Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu

by J. Sheridan le Fanu

  “We must have left it in the corner tower of Cloostedd House, which commands that view of the grounds, you remember; it would not do to lose it. It is the most accurate thing we have. I’ll sit down here and rest a little till you come back.”

  The man was absent little more than twenty minutes. When he returned, he found that Sir Bale had changed his position, and was now walking to and fro, around and about, in what, at a distance, he fancied was mere impatience, on the open space a couple of hundred paces nearer to the turn in the valley towards the boat. It was not impatience. He was agitated. He looked pale, and he took his companion’s arm — a thing he had never thought of doing before — and said, “Let us away quickly. I’ve something to tell at home, — and I forgot it.”

  Not another word did Sir Bale exchange with his companion. He sat in the stern of the boat, gloomy as a man about to glide under traitor’s-gate. He entered his house in the same sombre and agitated state. He entered his library, and sat for a long time as if stunned.

  At last he seemed to have made-up his mind to something; and applied himself quietly and diligently to arranging papers, and docketing some and burning others. Dinner-time arrived. He sent to tell Lady Mardykes that he should not join her at dinner, but would see her afterwards.

  “It was between eight and nine,” she continued, “I forget the exact time, when he came to the tower drawingroom where I was. I did not hear his approach. There is a stone stair, with a thick carpet on it. He told me he wished to speak to me there. It is an out-of-the-way place — a small old room with very thick walls, and there is a double door, the inner one of oak — I suppose he wished to guard against being overheard.

  “There was a look in his face that frightened me; I saw he had something dreadful to tell. He looked like a man on whom a lot had fallen to put some one to death,” said Lady Mardykes. “O, my poor Bale! my husband, my husband! he knew what it would be to me.”

  Here she broke into the wildest weeping, and it was some time before she resumed.

  “He seemed very kind and very calm,” she said at last; “he said but little; and, I think, these were his words: ‘I find, Janet, I have made a great miscalculation — I thought my hour of danger had passed. We have been many years together, but a parting must sooner or later be, and my time has come.’

  “I don’t know what I said. I would not have so much minded — for I could not have believed, if I had not seen him — but there was that in his look and tone which no one could doubt.

  “‘I shall die before tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘You must command yourself, Janet; it can’t be altered now.’

  “‘O, Bale,’ I cried nearly distracted, ‘you would not kill yourself!’

  “‘Kill myself! poor child! no, indeed,’ he said; ‘it is simply that I shall die. No violent death — nothing but the common subsidence of life — I have made up my mind; what happens to everybody can’t be so very bad; and millions of worse men than I die every year. You must not follow me to my room, darling; I shall see you by and by.’

  “His language was collected and even cold; but his face looked as if it was cut in stone; you never saw, in a dream, a face like it.”

  Lady Walsingham here said, “I am certain he is ill; he’s in a fever. You must not distract and torture yourself about his predictions. You sent for Doctor Torvey; what did he say?”

  “I could not tell him all.”

  “O, no; I don’t mean that; they’d only say he was mad, and we little better for minding what he says. But did the Doctor see him? and what did he say of his health?”

  “Yes; he says there is nothing wrong — no fever — nothing whatever. Poor Bale has been so kind; he saw him to please me,” she sobbed again wildly. “I wrote to implore of him. It was my last hope, strange as it seems; and O, would to God I could think it! But there is nothing of that kind. Wait till you have seen him. There is a frightful calmness about all he says and does; and his directions are all so clear, and his mind so perfectly collected, it is quite impossible.”

  And poor Lady Mardykes again burst into a frantic agony of tears.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  Sir Bale in the Gallery

  “Now, Janet darling, you are yourself low and nervous, and you treat this fancy of Bale’s as seriously as he does himself. The truth is, he is a hypochondriac, as the doctors say; and you will find that I am right; he will be quite well in the morning, and I daresay a little ashamed of himself for having frightened his poor little wife as he has. I will sit up with you. But our poor Mary is not, you know, very strong; and she ought to lie down and rest a little. Suppose you give me a cup of tea in the drawingroom. I will run up to my room and get these things off, and meet you in the drawingroom; or, if you like it better, you can sit with me in my own room; and for goodness’ sake let us have candles enough and a bright fire; and I promise you, if you will only exert your own good sense, you shall be a great deal more cheerful in a very little time.”

