Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu

by J. Sheridan le Fanu

  “Don’t look that way, Pucelle, it’s so odd.”

  “How, ma chere?”

  “So changed, I mean.”

  “Perhaps I am changed.”

  “Turn away from that light.”

  “I’m looking at Wynderfel, and thinking of Wynderfel,” said the beautiful girl apathetically.

  “But that light is so unbecoming,” persisted Rachel.

  “Unbecoming — oh?” murmured the young lady with a smile, and a satire faintly returning to her face, and she did turn and looked with a tiny nod — arch and dismal, also — on Rachel, who took her hand, and in silence for a time, side by side, they looked out on the fading landscape. In Agnes Marlyn’s face there was melancholy without softening. The far-off gaze, and those delicate features looked sad and stem — no sympathy — no yearning.

  “Come, Pucelle, — I won’t have you look so sad and cruel,” said Rachel with a little laugh. “You shall look like yourself.”

  And with fingers interlaced, as they had been standing, she raised Agnes Marlyn’s hand and leaned her head lightly on it — the attitude was fond and even caressing.

  There was a short silence, the light was fading, Rachel raised her head, and in a minute more she said:

  “An odd little scar you have got, Pucelle, in the middle of your hand.”

  She was looking at a little white scar on the palm of Agnes Marlyn’s hand. Agnes still looking out, held her slender hand, palm-upward, wide open for Rachel’s scrutiny.

  “But it really is,” she continued, with growing curiosity, and with a little laugh she added, “why it has just five little rays, the star of Bethlehem, you know, and your left hand, that’s the mark of the gaze-lady.” Without changing her attitude, Agnes also laughed a little.

  “I did not think of that,” she said. “I got that when I was a very little thing — I don’t remember — some one told me, getting over a fence, and I leaned on a sharp stake — yes, so it has — one, two, three, four, five,” and she smiled for a moment. “That star of Bethlehem burns sometimes, I can tell you — it pained me to-day for instance — all the time we were talking in that little chapel.”

  She sighed, and with a little shiver, drew her hand away suddenly, and her cloak about her. Then Rachel, without an attempt to stay her, saw Agnes Marlyn leave the room.

  “She is angry, I think; what can have happened? I have said nothing to vex her. She’ll tell me all by and by. She can’t seriously mean all that she says. Yes; she’ll tell me the cause, I dare say, and she will be like herself again.”

  Rachel fancied she thought all this, but she did not, for the dark laugh of Agnes chilled her with a strange presage of evil.

  CHAPTER VII.

  VENUS ‘DUSESOS’ FAREWELL.

  THE window was open; the rich odours of the flowers exhaled on the evening air, and the rose-tinted western lights, melting into the deep sky of the coming night, inspired that luxurious melancholy which is, for the young, the poetic foreshadowing of the sorrows of life. Rachel, leaning against the side of the window, looked out upon those fading piles of cloud that crowned the solemn landscape, and experienced the influence of the hour and the scene. From under the boughs of the ancient clump of trees that stands nearest to the house, emerged a figure, and slowly approached the window at which she sat.

  “Only I, Miss Rachel; only I, your old tutor,” said the well-known voice of Carmel Sherlock.

  “Oh! Mr. Sherlock?” she said, kindly.

  “It is a long time, Miss Rachel, since we read French and German, and Italian.”

  “Yes, very long; but you have been so busy.”

  “A long interruption, Miss Rachel.”

  “Too long — a great deal,” she said.

  “All goes on and on, Miss Rachel; and that time sickened and died, and a new time is come; and that, too, will die, and be succeeded by another, and another; the first perishes, there is no unknitting the fruit, and expanding it into the flower again; there is no folding the flower, and shutting it up in the seed again. Nature makes no step back — never looks over the shoulder — never.”

  “Well, sha’n’t we resume our Italian soon? we must begin again — soon — very soon,” said she.

  “No; not soon — never” he said, very sadly.

  “Never! Why?” asked Rachel.

