Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu

by J. Sheridan le Fanu

  The discovery of the real state of his account with Sir Roke Wycherly was an immense relief. His spirits had expanded for a time, but quickly the vague sense of danger with which Sir Roke’s meditated visit had before been associated returned.

  He had known Roke Wycherly well and long, better than he knew himself — always selfish, a cold, hard heart. What on earth did he care if the inhabitants of Raby were one and all dead and buried? Nothing. Why, then, did he propose this visit to Raby, forlorn and dull? This troubled him. There was some little question, he could not recollect what, he had never understood it, about his title. There had been a correspondence about it in his father’s time, reserved, laconic, and defiant. It had subsided, and nothing came of it. But he remembered well how transformed his father was pending that unpleasant controversy, that he grew gloomy, fidgety, and silent; that he shut himself up a great deal in the library, and addicted himself to solitary walks, that his temper was short and dangerous, and that no one liked to go near him unnecessarily.

  The whole thing had made an impression on his childish imagination as a picture of great suffering — a shadow of that outer darkness — an inkling of the worm and the fire — with which the bilious old Rector of Wynderfel, in his loud and hollow tones, used to threaten so awfully on Sundays.

  The alarm had passed away; his father had emerged from the horror of great darkness; and he heard no more of the debate of title-deeds, fines, and recoveries. But he had once since then looked into the correspondence in the chambers of Messrs. Dolby and Keane. It left an unpleasant impression. There was that kind of dipping and drawing together which is seen between cloud and sea when a water-spout threatens. It did not actually form, but cloud and sea were there; and here again was a menace: what else could it mean?

  “He’ll come, and he’ll go; he doesn’t know what to do with himself — used up; so he runs down here, as fellows descend into a lead mine, or go to Norway, for want of something new — just for the chance of a new idea. Too much ease, too much money, too much pleasure — life grows tiresome — ha! ha! It’s but a choice between life and death. Death, of the two, I should say, is the most tiresome. And they say he has been tapping at your chest.”

  Vaguely, but substantially, as this soliloquy runs, flowed the current of Mark Shadwell’s reasonings, as he strove to shake off the unaccountable uneasiness that returned as often as he thought of Roke Wycherly’s visit.

  There was an old quarrel. Sir Roke, when they were both young, had outwitted his kinsman in an affair of the heart. It had nearly taken a tragic turn, but friends interposed, and an unnatural duel was prevented. So years had passed away. Mark Shadwell, proud and vindictive as he was, had, in his way, forgiven this and many other trespasses; and they had “buried the hatchet,” which might yet be disinterred.

  CHAPTER XII.

  THE WALLS OF WYNDERFEL.

  FAR away beyond Hazelden — beyond haunted Feltram — beyond the ruined manorhouse of Wynderfel — next evening, Mark Shadwell had wandered through the rabbit-peopled woodlands with his gun. The sun was setting, the birds whistling their vespers from a thousand boughs, as that gentleman, with the fatigue of dejection, sat down upon the rude stone seat — a relic of other times and their hospitable care for the wayfarer — which still stands in the now solitary region of the old park, under the roofless gables of Wynderfel.

  He “was looking up at its grey walls, his eyes wandering listlessly from window to window, and from one tall, smokeless chimney to another, over which the jackdaws were wheeling. Dismally he looked upon the relics of the old manorial residence of generations of Shadwells, before the Raby estate had united itself with Wynderfel by marriage. He was thinking, as he looked, that the Shadwells of those days must have been very great people. It was the finest house of its time in the county. What lots of chimneys there were! and he thought how hospitable the place must have looked when they were all smoking; and how those empty windows were once pleasant with pretty faces — the Shadwells were a handsome race; — and the stables, and kennels, and offices, among whose silent buttresses the alder and hawthorn were growing now, were astir with horses, dogs, and hawks; and from his readings in Walter Scott’s romances, he peopled the deserted courtyard with jesters, knights, falconers, and a masquerade of old-world splendour.

  “And all this was ours! And what is left us now? What would they think of Mark Shadwell, of Raby, I wonder, in this costume, without a guinea — a seedy recluse — who never knows one year whether he’s to have a house over his head the next?”

  Mark Shadwell raised his eyes again, lighted a cigar, and grew serene and contemplative as he smoked it — less-bitter about himself — more wrapt up in the tranquil glories of the past.