  Lady Walsingham’s address was kind and cheery, and her air confident. For a moment a ray of hope returned, and her sister Janet acknowledged at least the possibility of her theory. But if confidence is contagious, so also is panic; and Lady Walsingham experienced a sinking of the heart which she dared not confess to her sister, and vainly strove to combat.

  Lady Walsingham went up with her sister Mary, and having seen her in her room, and spoken again to her in the same cheery tone in which she had lectured her sister Lady Mardykes, she went on; and having taken possession of her own room, and put off her cloaks and shawls, she was going downstairs again, when she heard Sir Bale’s voice, as he approached along the gallery, issuing orders to a servant, as it seemed, exactly in his usual tone.

  She turned, with a strange throb at her heart, and met him.

  A little sterner, a little paler than usual he looked; she could perceive no other change. He took her hand kindly and held it, as with dilated eyes he looked with a dark inquiry for a moment in her face. He signed to the servant to go on, and said, “I’m glad you have come, Maud. You have heard what is to happen; and I don’t know how Janet could have borne it without your support. You did right to come; and you’ll stay with her for a day or two, and take her away from this place as soon as you can.”

  She looked at him with the embarrassment of fear. He was speaking to her with the calmness of a leavetaking in the pressroom — the serenity that overlies the greatest awe and agony of which human nature is capable.

  “I am glad to see you, Bale,” she began, hardly knowing what she said, and she stopped short.

  “You are come, it turns out, on a sad mission,” he resumed; “you find all about to change. Poor Janet! it is a blow to her. I shall not live to see tomorrow’s sun.”

  “Come,” she said, startled, “you must not talk so. No, Bale, you have no right to speak so; you can have no reason to justify it. It is cruel and wicked to trifle with your wife’s feelings. If you are under a delusion, you must make an effort and shake it off, or, at least, cease to talk of it. You are not well; I know by your looks you are ill; but I am very certain we shall see you much better by tomorrow, and still better the day following.”

  “No, I’m not ill, sister. Feel that pulse, if you doubt me; there is no fever in it. I never was more perfectly in health; and yet I know that before the clock, that has just struck three, shall have struck five, I, who am talking to you, shall be dead.”

  Lady Walsingham was frightened, and her fear irritated her.

  “I have told you what I think and believe,” she said vehemently. “I think it wrong and cowardly of you to torture my poor sister with your whimsical predictions. Look into your own mind, and you will see you have absolutely no reason to support what you say. How can you inflict all this agony upon a poor creature foolish enough to love you as she does, and weak enough to believe in your idle dreams?”

  “Stay, sister; it is not a matter to be debated so. If tomorrow I can hear you, it will be time enough to upbraid me.
Pray return now to your sister; she needs all you can do for her. She is much to be pitied; her sufferings afflict me. I shall see you and her again before my death. It would have been more cruel to leave her unprepared. Do all in your power to nerve and tranquillise her. What is past cannot now be helped.”

  He paused, looking hard at her, as if he had half made up his mind to say something more. But if there was a question of the kind, it was determined in favour of silence.

  He dropped her hand, turned quickly, and left her.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  Dr. Torvey’s Opinion

  When Lady Walsingham reached the head of the stairs, she met her maid, and from her learned that her sister, Lady Mardykes, was downstairs in the same room. On approaching, she heard her sister Mary’s voice talking with her, and found them together. Mary, finding that she could not sleep, had put on her clothes again, and come down to keep her sister company. The room looked more comfortable now. There were candles lighted, and a good fire burnt in the grate; teathings stood on a little table near the fire, and the two sisters were talking, Lady Mardykes appearing more collected, and only they two in the room.

  “Have you seen him, Maud?” cried Lady Mardykes, rising and hastily approaching her the moment she entered.

  “Yes, dear; and talked with him, and — — “

  “Well?”

