Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu

by J. Sheridan le Fanu

  Up to the third storey, long disused, he and old Cooper mounted. At the end of a dusty gallery, the room lay. The old tapestry, from which the spacious chamber had taken its name, had long given place to modern paper, and this was mildewed, and in some places hanging from the walls. A thick mantle of dust lay over the floor. Some broken chairs and boards, thick with dust, lay, along with other lumber, piled together at one end of the room.

  They entered the closet, which was quite empty. The Squire looked round, and you could hardly have said whether he was relieved or disappointed.

  “No furniture here,” said the Squire, and looked through the dusty window. “Did you say anything to me lately — I don’t mean this morning — about this room, or the closet — or anything — I forget— “

  “Lor’ bless you! Not I. I han’t been thinkin’ o’ this room this forty year.”

  “Is there any sort of old furniture called a buffet — do you remember?” asked the Squire.

  “A buffet? why, yes — to be sure — there was a buffet, sure enough, in this closet, now you bring it to my mind,” said Cooper. “But it’s papered over.”

  “And what is it?”

  “A little cupboard in the wall,” answered the old man.

  “Ho — I see — and there’s such a thing here, is there, under the paper? Show me whereabouts it was.”

  “Well — I think it was somewhere about here,” answered he, rapping his knuckles along the wall opposite the window. “Ay, there it is,” he added, as the hollow sound of a wooden door was returned to his knock.

  The Squire pulled the loose paper from the wall, and disclosed the doors of a small press, about two feet square, fixed in the wall.

  “The very thing for my buckles and pistols, and the rest of my gimcracks,” said the Squire. “Come away, we’ll leave the dog where he is. Have you the key of that little press?”

  No, he had not. The old master had emptied and locked it up, and desired that it should be papered over, and that was the history of it.

  Down came the Squire, and took a strong turnscrew from his gun-case; and quietly he reascended to King Herod’s room, and, with little trouble, forced the door of the small press in the closet wall. There were in it some letters and cancelled leases, and also a parchment deed which he took to the window and read with much agitation. It was a supplemental deed executed about a fortnight after the others, and previously to his father’s marriage, placing Gylingden under strict settlement to the elder son, in what is called “tail male.” Handsome Charlie, in his fraternal litigation, had acquired a smattering of technical knowledge, and he perfectly well knew that the effect of this would be not only to transfer the house and lands to his brother Scroope, but to leave him at the mercy of that exasperated brother, who might recover from him personally every guinea he had ever received by way of rent, from the date of his father’s death.

  It was a dismal, clouded day, with something threatening in its aspect, and the darkness, where he stood, was made deeper by the top of one of the huge old trees overhanging the window.

  In a state of awful confusion he attempted to think over his position. He placed the deed in his pocket, and nearly made up his mind to destroy it. A short time ago he would not have hesitated for a moment under such circumstances; but now his health and his nerves were shattered, and he was under a supernatural alarm which the strange discovery of this deed had powerfully confirmed.

  In this state of profound agitation he heard a sniffing at the closet-door, and then an impatient scratch and a long low growl. He screwed his courage up, and, not knowing what to expect, threw the door open and saw the dog, not in his dream-shape, but wriggling with joy, and crouching and fawning with eager submission; and then wandering about the closet, the brute growled awfully into the corners of it, and seemed in an unappeasable agitation.

  Then the dog returned and fawned and crouched again at his feet.

  After the first moment was over, the sensations of abhorrence and fear began to subside, and he almost reproached himself for requiting the affection of this poor friendless brute with the antipathy which he had really done nothing to earn.

  The dog pattered after him down the stairs. Oddly enough, the sight of this animal, after the first revulsion, reassured him; it was, in his eyes, so attached, so goodnatured, and palpably so mere a dog.