  “You see, Miss Rachel, they all believe, one way or another, in that palingenesis; for my part, I can’t believe but that, somehow, I shall see the light again, and see my love again.

  Petrarch met, I think, his Laura when he died. How beautiful those lime-trees look, where I read ‘Tasso,’ long ago, to you, when you were a little thing. I love these solitudes, and when I die, I’ll come — yes, I’ll come again — not to be seen — only to wander here, by the old lime-trees where I read ‘Tasso,’ long ago. Or at Wynderfel, where sympathy grows among the brambles and ivy-tendrils, and the wind among the high gables has a pitying sound, where I may chance to meet that poor lady who died for her love; and I would tell her — my God! — all my misery. The sordid idol!”

  She listened to this rhapsody, as she had to others from the lips of the same maundering prophet, not understanding, only in kindness. His lonely habits had taught him quite to dispense with dialogue, and his spoken meditation flowed on:

  “That was her girlish thought — to die. Yes, once worshipped, always a divinity — always. Break the poor heart — that was the shrine. Shatter the brain, where the image always stands in light; it is so only that love can break the idol, and extinguish the tapers of a vain worship. I hear that scream — sometimes — so far away — at night! Yes, indeed, by Heaven! like one wild note of distant music — the past and future in it. I’ve stood a whole night, at the window listening. It hardly lasts while you could count a slow ten — swelling on and on, louder and louder, till it stops in silence. That one note is a concert from Paradise and Tartarus; it fills a whole night, to a man who will think; the hours fly after it, pursuing like waves to drown it. Nature hastens to hide it away; the morning comes before I am aware.”

  Carmel looked with a despairing eye over the wide landscape toward the disappearing glow of sunset, as you might fancy a shipwrecked man upon a lonely raft gazing towards that fading light in the space of ocean.

  “What a pity! Love does not meet love in this world; follows a phantom and unreal voices, and, finding itself alone, dies. A hard case it is. Love crosses love, like ships at sea, each on a different errand, over the waste of life; the narrow horizon coming up and disappearing. Miss Rachel, it is terrible! the affections all so minute and intense, and nature and time so vast and vague — all love so individual; it may be never, in the revolution of time and the changes of worlds, never to meet again. You need not tell me; I tell myself. I know it; it is unreal. I have created it; but it is irrevocable — an irreparable mistake. I have found it out, but am none the better. Satan has come, and I have tasted of knowledge; and so — forth from Paradise for ever. The wide world; the dark night! Little Miss Rachel, with the golden hair, how long it seems since I taught you to write! I don’t blame you; I never did. It is nature that is cruel — kind, but also cruel. The bird will fly — nature is vigorous — the bird will fly! All pain, and pleasure, and illusion, come to an end. Instinct, the inspiration of our birth, alone inflexible. God whispered to each creature when he made it, and God is immutable.”

  Carmel looked down, and up, and stamped upon the ground.

  “The hoary Satan! — the old dragon! — with poisonous tongue and golden scales, lying under this moon awhile, basking and panting in a gluttonous dream. The reptile! — the murderer! There is a spear of light for him. His sun shall be darkened, and his moon turned into blood. When he moves, the skin of the earth quivers under him. The elements that gave him birth abhor him. But my hand I hold palm upward. My robe is white. The fossil reptiles are extinct. Leave the monstrous generations to the vindicator, Death. Out of the castle I go, and close the gate after me; into the night, the fores
t, the waste — never to look back — only hoping for some spot where a worn out man may die! The journey — the descent; and oh! at last, the fountain of forgetfulness, and the cold sleep of death. I hope, Miss Rachel, I have not been ungrateful — that is, quite unprofitable.”

  “Unprofitable! no one was ever kinder or more useful,” she answered.

  “That is all,” he said, sadly.

  “And if you were to leave us, I really don’t know how papa could manage without you; and as for me, almost everything I know I have learned from you, my kind teacher.”

  “Ah! yes, the Italian — the French; these will go on, and she will remember, and sometimes say, I learned these from that poor Carmel Sherlock, who went away, and was heard of no more.”

