Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu

by J. Sheridan le Fanu

  To this gentleman, whom he had despatched to Scarbrook to await his arrival and administer for him in the interim, he was now writing thus:

  “My dear Adderley, — No one is more ready to admit than I the immense value of your time; and therefore I merely hint that, if you could waste a very few minutes in improving your valuable letters, they might be applied with advantage in forming the words of your sentences, which at present are only indicated, and in thus saving me an infinity of fruitless trouble. I would also suggest that if, instead of thinking after, you would take the trouble to think before you write, it would obviate the necessity of those frequent erasures and interlineations which further complicate the problem of speculating upon your meaning. I write at present to beg you won’t go to races or any other d — d thing, just for a week. By that time I shall be at Scarbrook; and pray don’t leave, as I may write by any post, and arrive the train after. Write to this place up to Saturday. I shall go to town on Sunday, and remain there till Tuesday, or perhaps Wednesday; you may expect me on either day. It is just possible a friend may precede me. Suppose we call her Mrs. — (any name you please, only tell me what), and you receive her as your married — any relation you please — a mere lark as you say — but the rustics must not be offended. Have you any objection? We sha’n’t remain many days at Scarbrook, and you shall never see that dull spot of earth again. She must be received with respect, observe, being, I assure you, a lady. Her maid will accompany her. Let me have a line, legible, by return of post. Let my people make everything, in a small way, as comfortable as possible. I don’t understand the object of what you call ‘roughing it.’

  “Ever, dear Adderley, “Yours sincerely, R. W.”

  Sir Roke came down and talked with Amy Shadwell, whom he found at last in the drawingroom. The pretty Amy of long ago, with the large hazel eyes — those eyes would always be pretty — and the slender figure, and white delicate hands, and her pretty even teeth, and the early pleasant smile; but how very delicate she looks! there can be no mistake here — poor little smiling thing! She’ll not be a trouble very long to Mark!

  Mark, her first and only love, whom she still loves, and thinks the handsomest and the cleverest man on earth, whose looks she watches by stealth, for whom she hazards little hesitating smiles on the chance, just the chance, of wiling him back, even for a moment, to the illusions of bygone days, and luring him into one answering smile. Poor little smiling thing, with always the same load at her heart!

  I wonder whether any woman, except a very coarse one, ever met a man who had admired and pursued her once, and not beheld her since, for an interval say of ten years, without a secret shrinking and a pang: she would rather remain unseen, leaving the early image in its place un-shivered.

  Sir Roke Wycherly advanced and took her hand with a smile that admitted no shock and no decay. He sat beside her at the sofa with an air so tender and respectful as testified that the romantic gallantry of chivalric days was not over.

  They talked a great deal of all sorts of things, and of old times, of course, and he said some pretty things, at which she laughed, but was pleased, and repeated them after to old Wyndle and pretty Rachel, and laughed more. She knew it was flattery, but spoken by the man who once felt it, there was still the ring of a romantic sincerity in it.

  She talked to him of course a great deal about her demigod Mark, and he listened, I am bound to say, respectfully; and he thought within himself what an odd arrangement of nature it was that women do go on liking particular fellows. It answers some end, he supposed; but it did seem to him a mystery, worshipping fellows like Mark there, who has not cared a pin about her for ten years or more.

  “What a pretty creature she was, sweetly pretty!” Sir Roke thought; “very gentle, and rather agreeable. She seemed to me positively clever when she was young. What fire and point a brilliant eye lends to a bon-mot! How their good looks tint and lighten up their conversation! Mark will be looking out for a wife — he’ll try for money this time — I’ll back him to get a woman with money. Wonderful fellow he is; his hair — what a mystery the hair is” — Sir Roke had a great deal of trouble with his whiskers; we know that the upper tresses grew, hair by hair, in the studio of the great M. Picardin of Paris, and had ceased to cost the baronet any anxiety— “a wonderfully preserved fellow, as good-looking almost as ever he was, and the estates and a very good name, the Shadwells; it’s time he should make a push somehow — great advantage to my pretty little friend Rachel, pretty little girl, the Miranda of this solitude — I wonder where they are.” He was by this time in his room, and rang his bell for Clewson. “Find out where the young ladies are, will you? and if they have gone out for a walk, in what direction, and get the people to show you, so that you can point it out to me, will you?”

  In the interim Sir Roke made an inspection before the mirror, and some little repairs and embellishment, and then walked out, as unexceptionably got up as he would have done in Mayfair.

  “I’ve no fancy for killing birds,” he used to say, “or deer, or fish, or myself, by Jove! a little delicacy in boyhood saves one from all that, and I never could contract, thank Heaven, a taste for the drudgery and butchery of what they call their sports, fiddling with worms and taking fish in one’s hands, or killing a great deer as big as a cow, or breaking my neck in pursuit of a stinking fox! I’m not ashamed to say I’m a bit of a cockney, and don’t care to kill my own meat, and like to be clean; and I look on the country as a very decided bore, a place where we get our flour and beef from, and go when we’re sick; but I’m altogether of Captain Morris’s way of thinking about the grove of chimneys and the sweet shady side of Fall Mall.”

