Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu

by J. Sheridan le Fanu

  Carmel’s large eyes followed the wavering flight of the bat; and he murmured, “Oh! that I had wings— “

  “Like a bat?” said Shadwell.

  “Good poetry, sir, here and there, in the psalms,” continued his companion. “Oh! that I had wings like a dove,” he repeated with a strange sigh and a smile.

  “Or a demi-griffin — hang them!” said the master of Raby, again snarling at the mystic brutes that seemed to mock him, with an elaborate burlesque, whenever ruin came as near as it stood at present. They were by this time at the hall-door, and, pushing it open, Shadwell paused and said:

  “And, I say, you’ve done enough to-day, You must come down, you must, this evening, and read some Italian, or whatever it is; do you mind? They’ll be very glad to see you.”

  “Shall I?” murmured Carmel, looking to the sky with a doubtful smile and one hand raised.

  “Of course you shall; don’t I tell you you must? You’re tired; mind you come,” he added with a nod, as he left him, and crossed the hall, thinking of something else; while Sherlock, with his peculiar pallid smile, stood at the foot of the stair, with the tips of his fingers to his lips, looking after him.

  CHAPTER III.

  THE BARONET SPEAKS.

  “SHALL I?” repeated Carmel, with the same rapt smile and sigh, standing like a beautiful spirit at the gate of Paradise, with its light upon his face.

  But as with sudden pain his features contracted and darkened. “Tut, tut, tut, Carmel! whither so fast? Not bad enough, eh? ha! ha! why I’m all burnt — burnt. Scrivener, fiddler, fool! No, no; up to my crib, and draw forth my pitying angel, and scrape her into screams and sobs of consolation.” And with this idea, evidently tickled, he laughed oddly to himself, running up the stairs three at a time.

  The gallery was dark, and only the dim sky of a moonless night faintly defined the outline of his open window as he entered his room. He was groping for a match; but desisted.

  “No,” he thought; “this is better — beautiful neutral tint, on which my eyes will paint images! while, let me see, let me see — can I find it? ay, here thou art! while thou dost wail and quiver in the dark — my spirit!” And, at the same time, he swept his bow across the strings of the violin, and in low, wild, tremulous notes, standing with his shoulder against the window-case, and gazing out upon the blank, he made a dirge - like and wandering voluntary, which proceeded unbroken, though he sometimes sighed, and sometimes talked to himself, and sometimes laughed a little.

  In the meantime, as Mark Shadwell approached the door to which he was walking dejectedly, his eye was suddenly caught by the postbag on the oak table in the hall.

  The letters! the hated letters. They never had a pleasant tale to tell. He emptied the bag on the table, and with a shock that suspended his breath, he saw at a glance a large square envelope, addressed in the hand of Sir Roke Wycherly.

  Five years had passed since he saw that hand before — five years of mutability and death — through which they two had come alive, reserved for the events that were coming.

  “R. Wycherly” at the left-hand corner of the envelope identified the writer. But Shadwell needed not the proof. Love has its instinct of recognition, but fear a still subtler one. Shadwell feared this baronet, who was his remote cousin, his creditor, and who had, moreover, a fancied claim to a portion of that estate, every acre of which was needed to keep him from ruin.

  Mark Shadwell’s features grew paler as this envelope looked him in the face. A crisis of some sort was coming. Roke Wycherly would not have taken up his pen to write to a man whom he despised — as he did every unsuccessful man — whom he had always rather disliked, and who, he knew, hated him — without some special business on hand. “He is going to demand his arrears of interest, and to open an attack upon my title, and perhaps to hint at a compromise. A compromise! what compromise could there be which would not ruin Shadwell?” All the time that he was thus trifling with his own suspense, he would have taken another man by the throat for retaining his secret. He looked at the large red seal, and back again at the front of the address. The letters were thick, and the lines ran up at one end with an ominous scowling squint.