  The memory of pain is short-lived. Retrospect is sunny; the best days always in the past. The illusion runs beyond our own short lives, into other centuries, among buried generations; and we look on their relics as those of a golden age, when times were plentiful, and men all kind, and women beautiful, and heads and hearts never ached.

  “Merry England it was then!” said Mark Shadwell, lowering his cigar: he had read an extract from an essay on the subject somewhere. “So it was! No gambling; none of those cursed places where you’re robbed; no debts; plenty of fun; plenty of everything; and old families where they should be! Now it’s all mortgages, and tradesmen, and upstarts, and money, and smash!”

  He was obliged to stop, for, as his eloquence was kindling, his cigar was dying out, and he was fain to replace it between his lips and puff a little anxiously until it was aglow again.

  There is a state of pleasant and active observation of passing things; a state also of dreaming, a state of thinking, and another state for which in due time metaphysicians will find a name quite distinct, in which there is a mental silence — thought and fancy nowhere — in which the eyes will rest unmoving on a tree, or distant hill; the mind a blank, in utter, yet strangely pleasurable, apathy.

  In this state, smoking, with his eyes on the shield and Shadwell arms over the arch of the wide door, Mark Shadwell heard a voice close by him at the stile; a voice he did not like — quiet, low, and a little stern — a voice which was unlike his angry nature, for it was cold, and which always fired his pride, for it was, in its very tranquillity, commanding.

  “Mr. Shadwell, I think? How d’ye do, Mr. Shadwell?” said the voice.

  Shadwell had turned towards the speaker before the sentence ended, and saw the Reverend Richard Stour Temple, Vicar of Rydleston; a man of middle height and thin, with a pale face, closely shorn, and dark, steady grey eyes. The level light of the setting sun shone across his features with an odd abruptness of light and shadow; the smile of greeting on his thin lips was slight and cold: his dress, though natty, had seen work, and was fashioned rather after the High Church manner.

  “Oh! Temple; how d’ye do? Charming evening for a ramble, isn’t it?” said Shadwell, without rising. He did not like the vicar.

  “Sweet evening, yes,” said the vicar, extending his hand. Shadwell gave him two fingers to shake.

  Mr. Temple had generally a word to say when he met Mark Shadwell, and so he seemed to have now, for he paused, and leaning rather than sitting on the bank, close by the old stone seat, he looked down upon the squire as his master at Eton used, when he meditated a lecture.

  “Very sweet evening,” he resumed: “a little tired though and the vicar with his walking-stick knocked his dusty gaiter slightly. “I find my walks tell upon me more than they used; it’s a good way to Pennelston: I’ve been to visit a tenant of yours, Abel Ford; poor man, he’s dying; you have not heard, perhaps? You ought to look more, I think, after your tenants, Mr. Shadwell; it’s not right.”

  He spoke this very quietly, with a little nod, and with reproving eyes fixed on the representative of the Shadwells of Raby, and of this old Wynderfel, whose long shadows were stretching over the turf beyond them.

  “You’ve told me that pretty often,” said Shadwell.

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p; “No doubt; and you think me impertinent?” said the vicar, gravely.

  “I do,” said Shadwell, the indulgence of whose morose temper had grown upon him in his solitude.

  “And yet, Mr. Shadwell, it is but my duty. The man is dying; I’ve been praying with him — the office of the church;” and he touched the coat pocket in which lay the book. “I don’t think he’s properly attended to; he’s poor, and has no wife, and his daughter has not turned out well, you know.”

  “No, I don’t know; and if he is not attended to, I can’t help it: I can’t attend him, can I?”

  “If you told your steward to speak to his cousin, who lives near him, he would look a little after him; he had no one last night to give him a drink,” said the vicar.

  “You churchmen are always for saddling men with duties. You don’t ask what are their privileges — estates, indeed — tenants!

  You know perfectly well I’m a mere receiver over all this for others; you treat me so; you know devilish well, sir, you would not talk to me as you do if the estates were unencumbered, and I where I ought to be.”

  Thus spoke Mark Shadwell, with an angry eye upon the vicar, and then laughed scornfully to himself, turning his head slowly away.

  “I’ve many faults, I dare say, but I don’t think cowardice is one,” replied Mr. Temple. “I thought it right to mention the circumstance; you can do as seems good to you.”

  “I can not do as seems good to me. How can a fellow do anything without money? Such rot and nonsense!” These latter words were muttered contemptuously to the grass at his feet, but the vicar heard them, and Mark Shadwell did not care whether he did or not.