  CHAPTER XXIV.

  UNDER LADY MILDRED’S WINDOW.

  Miss MARLYN’S dress is very nun-like, made high up, with broad plates, quite simply. She makes them herself, I think — the material nothing remarkable; she affects greys — silver greys, I think we call them — which look as if they were shot with silk, but are not: grey, nun-like, I say, but with just a little bit of colour below her full white throat, generally a small knot of crimson velvet. I can’t be quite sure; just a few inches of soft and intense colour, harmonising, the French know how, with the shy elegant grey. It is the most humble, quiet, piquant thing in all the wardrobe of cruel Love. Everything is in keeping. The little bonnet she used to wear — nothing — straw; but there is a tournure in it, as in everything she wears; and the croquet gloves she pulls on so carelessly: is the prettiness theirs, or is it all in the slender hands they cover? Her dress might have been shorter without violence to the fashion — mutabile semper — of that particular season, but it would have lost its conventual quietude, and when some cruel chance for a moment shows her boot, you see the slenderest boot, the prettiest foot in all the world.

  When this young lady took her walk today with Rachel, it seemed to her pupil that she was not in her usual spirits, or, truth to say, temper. She was silent, or stopped her companion’s overtures to conversation with short and dry answers, so much so, that Rachel asked her whether she had vexed her. Whereat Miss Agnes looked full at her on a sudden with her deep grey eyes, and laughed.

  “No! what makes you think that?” she answered.

  “Your silence and your manner,” replied Rachel.

  “Well, I have been silent, I believe, and I really don’t know why; but my manner?” said Miss Marlyn.

  They were by this time under the grey walls of the ruined Manor House of Wynderfel.

  “Yes, Pucelle, your manner,” repeated Rachel.

  “Well, Rachel, I did not intend — I did not even perceive it — there, won’t you?”

  And she drew her towards her and kissed her, and then held her from her and looked for a moment in her face with an expression which Rachel did not understand.

  “Vexed with you; good God! what a notion!” she exclaimed, with a sharp disdain; “what in the whole earth could I be vexed with you about? Come, do pray let us talk of something else.” Th
ere was a little silence here, and with a slightly changed manner she added— “You know, dear Rachel, I love you.”

  “Shall I tell you about Lady Mildred?” asked Rachel.

  “Do,” answered Miss Agnes; and Rachel related the story.

  “It’s a very pretty, sad story — love and jealousy — poor thing!” said Rachel, by way of epilogue to her tragedy.

  “Lady Mildred, what a goose!” said Miss Marlyn.

  “Ah! you don’t think so, Pucelle,” answered Rachel.

  “From that window?” inquired Agnes, and she stood up and looked through her little glass at it. She did not smile, she looked without sympathy or interest, as she might at the “drop” of a prison at which a convict had been executed.

  “A high window,” she said at last. “If she did go about it, Lady Mildred was quite right to do it effectually, don’t you think? An odd fancy to live in a garret, though! I did it once, because I could not help it. Old La Chouette we used to call old De la Perriere. De la Perriere, indeed! Her real name was Roque, and her father was porter in a dirty old house near Notre Dame. She put me into one; but I’ll never sleep in a garret again.”

  There was something both cynical and dismal in Agnes Marlyn now, that was quite new to Rachel, and which somehow made her feel uncomfortable, and even nervous.

  “It was not a garret, however, in our sense,” she said. “It was, on the contrary, a very fine chamber; look to what a height the roof rose above it, and look inside with your glass, and you’ll see a wonderfully carved mantelpiece. There is a great stone with the Shadwell arms, and I don’t know how many quarterings over it. It was quite a splendid room.”

  “And if she was so comfortable, why did she kill herself?” asked Miss Marlyn.

  “She was wild with grief, and love, and jealousy, poor thing!” answered Rachel. “She was cruelly illused, and has haunted us, you know, ever since.”

  “I don’t pity her a bit,” said Miss Marlyn.’ “You don’t!” exclaimed Rachel.

  “Neither will you, when you know better,” replied Agnes. “How can you interest yourself about a fool?”

  “Why a fool?” asked Rachel.

  “Because she was jealous, and a greater one for killing herself. If she would kill some one, she should have killed him. But he was not worth it.”

  “I think, Pucelle, you want to shock me,” said Rachel, after a little pause; “why do you talk like that?”

  In fact, it was something wicked in Pucelle’s face rather than in her words, which were, like those of young people, often loosely spoken, that vaguely startled Rachel Shadwell; but people don’t always take the trouble to analyse their impressions.

  “Oh! every one talks what they don’t half mean sometimes. I think all that business up there was miserable folly,” said Agnes Marlyn. “She was an imbecile, that’s all. It would have been murder, of course, to kill him, and murder’s wicked; but it was worse to kill herself. It’s a world of tyranny.”

  “What do you mean, Pucelle?” asked her companion.

  “I was tyrannised over ever since I was a wee thing like that,” and she laid her left arm across her breast, and locked it in her right, like a baby, with a laugh.

  What a wonderfully pretty strange nurse she would have made!