  “And I think very much as I did before. I think he is nervous, he says he is not ill; but he is nervous and whimsical, and as men always are when they happen to be out of sorts, very positive; and of course the only thing that can quite undeceive him is the lapse of the time he has fixed for his prediction, as it is sure to pass without any tragic result of any sort. We shall then all see alike the nature of his delusion.”

  “O, Maud, if I were only sure you thought so! if I were sure you really had hopes! Tell me, Maud, for God’s sake, what you really think.”

  Lady Walsingham was a little disconcerted by the unexpected directness of her appeal.

  “Come, darling, you must not be foolish,” she said; “we can only talk of impressions, and we are imposed upon by the solemnity of his manner, and the fact that he evidently believes in his own delusion; every one does believe in his own delusion — there is nothing strange in that.”

  “O, Maud, I see you are not convinced; you are only trying to comfort me. You have no hope — none, none, none!” and she covered her face with her hands, and wept again convulsively.

  Lady Walsingham was silent for a moment, and then with an effort said, as she placed her hand on her sister’s arm, “You see, dear Janet, there is no use in my saying the same thing over and over again; an hour or two will show who is right. Sit down again, and be like yourself. My maid told me that you had sent to the parlour for Doctor Torvey; he must not find you so. What would he think? Unless you mean to tell him of Bale’s strange fancy; and a pretty story that would be to set afloat in Golden Friars. I think I hear him coming.”

  So, in effect, he was. Doctor Torvey — with the florid gravity of a man who, having just swallowed a bottle of port, besides some glasses of sherry, is admitted to the presence of ladies whom he respects — entered the room, made what he called his “leg and his compliments,” and awaited the ladies’ commands.

  “Sit down, Doctor Torvey,” said Lady Walsingham, who in the incapacity of her sister undertook the doing of the honours. “My sister, Lady Mardykes, has got it into her head somehow that Sir Bale is ill. I have been speaking to him; he certainly does not look very well, but he says he is quite well. Do you think him well? — that is, we know you don’t think there is anything of importance amiss — but she wishes to know whether you think him perfectly well.”

  The Doctor cleared his voice and delivered his lecture, a little thickly at some words, upon Sir Bale’s case; the result of which was that it was no case at all; and that if he would only live something more of a country gentleman’s life, he would be as well as any man could desire — as well as any man, gentle or simple, in the country.

  “The utmost I should think of doing for him would be, perhaps, a little quinine, nothing mo’ — shurely — he is really and toory a very shoun’ shtay of health.”

  Lady Walsingham looked encouragingly at her sister and nodded.

  “I’ve been shen’ for, La’y Walsh — Walse — Walsing — ham; old Jack Amerald — he likshe his glass o’ port,” he said roguishly, “and shuvversh accord’n’ly,” he continued, with a compassionating paddle of his right hand; “one of thoshe aw — odd feels in his stomach; and as I have pretty well done all I can man-n’ge down here, I must be off, ye shee. Wind up from Golden Friars, and a little flutter ovv zhnow, thazh all;” and with some remarks about the extreme cold of the weather, and the severity of their night journey, and many respectful and polite parting speeches, the Doctor took his leave; and they soon heard the wheels of his gig and the tread of his horse, faint and muffled from the snow in the courtyard, and the Doctor, who had connected that melancholy and agitated household with the outer circle of humanity, was gone.

  There was very little snow falling, half-a-dozen flakes now and again, and their flight across the window showed, as the Doctor had in a manner boasted, that the wind was in his face as he returned to Golden Friars. Even these desultory snowflakes ceased, at times, altogether; and returning, as they say, “by fits and starts,” left for long intervals the landscape, under the brilliant light of the moon, in its wide white shroud. The curtain of the great window had not been drawn. It seemed to Lady Walsingham that the moonbeams had grown more dazzling, that Snakes Island was nearer and more distinct, and the outstretched arm of the old tree looked bigger and angrier, like the uplifted arm of an assassin, who draws silently nearer as the catastrophe approaches.