  “When that old building was raised, Mr. Shadwell, our social relations were better understood,” said the vicar, turning up his face toward the gables and gurgoils of Wynderfel, with a cold smile.

  “I dare say,” said Shadwell. “Gentlemen, for instance, did not give their advice in those days till it was asked for.”

  “Except churchmen,” said the vicar, “whose thankless duty it is, uninvited, to instruct, to exhort, and to warn. Those who most need advice are the last to ask it. Were we to wait till erring mortals invited us to reprove them our calling were vain indeed.”

  “Well, Temple, I dare say you do fancy you are doing your duty — I’m sure you do; and I assure you, though you talk sometimes about things you don’t quite understand, and give me all sorts of impracticable advice, I respect you all the time, so you’ll forgive my gruff talk, I can’t help it; but, upon my soul, if you expect a poor devil like me to look after all those tenants, and find nurses for them when they’re sick, and fun for them when they’re well, you’re going rather too fast for me: I tell you once for all, I can’t; I can do nothing for them; I never have a guinea to bless myself with; half of them are better off than I am; I wish you’d tell them to look after me, by Jove!”

  “You know, Mr. Shadwell, as well as I,” replied the vicar, gently and coldly, “that you might do a great deal more than you do: in the case I mentioned, for instance, but having mentioned it, I can do no more.”

  “Well, I don’t care if I do what you say; I’ll send down there tomorrow. If you’d just ask people quietly, and not mind lecturing, you’d often carry your point better, d’ye see? You’re not vexed at my saying so?”

  The vicar smiled and bowed with a serenity in which one might have suspected a little contempt.

  “Thanks, at all events, for your compliance with my present request,” he said. “There was one other, I have often urged it, you perhaps remember?”

  “Upon my life, I can’t say; there have been a good many,” answered Shadwell, darkening again.

  “It is not much; that is, not much trouble; it was only this, that you would read just six verses of the New Testament every day.” Shadwell looked at him and laughed, as one might at a foolish saying of a child.

  “I beg your pardon — you’ll forgive me, but it sounds so odd; I know you mean it well, but it does, because I don’t believe it; I think your New Testament is all a myth; Christianity is simply a philosophy which has survived other and better ones, just because it has condescended to ally itself with the principle of superstition, which is part of human nature.”

  The vicar, for the first time, looked sadly he shook his head, and for some seconds silently watched the now fading splendour that duskily flooded the wake of the sun that had gone down. There was in the sight something funereal that accorded with his thoughts.

  “It’s nothing new, you know; I’ve told you the same thing pretty often, and that’s the foundation of our relations. I live in your parish, but I’m not your parishioner, though we are very good friends, don’t you see? You’re a Christian; I’m a philosopher,” said Mark Shadwell, who was conceited of his smattering of Greek philosophies. “I don’t say I’m a Platonist, an epicurean, or a stoic; nullius addictus, I don’t deal all in one shop; every man who thinks frames a system for himself. I’m an eclectic philosopher, if you please, and I’m very well satisfied with my credo!”

  “I have argued it with you pretty often, Mr. Shadwell. I had hoped that time and reflection might have opened your eyes; there’s an hour coming for each when we shall need more than the speculations of men.”

  “We all need more than we’re ever likely to get,” replied Mr. Shadwell; “but what enabled Socrates to meet death as he did, is enough for me.”

  “I’m not arguing it, mind. It is not a question to be settled in a five minutes’ talk over a cigar, but I should be very happy if you would discuss it fully with me, or even if you would read a few books which I’ll be glad to lend you.”

  “Thanks, no. The death of Socrates and the morals of Hume; I don’t think your calendar and martyrology can show much better. I’m content.”

  Mark Shadwell, if not exactly content, was self-complacent; he lighted another cigar, and puffed a little smoke into the air, fancying that he had floored his opponent, who rose as if to go upon his way.

  “And as for me,” resumed Shadwell, lowering his cigar, “I can’t say, of course, what sort of death I may die, but my life, I venture to say, is as moral as any parson’s in England. I don’t drink, I don’t play; I live like an anchorite, every way; I don’t even curse or swear, to signify, and I could give that up, if I liked. I hardly run up to town twice in the year, and then, upon my honour, it’s only for business; you say I’ve no experience of Christianity, I say you’ve none of philosophy. I haven’t a passion left in me, by Jove! Of course, a fellow can’t help getting riled a bit, sometimes, but every other way I’m as cold as a marble block. Take one of these, on your walk, won’t you?” And Shadwell tendered his cigar-case.