  By the hour of evening the Squire had resolved on a middle course; he would not inform his brother of his discovery, nor yet would he destroy the deed. He would never marry. He was past that time. He would leave a letter, explaining the discovery of the deed, addressed to the only surviving trustee — who had probably forgotten everything about it — and having seen out his own tenure, he would provide that all should be set right after his death. Was not that fair? at all events it quite satisfied what he called his conscience, and he thought it a devilish good compromise for his brother; and he went out, towards sunset, to take his usual walk.

  Returning in the darkening twilight, the dog, as usual attending him, began to grow frisky and wild, at first scampering round him in great circles, as before, nearly at the top of his speed, his great head between his paws as he raced. Gradually more excited grew the pace and narrower his circuit, louder and fiercer his continuous growl, and the Squire stopped and grasped his stick hard, for the lurid eyes and grin of the brute threatened an attack. Turning round and round as the excited brute encircled him, and striking vainly at him with his stick, he grew at last so tired that he almost despaired of keeping him longer at bay; when on a sudden the dog stopped short and crawled up to his feet wriggling and crouching submissively.

  Nothing could be more apologetic and abject; and when the Squire dealt him two heavy thumps with his stick, the dog whimpered only, and writhed and licked his feet. The Squire sat down on a prostrate tree; and his dumb companion, recovering his wonted spirits immediately, began to sniff and nuzzle among the roots. The Squire felt in his breastpocket for the deed — it was safe; and again he pondered, in this loneliest of spots, on the question whether he should preserve it for restoration after his death to his brother, or destroy it forthwith. He began rather to lean toward the latter solution, when the long low growl of the dog not far off startled him.

  He was sitting in a melancholy grove of old trees, that slants gently westward. Exactly the same odd effect of light I have before described — a faint red glow reflected downward from the upper sky, after the sun had set, now gave to the growing darkness a lurid uncertainty. This grove, which lies in a gentle hollow, owing to its circumscribed horizon on all but one side, has a peculiar character of loneliness.

  He got up and peeped over a sort of barrier, accidentally formed of the trunks of felled trees laid one over the other, and saw the dog straining up the other side of it, and hideously stretched out, his ugly head looking in consequence twice the natural size. His dream was coming over him again. And now between the trunks the brute’s ungainly head was thrust, and the long neck came straining through, and the body, twining after it like a huge white lizard; and as it came striving and twisting through, it growled and glared as if it would devour him.

  As swiftly as his lameness would allow, the Squire hurried from this solitary spot towards the house. What thoughts exactly passed through his mind as he did so, I am sure he could not have told. But when the dog came up with him it seemed appeased, and even in high goodhumour, and no longer resembled the brute that haunted his dreams.

  That night, near ten o’clock, the Squire, a good deal agitated, sent for the keeper, and told him that he believed the dog was mad, and that he must shoot him. He might shoot the dog in the gunroom, where he was — a grain of shot or two in the wainscot did not matter, and the dog must not have a chance of getting out.

  The Squire gave the gamekeeper his double-barrelled gun, loaded with heavy shot. He did not go with him beyond the hall. He placed his hand on the keeper’s arm; the keeper said his hand trembled, and that he looked “as white as curds.”

>   “Listen a bit!” said the Squire under his breath.

  They heard the dog in a state of high excitement in the room — growling ominously, jumping on the window-stool and down again, and running round the room.

  “You’ll need to be sharp, mind — don’t give him a chance — slip in edgeways, d’ye see? and give him both barrels!”

  “Not the first mad dog I’ve knocked over, sir,” said the man, looking very serious as he cocked the gun.

  As the keeper opened the door, the dog had sprung into the empty grate. He said he “never see sich a stark, staring devil.” The beast made a twist round, as if, he thought, to jump up the chimney— “but that wasn’t to be done at no price,” — and he made a yell — not like a dog — like a man caught in a mill-crank, and before he could spring at the keeper, he fired one barrel into him. The dog leaped towards him, and rolled over, receiving the second barrel in his head, as he lay snorting at the keeper’s feet!

