot old Lady Alice dead at the other side. For about a minute she sat so, and then a chilly little laugh rang from her lips; and she thought no more for a while of Lady Alice, and her eyes wandered again to her Bible.
“Yes, that odious book! with just power enough to distract us, without convincing — to embitter our short existence, without directing it; I hate it.”
So she said, and looked as if she would have flung it into the farthest corner of the room. She was spited wit
h it, as so many others are, because it won’t do for us what we must do for ourselves.
“When sorrow comes, poor Donnie says — when it comes — little she knows how long it has been here! Life — such a dream — such an agony often. Surely it pays the penalty of all its follies. Judgment indeed! The all-wise Creator sitting in judgment upon creatures like us, living but an hour, and walking in a dream!”
This kind of talk with her, as with many others, was only the expression of a form of pain. She was perhaps in the very mood to read, that is, with the keen and anxious interest that accompanies and indicates a deep-seated grief and fear.
It was quite true what she said to old Donica. These pages had long been sealed for her. And now, with a mixture of sad antipathy and interest, as one looks into a coffin, she did open the book, and read here and there in a desultory way, and then, leaning on her hand, she mused dismally; then made search for a place she wanted, and read and wept, wept aloud and long and bitterly.
The woman taken, and “set in the midst,” the dreadful Pharisees standing round. The Lord of life, who will judge us on the last day, hearing and saving! Oh, blessed Prince, whose service is perfect freedom, how wise are thy statutes! “More to be desired are they than gold — sweeter also than honey.” Standing between thy poor tempted creatures and the worst sorrow that can befall them — a sorrow that softens, not like others, as death approaches, but is transformed, and stands like a giant at the bedside. May they see thy interposing image — may they see thy face now and for ever.
Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu Page 295