  “No; I will say I learned them from that kind Mr. Sherlock who would not go away, because he knew it would make us all sorry; who stayed with us, and is with us still, and will never leave Raby.”

  Sherlock with both hands leaned on the window-stone, as a drowning man might hold by a rock, and she thought he looked steadfastly in her face. She could not see his features distinctly in the deep shadow, but it seemed to her that he was weeping.

  Her heart bled with compassion for the kind creature who had been so gentle with her through all the inattention and waywardness of her childish years, and she wondered how one who never gave a moment’s pain to others should inflict so much, and, as it seemed to her, so causelessly, upon himself.

  “I’m going, Miss Rachel; I’ve come to say farewell. I’ll leave Raby perhaps tonight, perhaps in the morning; but I’ll see you no more.”

  “Really!” exclaimed she, in a kind of consternation.

  “Really, Miss — if there should be such a word as real where all is visionary. So, Miss Rachel, goodbye.”

  “No, I’ll not say goodbye,” said she; “and you sha’n’t go — good, kind Carmel. I don’t think I should know Raby without you; so, goodbye, it shall not be.”

  “Well, Miss, what will you say?”

  “I’ll say goodnight, as usual.”

  “Very well, Miss,” and he held out his hand timidly. She gave him hers. “It will do; yes, better. Goodnight, Miss Rachel; for night it will be.”

  He hurriedly kissed her hand, and repeated faintly, “Goodnight!” and he walked quickly away along that front of the old house, and was lost to her sight, before she had quite recovered from the surprise of the strange familiarity, if anything so sad and timid could be so called, of his parting salutation.

  “Poor Carmel! is he really going? And so grieved; he seems quite heartbroken. Has he heard any very bad news from his people at home? Surely he ought to tell us; papa might be of use, and advise him; and he ought to know that we all feel for him, and with him, in all his troubles.”

  So she murmured to herself, as, leaning from the window, she looked after the disappearing figure of Carmel Sherlock.

  He walked round the two sides of the house, and by the small projecting tower, I may call it, in which his quaint apartment lay.

  “What an oddity — poor old Carmel!” said she, with a little shrug and a smile, as he disappeared.

  “Spirit of light and beauty!” said he, with a moan. “Henceforward for me, the long, dark winter of the north! The hour of flowers and of light I shall see no more.”

  Up and around he looked; he was taking leave of everything that night.

  The front of the house, with the hall-door, and the winged demi-griffins keeping guard, with fierce crooked beaks, and talons, and expanded wings, were all in deep shadow by this time. He stood upon the steps — the door partly opened.

  “What is the meaning of these things?” pondered Carmel Sherlock, whose mind like all others too strongly infused with fancy, was easily and powerfully diverted by any object that invited for the moment his imagination.

  “These griffins, which heraldry has found — not created; the eagle, the lion — a combination whose origin goes back into mystery: an Assyrian image, proceeding, perhaps, from visions. What is its meaning — what is its force? What latent power and action on the world of spirits? See here! this great family of Shadwell — the Shadwells of Wynderfel; all through the County History growing greater and greater till they came here, and passed in and out between these carved dreams. Not a breath — not a sound — enters the door but through them; and how have they dwindled ever since! wane and waste! — peak and pine! Ha! what’s that?”

  “Well! what is it?” said Shadwell, surlily, who had nearly reached the doorsteps unperceived, on his return. “Perhaps it’s I; will you allow me to get by?”

  “I saw it, sir!”

  “What did you see?” demanded Mark.

  “I swear I saw it pass and enter the house!”

  “Suppose we follow it,” said Mark. “I think it did right at this hour.”

  “Only a shadow — a degree darker than the rest; your evil genius or mine; an influence, about no good —

  “ — Things that love night.

  Love not such nights as these.’”

  “Do, pray, allow me to go in, or go yourself,” said Mark Shadwell, looking much angrier than his words implied.

  Carmel Sherlock drew back.