  “I never seed the like; I never heard a screech like that!” said the keeper, recoiling. “It makes a fellow feel queer.”

  “Quite dead?” asked the Squire.

  “Not a stir in him, sir,” said the man, pulling him along the floor by the neck.

  “Throw him outside the hall-door now,” said the Squire;” and mind you pitch him outside the gate tonight — old Cooper says he’s a witch,” and the pale Squire smiled, “so he shan’t lie in Gylingden.”

  Never was man more relieved than the Squire, and he slept better for a week after this than he had done for many weeks before.

  It behoves us all to act promptly on our good resolutions. There is a determined gravitation towards evil, which, if left to itself, will bear down first intentions. If at one moment of superstitious fear, the Squire had made up his mind to a great sacrifice, and resolved in the matter of that deed so strangely recovered, to act honestly by his brother, that resolution very soon gave place to the compromise with fraud, which so conveniently postponed the restitution to the period when further enjoyment on his part was impossible. Then came more tidings of Scroope’s violent and minatory language, with always the same burthen — that he would leave no stone unturned to show that there had existed a deed which Charles had either secreted or destroyed, and that he would never rest till he had hanged him.

  This of course was wild talk. At first it had only enraged him; but, with his recent guilty knowledge and suppression, had come fear. His danger was the existence of the deed, and little by little he brought himself to a resolution to destroy it. There were many falterings and recoils before he could bring himself to commit this crime. At length, however, he did it, and got rid of the custody of that which at any time might become the instrument of disgrace and ruin. There was relief in this, but also the new and terrible sense of actual guilt.

  He had got pretty well rid of his supernatural qualms. It was a different kind of trouble that agitated him now.

  But this night, he imagined, he was awakened by a violent shaking of his bed. He could see, in the very imperfect light, two figures at the foot of it, holding each a bedpost. One of these he half-fancied was his brother Scroope, but the other was the old Squire — of that he was sure — and he fancied that they had shaken him up from his sleep. Squire Toby was talking as Charlie wakened, and he heard him say:

  “Put out of our own house by you! It won’t hold for long. We’ll come in together, friendly, and stay. Forewarned, wi’ yer eyes open, ye did it; and now Scroope’ll hang you! We’ll hang you together! Look at me, you devil’s limb.”

  And the old Squire tremblingly stretched his face, torn with shot and bloody, and growing every moment more and more into the likeness of the dog, and began to stretch himself out and climb the bed over the foot-board; and he saw the figure at the other side, little more than a black shadow, begin also to scale the bed; and there was instantly a dreadful confusion and uproar in the room, and such a gabbling and laughing; he could not catch the words; but, with a scream, he woke, and found himself standing on the floor. The phantoms and the clamour were gone, but a crash and ringing of fragments was in his ears. The great china bowl, from which for generations the Marstons of Gylingden had been baptized, had fallen from the mantelpiece, and was smashed on the hearthstone.

  “I’ve bin dreamin’ all night about Mr. Scroope, and I wouldn’t wonder, old Cooper, if he was dead,” said the Squire, when he came down in the morning.

  “God forbid! I was adreamed about him, too, sir: I dreamed he was dammin’ and sinkin’ about a hole was burnt in his coat, and the old master, God be wi’ him! said — quite plain — I’d ‘a swore ’twas himself— ‘Cooper, get up, ye d —— d land-loupin’ thief, and lend a hand to hang him — for he’s a daft cur, and no dog o’ mine.’ ’Twas the dog shot over night, I do suppose, as was runnin’ in my old head. I thought old master gied me a punch wi’ his knuckles, and says I, wakenin’ up, ‘At yer service, sir’; and for a while I couldn’t get it out o’ my head, master was in the room still.”