  “That letter means mischief,” he thought, and thrust it unopened into the bottom of his pocket, pinched hard between his finger and thumb, and he stood irresolute: he was thinking of reading it elsewhere, but he could wait no longer; and, glancing over his shoulder and around, like a man on the verge of a crime, he broke the seal and read Roke Wycherly’s letter. It ran thus:

  “DEAR MARK, — Look on to the foot of this note, and then say, can you believe your eyes? Yet it is I indeed! I wish to see you, and am myself so much abroad, so little, therefore, likely to meet you in town, or elsewhere in England, casually, that I must ask you to permit me to make a certainty of it by looking in upon you at Raby. May I? I shall be running northward, in two or three days, to Scarbrook. My wish would be to pull up at your door as I pass. It is very impertinent, I know, to say so, particularly to ask admission at so short a notice, when fifty things may make it inconvenient or impracticable. See how I approach you! Pray stand on no ceremony with me. If you can’t see me this time, I shall know you really can’t. If you can, can you manage also a corner for my man? I have been a little of an invalid — though, understand, not a troublesome one — for now upwards of a year. Drop me a line to this place, and pray remember me particularly to my kinswoman, Amy, and my best respects to my other kinswoman, your daughter, whose acquaintance I hope to make. Again, pray requite me as little ceremony as I use, and believe me, dear Mark, yours ever, “ROKE WYCHERLY.”

  “— ‘s Hotel, London.

  Shadwell’s hungry eye devoured all this with a rapid glance. He read it again. “There is absolutely nothing in it, but that he wants to come here. Does he? It’s not for my good, then, that’s clear; what can it be for? To see the place, to sneak, and pick up information about the property? It isn’t that — no, it isn’t that — what could he ask? what could he learn? No! it isn’t.”

  Shadwell had read this letter with his broad felt hat overshadowing his still handsome face. It engaged him so thoroughly that he forgot the other letters lying on the table, and, crossing the hall in deep thought, or rather abstraction, he walked out into the darkness and solitude to ruminate undisturbed, for this enigma troubled him.

  As he loitered with downcast looks under the broad front of the old house, he was startled from his reverie by the ugly wailings of Carmel’s fiddle from the turret-window.

  “That’s you, Sherlock! Hollo! Stop your caterwauling, will you? Do you hear?”

  “I do,” said the gentle voice of Carmel, from above.

  “Well, he’s coming; I’m going to write for him. He’ll be here in a day or two; I’ll write to ask him — and — I don’t know what it’s for,” he added, a little inconsistently.

  “Sir Roke Wycherly — aha — I thought,” said the oracle from above.

  “Ay, Roke Wycherly, who else?” echoed Shadwell.

  “Oh no! Oh dear, no! True — no one — ah! ha-ha!” said Carmel, with something between a shudder and a laugh. “Ho dear! can’t you keep him off?”

  “Keep him off! why the devil should I? I’m not afraid of him, I suppose,” said Shadwell, fiercely.

  “Oh no! oh no! of course; but I am; I’m afraid. I wish, sir, you could keep him off, you know.”

  “Why, it’s I who am bringing him here! Keep him off? I) — n him!” snarled Shadwell’s voice, defiantly.

  “Bringing him? Oh yes! Bringing him here — yes, sir. I’m afraid. It’s a very dark night. It’s the shadow. I wish I could keep him off — tut, tut! — is not there plague enough?”

  And speaking these words, I suppose in a reverie, he drew his bow across the strings again, and produced a long-drawn discord.

  “Will you stop that d — d noise?” cried Shadwell, sternly. “Light your candle, will you? I’m going up: and get out the paper about that cursed mortgage, do, and I’
ll just look at it, as far as you’ve got.”

  “Pardon — pardon — I wasn’t thinking; light, to be sure, sir! I beg your pardon — light, to be sure, sir. It is dark — awfully dark! If I were a fanciful man, I’d say this violin made it darker, and the news darkest of all. “Wings, wings, sir, and moral shadows!”

  Shadwell, you may be sure, did not wait to hear these sage reflections out, and, as he ascended the doorsteps, the glimmer of a match from Carmel Sherlock’s window showed that he was lighting his candle.

  CHAPTER IV.

  MARK SHADWELL’S ANSWER.

  So Mark Shadwell mounted the stairs of Raby Hall in the dark, and at the end of the lonely gallery entered the turret room, where Carmel Sherlock awaited him standing, with a solitary candle lighted.