  Cold, dazzling, almost repulsive in this intense moonlight and white sheeting, the familiar landscape looked in the eyes of Lady Walsingham. The sisters gradually grew more and more silent, an unearthly suspense overhung them all, and Lady Mardykes rose every now and then and listened at the open door for step or voice in vain. They all were overpowered by the intenser horror that seemed gathering around them. And thus an hour or more passed.

  CHAPTER XXX

  Hush!

  Pale and silent those three beautiful sisters sat. The horrible quietude of a suspense that had grown all but insupportable oppressed the guests of Lady Mardykes, and something like the numbness of despair had reduced her to silence, the dreadful counterfeit of peace.

  Sir Bale Mardykes on a sudden softly entered the room. Reflected from the floor near the window, the white moonlight somehow gave to his fixed features the character of a smile. With a warning gesture, as he came in, he placed his finger to his lips, as if to enjoin silence; and then, having successively pressed the hands of his two sisters-in-law, he stooped over his almost fainting wife, and twice pressed her cold forehead with his lips; and so, without a word, he went softly from the room.

  Some seconds elapsed before Lady Walsingham, recovering her presence of mind, with one of the candlesticks from the table in her hand, opened the door and followed.

  She saw Sir Bale mount the last stair of the broad flight visible from the hall, and candle in hand turn the corner of the massive banister, and as the light thrown from his candle showed, he continued, without hurry, to ascend the second flight.

  With the irrepressible curiosity of horror she continued to follow him at a distance.

  She saw him enter his own private room, and close the door.

  Continuing to follow she placed herself noiselessly at the door of the apartment, and in breathless silence, with a throbbing heart, listened for what should pass.

  She distinctly heard Sir Bale pace the floor up and down for some time, and then, after a pause, a sound as if some one had thrown himself heavily on the bed. A silence followed, during which her sisters, who had followed more timidly, joined her. She warned them with a look and gesture to be silent.

  Lady Haworth stood a little behind, her white
lips moving, and her hands clasped in a silent agony of prayer. Lady Mardykes leaned against the massive oak door-case.

  With her hand raised to her ear, and her lips parted, Lady Walsingham listened for some seconds — for a minute, two minutes, three. At last, losing heart, she seized the handle in her panic, and turned it sharply. The door was locked on the inside, but some one close to it said from within, “Hush, hush!”

  Much alarmed now, the same lady knocked violently at the door. No answer was returned.

  She knocked again more violently, and shook the door with all her fragile force. It was something of horror in her countenance as she did so, that, no doubt, terrified Lady Mardykes, who with a loud and long scream sank in a swoon upon the floor.

  The servants, alarmed by these sounds, were speedily in the gallery. Lady Mardykes was carried to her room, and laid upon her bed; her sister, Lady Haworth, accompanying her. In the meantime the door was forced. Sir Bale Mardykes was found stretched upon his bed.

  Those who have once seen it, will not mistake the aspect of death. Here, in Sir Bale Mardykes’ room, in his bed, in his clothes, is a stranger, grim and awful; in a few days to be insupportable, and to pass alone into the prison-house, and to be seen no more.

  Where is Sir Bale Mardykes now, whose roof-tree and whose place at board and bed will know him no more? Here lies a chapfallen, fish-eyed image, chilling already into clay, and stiffening in every joint.

  There is a marble monument in the pretty church of Golden Friars. It stands at the left side of what antiquarians call “the high altar.” Two pillars at each end support an arch with several armorial bearings on as many shields sculptured above. Beneath, on a marble flooring raised some four feet, with a cornice round, lies Sir Bale Mardykes, of Mardykes Hall, ninth Baronet of that ancient family, chiseled in marble with knee-breeches and buckled-shoes, and ailes de pigeon, and single-breasted coat and long waistcoat, ruffles and sword, such as gentlemen wore about the year 1770, and bearing a strong resemblance to the features of the second Charles. On the broad marble which forms the background is inscribed an epitaph, which has perpetuated to our times the estimate formed by his “inconsolable widow,” the Dowager Lady Mardykes, of the virtues and accomplishments of her deceased lord.