  “Thanks, no; I never smoke,” said the vicar.

  “If you were, as I am, looking at that old house, and remembering what we were there, once on a time, you’d know what it was to feel as I do,” said Shadwell, pointing at the old walls with his cigar.

  “No greater waste of time than regretting, except, perhaps, wishing,” said the vicar; “I must get on. Your young people — Miss Shadwell, I mean, and her governess — are drinking tea with my sister. So I’ll say good evening.”

  Shadwell stood up and waved his hand to the vicar’s valediction, and the vicar smiled his cold smile and nodded, and his swift and wiry walk soon carried him under the whitethorns and scattered ash-trees through which the path descends. Mark Shadwell remained with his foot on the stone seat, smoking and looking after that disappearing figure.

  “Good man — awfully conceited — curiously disagreeable; I wonder how he made love to Amy, long ago, when he was at her feet. I dare say he frightened that poor old fellow, Ford, to-day, half out of his wits, with his Beelzebub, and his hell, and his visitation of the sick. How these poor little prigs do delight in frightening people!”

  It was a delightful, balmy twilight, and Mark Shadwell was in no mood to return to Raby for a little time, so he smoked on, and the bats came out from their ivied nooks in the walls
of Wynderfel, and the stars began to glimmer in the deepening sky.

  CHAPTER XIII.

  BONNIE AND BABY.

  As the Reverend Stour Temple said, the young ladies of Raby were that evening drinking tea at the vicar’s house.

  In the pretty country about Wynderfel, there are few prettier things than the vicar’s house, which is old and lonely, standing among dark elm-trees, on a gentle eminence, built of timeworn white stone, with a flight of broad white steps leading up to the fluted doorway. In front, spreads a little carpet of short grass, pleasantly relieved by clusters of roses and sweetbriars, and several small beds of brilliant flowers. A tall double hedgerow marks the line of the narrow road in front, from which you can see, peeping among the old trees and underwood, the arched gateway of the farmyard, and the smaller arch of a little belfry, and the pigeons are often seen fluttering and wheeling in the air, above the dovecot, and the great dog, Drake, lying before the steps, on summer days, blinking and dozing, and snapping lazily at the flies.

  Stour Temple, the vicar, is the master of this dwelling of rural quiet — that is to say, he pays the bills, but exercises little other lordship, leaving the government pretty nearly altogether in the hands of his dear maiden sister, Barbara, who takes into counsel her brother, the vicar’s junior, I think, by about a year, beloved of both, though seen with different eyes.

  This brother is Roger S. Temple, and as unlike as may be to the slim dark vicar. I am going, young ladies, to describe a fellow, by no means handsome, who, nevertheless, from some celestial qualities, has always seemed to me almost beautiful. He violates all the canons of your heroic statuary, as you shall see, if you read on a little. But, on the whole, knowing that in age, ways, and form, he is likely to fall under your displeasure, I would advise your looking another way, and passing by what concerns him. Happy am I to be able to write of him in the present tense still, and yet to know that these lines will never meet his honest eye, or wound his innocent soul, for he reads no books but those half-dozen samples of the old sentimental novel, which his sister, Miss Barbara, keeps in her bookcase, and these so much at his leisure, that by the time he reads “finis” in the last, he is ready with a fresh interest for the title-page of the first. He is fat, and round, and high-shouldered — clumsy, I must allow — no longer an athlete, and when, for instance, he ran after his hat, on the stormy day in October last, suffered more, and was longer in recovering, than he ever divulged. His face is the kindliest, though homeliest, in the world. It is a fat and expansive countenance, somewhat brown; there is not an angle in it, anywhere. He has no moustache or beard. His lips and chin are shorn and bluish, with a fat kind dimple here and there. He is somewhat bald too; a baldness not glaring and complete, a little softened and downy, and those remnants of what was once crisp black hair at the sides and back are grizzled, and now very much dashed with white. Bound little light-blue eyes, as innocent as they were in the cradle, are his, with next to no eyebrows over them. At a cricket-match, thirty years ago, some of his upper teeth were smashed, and time has, somewhat prematurely, removed the rest, which, to his kindly smile, gives an infantine character, though some people, when he smiles, fancy rather that he looks like a fond old nurse, charmed with the prattle and gambols of the children toddling about her chair.