  “You like babies, dear little sweet things, you know,” she continued, and laughed again, — not pleasantly, Rachel thought. “As long as I can remember papa used to box my ears for anything or nothing, every day almost, and lock me up in a dark room; and after my mother died, often half-starved me, when I knew he had money enough in his pocket ‘for his pleasures.”

  “Agnes, dear, I thought you loved him!” said Rachel, with wide and sorrowful eyes.

  “So I did, I believe, in spite of it; I don’t know why — he did not deserve it. Perhaps because he was lively, and amused me sometimes, when he took the trouble; and he was a man, and we like to be illused by men. It seems to suit — nature designed it, I suppose — slave and tyrant. But the idea of being jealous of a man!”

  And she smiled along the daisies at her feet, in a listless contempt.

  “Madame du Barry was a very wise woman,” she continued; “she did not know what that sort of jealousy meant; she never teazed the king.”

  “Was she a good woman?” inquired Rachel.

  “Yes,” answered Miss Agnes, with decision.

  I read her life in my garret, once; she wrote it herself. She had no Tartufferie about her, and was goodnatured — that’s what I mean by good.”

  “But was she really good?” asked Rachel.

  “Yes — well enough — good and wise in her way, I suppose; how should I know?” replied Miss Marlyn carelessly.

  “And who was she?” inquired her pupil.

  “She was one of Louis the Fifteenth’s wives, when he died.”

  “One of his wives!” repeated Rachel, as not having heard her rightly.

  “Yes; kings have as many as they choose,” Agnes laughed. “Upon my honour they have. King David had, and every other king that was worth a rush, ever since; as many as ever they choose. Why do you stare, child? I’d tell you no end of things — all true — only you’d tell them again, and get poor Pucelle into trouble.”

  She had two or three pebbles in the palm of her hand, which she was throwing with tiny jerks into the air, and rolling them about, and looking intently on them all the time she spoke, so that Rachel saw nothing of her eyes but their long lashes.

  “I should not like to hear anything I might not tell mamma,” said little Rachel, spiritedly.

  Her simplicity may amuse town-bred young ladies, but they will excuse her, remembering that she had not their advantages, and that her young mother had been her near and sisterly companion.

  “No, of course not — what a little fool! Your mamma, of course; I tell everything to your mamma myself,” said Agnes, quietly, still rolling the little pebbles in her hand. “All I say is, that no woman ought ever to make a fool of herself about any man; and no woman but an idiot, absolutely, could think of hurting herself for jealousy.”

  “They say that jealousy is a sign of love,” argued Rachel, in support of the sentiment of this legend of Wynderfel, which had seized on her imagination. “Wives always love their husbands best.” She thought she saw the light of a smile cross Agnes’s downcast face at these words. “And if they did not love them best, why should they marry them?” she added, arguing resentfully with that smile.

  Agnes Marlyn looked full at her for a moment, with laughter in her deep dark-grey eyes that she did not understand; and with the end of the daisy she had plucked from the bank close by, between her fingers, she knocked the pretty tip of Rachel’s nose, as one of Titania’s fairies might have done, with the tiniest little tap in the world, and almost whispered:

  “Mademoiselle Simplicity!”

  They sat down for a time, in silence, on that old stone bench which I have already mentioned. It was the drowsy time of day, when the afternoon sun is warm, and the air hardly stirs. Rachel had a book with her, and turned over its leaves, and laid it down.

  “Let us come to the ruin — the chapel, I mean, close by,” said Miss Marlyn, getting up listlessly. “We’ll sit under the window, in the shade of the ivy; it’s pleasanter than here.”

  CHAPTER XXV.

  SOME ONE LOOKS IN AT THE WINDOW.

  THE ruined chapel of Wynderfel stands on the slope behind the Manor House, embowered among grand old trees. A broken stone fence, here and there half obliterated, surrounds it; and a few stooping thorn and elders have straggled within it; an ancient yew-tree — which has witnessed, no doubt, the old funereal splendours of the Shadwells, whose burial-place this chapel was ever so long ago — still maintains its sombre supremacy in the centre of the long disused churchyard.

  Agnes Marlyn’s conversation had somehow frightened Rachel. Up to this she had seemed always playful, girlish, like herself; a sort of malign revelation had taken place. She had mistaken her; her sympathies we
re not with the child. The young girl felt she was making a mock of her; knew that she was the stronger; that she was mistress of a knowledge that was not good, and whose nature she had not apprehended. She was not as high as she thought, but more dangerous. She could not define all this; it was such an overpowering impression as comes in a dream, and there was a sense of sorrow and degradation mingling with her fear.

  In an evil world the evil is the more potent spirit, and overawes the good. We have not faith enough in Time, the vindicator; how few, even in Eternity, that will adjust all equities! The present is the inheritance of evil. We instinctively know this, and the knowledge clothes its fascinations and cruelty in terror and power.

  The first imperfect manifestations with which Evil hints its presence, touch the eternal antipathies of human nature with a frightful thrill. The ideas of danger and pain foreshadow its approach. Neither is there any such thing as a long hypocrisy; sooner or later the features of Evil appear with unmitigated distinctness. It is self-revealing, like Good, but manifests itself sooner, because its power is of time, and the other of eternity.