  “One meets you everywhere, except where you are wanted. Don’t you think you might sometimes look into the books upstairs; the accounts will be in a precious mess, if you do nothing but study the picturesque and see ghosts!” and so speaking, with an angry look at Carmel Sherlock — a look charged with violent and unspoken wrath — he entered the house.

  “See, how angry he is; he can’t help it. He does not see the cause; he only feels it — my benefactor!”

  Carmel Sherlock hesitated at the threshold, and, with a shudder, entered, and went up alone to his room.

  CHAPTER VIII.

  AGNES IN HER BEDROOM.

  Miss Marlyn took a candle and went upstairs to her room. In the hall she passed the open door of the drawingroom, and from within, a gaunt figure beckoned her, silently with a smile; affecting not to see Sir Roke, she passed on, but he overtook her at the foot of the staircase.

  “You did not see me?” said he, with the same smile, and in a very low tone.

  She stopped short, and looked full on him with rather fierce eyes, and flushed cheeks, and said: “Yes, sir, I did.”

  “You did? Then you cut me! Cruel, isn’t it?”

  As he spoke, the baronet glanced back into the hall and up the stairs vigilantly.

  “You said, sir — you promised, upon your honour, that you would speak to me no more during your stay at Raby. I don’t much care — but if you will speak — speak aloud.”

  “I should not have spoken at all, had you deigned to smile as you passed,” he said gallantly, and glanced again quickly, but no one approached; “why did you not come in for a moment to the drawingroom — I don’t frighten you, I hope.”

  “You can have nothing to say, sir, you know you can’t; do leave me at peace while you stay here; let me collect my thoughts, if I can.”

  “Well, you are a very odd— “

  “Yery odd, perhaps,” she said, turning away to pass on.

  “Yes, a most capricious and charming little witch,” said he.

  “Very commonplace, perhaps. When I’ve made up my mind, though I suffer, I debate no more. If that is odd, it should not be so,” she continued, taking no note of his parenthesis.

  At this moment a distant step was heard, and Agnes went her way, and Sir Roke glided quietly again into the drawingroom, where, standing on the hearthrug, he looked up at his own distorted shadow, dancing over the ceiling, and the reflected flicker of the fire, on the distant cornices, with an unpleasant smile.

  At times, indeed, this evidence of satisfaction was heightened to a quiet laugh; he had not been in such spirits since his arrival at Raby. He was disposed to be charmed with everything. It was a little excursion into savage life, and he liked the notion of roughing it, as in this case, without any essential sacrifice of comfort.
He smiled, he laughed, it was no habitual homage to the genialities; but in his solitude, the expansion of a genuine comfort and elation. He even spoke peaceably that evening to Mr. Clewson.

  He looked at his watch — still a quarter of an hour to wait. He rather enjoyed his dinner at Raby — country fare, and no French cookery, very odd, but a new sensation, and he was hungry, as invalids are oftener than they will always allow.

  He thought he heard Mark Shadwell’s step crossing the passage outside the door; he placed himself so as to see. It was Mark, returning from his walk. The guest was but dimly visible as he stood within, in the uncertain light of the fire. Mark saw him.

  “Ha!” exclaimed Mark Shadwell, stopping short.

  It was involuntary. He had not expected to see Roke Wycherly, who seldom descended from his dressing-room so early.

  This faint “ha!” had in it something of the gasp with which a man might discover an escaped cobra unexpectedly on his hearthstone.

  I think each would have been equally well pleased to have escaped this recognition. But Mark’s ejaculation had been too loud, and the recognition was inevitable.

  “Charming evening — delicious sunsets you have in this part of the world,” said Sir Roke; “you have just the right quantity of vapour; your colouring is perfectly splendid. I don’t know whether it is always so at Raby, or only that I am very much in luck. I wonder our artists don’t study sunsets more than they do.”

  Mark had come into the drawingroom. The last faint flush had nearly died out in the west, and the flicker from the fire chiefly lighted up the room. It showed how pale his face was, and glittered on his fierce eyes, as he looked in a kind of abstraction on his guest.