  “By Jove!” murmured the master of Raby with his accustomed sneer, when he stepped in and looked round him. He always forgot when he had been a few weeks without visiting it how odd the little room was — a segment of the wall circular, the rest polyhedric and crooked. “What a perverse little closet!” one would have exclaimed. And stranger still were the furniture and decorations. Near the window stood a high, slender, lock-up desk, on four slim legs, and with shelves beneath laden with a litter of papers and ledgers. Carmel. kept the accounts of the estate, and many cross accounts, and scores of interest, and other complicated debit and credit entries, and did his work standing before the tall desk. Over the tiny fireplace hung an ancient steel crossbow and four tobacco pipes of various fashions, long and short; an unframed small Madonna, antique and precious, in Carmel’s eyes, picked up in an old lumber-room of an out-of-the-way London tavern, for such a trifle as he could afford, and which he almost adored, in which he saw resemblances, and recognised, he fancied, a master hand. There were shelves of books, too, not half a dozen modem ones among them, and those of that “philosophic” school which bears no amity to revelation. Coverless folios, yellow vellum-backed quartos, and some diminutive black letter and others, dark and warped by time, and looking like great burnt squares of gingerbread. Against the wall, too, hung his beloved fiddle, and a variety of other queer decorations, so that one could understand Shadwell’s reflection, “It’s like nothing but a corner of a madman’s brain.”

  “Light that other candle, will you? and give me all the light you can, and let me have a sheet of paper, and — ay, there are pens and ink.”

  At the desk Shadwell wrote standing:

  “DEAR ROKE, — Your friendly note charms me. I shall expect you. Any day you like best will equally answer us. We can’t make you as comfortable as we could wish; but roughing it in a poor man’s country house you will make excuse. I write so briefly lest I should lose a post. We have some pretty good trout-fishing here. Our shooting decidedly bad — unless you care for killing rabbits. On the whole, I can’t deny the place is rather slow; but you’ll forgive it, and believe me, “Ever yours sincerely, “M. SHADWELL.

  “P.S. — What you say of your health distresses me. But, boasting little else, the air of Raby at least is excellent, and really does wonders for some people.”

  “Oh! d — n the fiddle!” exclaimed Shadwell, interrupted by the renewed minstrelsy of Carmel, who, startled with bow suspended in his fingers, gazed with a pained alarm on his patron.

  “Fiddle — fiddle! he said fiddle!” murmured Carmel, in sad and gentle accents; for it was a foible of his to fancy everything he possessed a chef d’œuvre or a miracle.

  “So he did,” repeated Shadwell, with a sharp nod.

  “A — yes; but, this is — a — yes, do but look at it — this is a Straduarius. I was lucky, sir — amazing — ha! yes. I paid only twenty-four shillings for it!”

  Shadwell sealed his envelope, and offered no comment.

  “And it is worth three hundred guineas, sir,” continued he, almost whispering the estimate to his beloved violin.

  “I wish you’d sell it,” said Shadwell, drily, for he hated its music; “and if you can get half what you gave, I advise you. Come, let me see what you have done.”

  “Sell it? So I will — ay, sir, when its term of servitude is done. I shan’t want it after a few weeks. There is a secret about those violins — Prometheus; the Statue of Memnon.

  If the history of Saul and David be as true as that of George the Third, there was a Straduarius who made harps then — harps. Spirit is vibration, and vibration is music. I have thought upon that, sir. I can explain —

  “Thank you, I’d rather have the balance of the mortgage account,” replied Shadwell.

  “Oh! — ah! — to be sure, sir, I beg pardon — not quite made out, though. Roke Wycherly — Sir Roke. Coming! Tut! tut! tut! Ay — well, yes — such dreams! And potential letters, too. Would you like the window shut, sir?”

  As he spoke he was selecting and getting together the notes required by Mark Shadwell.

  “My father died of fever at Easterbroke; my poor mother at Rochester, and my dear sister at Wyden — all great losses — dreadful, sir, dreadful — one at Christmas, that’s yule — the next on Easter Monday, and the last on the Royal Oak day, we used to call it — the anniversary, you know, and the villain who robbed me was Robert Eyre Yardley. Where I was knocked down by the cab, and my rib broken, was Regent Street, and there are no end — no end of them. So I have reason to hate those letters E, T, and B; and they are doubled in his name, and the rest — ay, here’s the account deducted — Sandford’s — and the rest are O, K, W, C, H, L — and they are your unlucky letters, sir. I’ll show you.”