  Letters from town soon convinced the Squire that his brother Scroope, so far from being dead, was particularly active; and Charlie’s attorney wrote to say, in serious alarm, that he had heard, accidentally, that he intended setting up a case, of a supplementary deed of settlement, of which he had secondary evidence, which would give him Gylingden. And at this menace Handsome Charlie snapped his fingers, and wrote courageously to his attorney; abiding what might follow with, however, a secret foreboding.

  Scroope threatened loudly now, and swore after his bitter fashion, and reiterated his old promise of hanging that cheat at last. In the midst of these menaces and preparations, however, a sudden peace proclaimed itself: Scroope died, without time even to make provisions for a posthumous attack upon his brother. It was one of those cases of disease of the heart in which death is as sudden as by a bullet.

  Charlie’s exultation was undisguised. It was shocking. Not, of course, altogether malignant. For there was the expansion consequent on the removal of a secret fear. There was also the comic piece of luck, that only the day before Scroope had destroyed his old will, which left to a stranger every farthing he possessed, intending in a day or two to execute another to the same person, charged with the express condition of prosecuting the suit against Charlie.

  The result was, that all his possessions went unconditionally to his brother Charles as his heir. Here were grounds for abundance of savage elation. But there was also the deep-seated hatred of half a life of mutual and persistent agression and revilings; and Handsome Charlie was capable of nursing a grudge, and enjoying a revenge with his whole heart.

  He would gladly have prevented his brother’s being buried in the old Gylingden chapel, where he wished to lie; but his lawyers doubted his power, and he was not quite proof against the scandal which would attend his turning back the funeral, which would, he knew, be attended by some of the country gentry and others, with an hereditary regard for the Marstons.

  But he warned his servants that not one of them were to attend it; promising, with oaths and curses not to be disregarded, that any one of them who did so, should find the door shut in his face on his return.

  I don’t think, with the exception of old Cooper, that the servants cared for this prohibition, except as it baulked a curiosity always strong in the solitude of the country. Cooper was very much vexed that the eldest son of the old Squire should be buried in the old family chapel, and no sign of decent respect from Gylingden Hall. He asked his master, whether he would not, at least, have some wine and refreshments in the oak parlour, in case any of the country gentlemen who paid this respect to the old family should come up to the house? But the Squire only swore at him, told him to mind his own business, and ordered him to say, if such a thing happened, that he was out, and no preparations made, and, in fact, to send them away as they came. Cooper expostulated stoutly, and the Squire grew angrier; and after a tempestuous scene, took his hat and stick and walked out, just as the funeral descending the valley fr
om the direction of the “Old Angel Inn” came in sight.

  Old Cooper prowled about disconsolately, and counted the carriages as well as he could from the gate. When the funeral was over, and they began to drive away, he returned to the hall, the door of which lay open, and as usual deserted. Before he reached it quite, a mourning coach drove up, and two gentlemen in black cloaks, and with crapes to their hats, got out, and without looking to the right or the left, went up the steps into the house. Cooper followed them slowly. The carriage had, he supposed, gone round to the yard, for, when he reached the door, it was no longer there.

  So he followed the two mourners into the house. In the hall he found a fellow-servant, who said he had seen two gentlemen, in black cloaks, pass through the hall, and go up the stairs without removing their hats, or asking leave of anyone. This was very odd, old Cooper thought, and a great liberty; so upstairs he went to make them out.

  But he could not find them then, nor ever. And from that hour the house was troubled.

  In a little time there was not one of the servants who had not something to tell. Steps and voices followed them sometimes in the passages, and tittering whispers, always minatory, scared them at corners of the galleries, or from dark recesses; so that they would return panic-stricken to be rebuked by thin Mrs. Beckett, who looked on such stories as worse than idle. But Mrs Beckett herself, a short time after, took a very different view of the matter.

  She had herself begun to hear these voices, and with this formidable aggravation, that they came always when she was at her prayers, which she had been punctual in saying all her life, and utterly interrupted them. She was scared at such moments by dropping words and sentences, which grew, as she persisted, into threats and blasphemies.