  “Much obliged — some other time,” said Shadwell, drily, taking the papers. “Will you tell Jack Linton to run down to the town and post this letter?”

  “Ha! this is it — ay, ay — my God! won’t you think, sir?” said Carmel, throwing back his long black hair, and fixing his eyes with a stare of pain and fear on Shadwell.

  “We’ll post the letter, and think after,” said he.

  “R — Rachel, that’s another — the worst, perhaps,” whispered Carmel, clasping his hands as he left the room dejectedly.

  “That fellow’s cracked — he is mad,” muttered Shadwell, looking after him. If he had been in better spirits he would have laughed; as it was he contented himself with a hope that Carmel’s figures were right. And Carmel, much troubled, reentered the room.

  He passed his hand through his hair, and groaned as he came behind Mark Shadwell’s chair softly, and laid his hand on the back of it, saying:

  “I think, sir, if you knew all — such dreams! He came into my room at dead of night, like a great cock — ha, ha! you will laugh, you will — with a bloody comb — head, eyes, neck, all bloody, sir, taller than the door, and crowed. I knew it was he — such a crow, it pierced my brains, sir. I knew it was he, though I never saw him.”

  “He’s not a bit like a cock, though — a coxcomb, perhaps. So do shut up your poultry, and help me to understand this.”

  While Mark Shadwell in Carmel’s room was busy over these accounts, in the drawingroom sat quite alone a very pretty woman — though no longer young, still girlish — with the transparent and delicate tints of an invalid in her oval face, large eyes and long lashes, and such a pretty mouth! Though the face was very sad just now, you could not help feeling how brightly it might smile. Pensively she lay back in her low-armed chair; her thin pretty hands lay extended beside her, and her head a little on one side, with that peculiar dejection which strikes us so plaintively in pictures of mediaeval martyrs. Her hair, brown and wavy, was seen under that pretty little lace coiffure, with a dark-blue ribbon running through it, which reminded one of the old mob cap.

  Pearly-tinted, slender, pensive, there was still in that fragile creature an air of youth quite wonderful in the mother of a girl now just eighteen.

  This girlish, fragile, pretty matron was Mark Shadwell’s wife — the still young mother of that pretty Rachel, who was their only child. Well might she be sad, thinking of the hope and love she had given in vain. It was one of those mysterious pa
ssions exacted by fate, never to be requited. Nineteen years ago, just two and thirty, in the prime of manly beauty, he seemed to her in all things a hero. His love was a beautiful but false adoration — so eloquent, so passionate, so graceful. Where was it now? Long burnt out, cold ashes, years ago — gone before their first child was born. What so terrible as this fatal fidelity of a neglected love? Wrongs will not murder it, nor desertion starve it. Wildly it prays to be changed to loathing — entreats that it may die, and curses itself for loving still.

  As Amy Shadwell leaned back in her chair, her look was lowered to the ground beyond her tiny feet, and on her face that strange look of pain along with that light or smile, I know not which it is, that we have seen so often on the faces of the youthful dead.

  Her thoughts were now wandering to Rachel and her governess.

  “My darling, it is well for her — a gentle and loving person — affectionate and playful — Agnes Marlyn. She would be good to her if I were gone. She loves me, I hope. But this triste place! Will she stay — will she stay long?”

  Just now the door silently opened, and Agnes Marlyn, like an evoked spirit, stood on the threshold with some flowers in her hand, doubtfully; and it seemed as if from within that old oak door-case, as from a stained window, a flood of wonderfully rich tints entered the room.

  Pretty Mrs. Shadwell looked up and smiled. “Come, dear — come, you dear kind Agnes; and flowers, too! You always think of me, you good creature.”

  Agnes heard this greeting with a beautiful dimpling smile, standing under the shadow of the doorway, and, as it seemed with a blush of gratification, and her long lashes were lowered over those dark, soft, clouded eyes, so impossible to describe. And closing the door, with the ends of her fingers, she approached the table with her flowers, gently.