Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated)

by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

  He then told me that Bartram was the temple of liberty, that the health of a whole life was founded in a few years of youth, air, and exercise, and that accomplishments, at least, if not education, should wait upon health. Therefore, while at Bartram, I should dispose of my time quite as I pleased, and the more I plundered the garden and gipsied in the woodlands, the better.

  Then he told me what a miserable invalid he was, and how the doctors interfered with his frugal tastes. A glass of beer and a mutton chop — his ideal of a dinner — he dared not touch. They made him drink light wines, which he detested, and live upon those artificial abominations all liking for which vanishes with youth.

  There stood on a side-table, in its silver coaster, a long-necked Rhenish bottle, and beside it a thin pink glass, and he quivered his fingers in a peevish way toward them.

  But unless he found himself better very soon, he would take his case into his own hands, and try the dietary to which nature pointed.

  He waved his fingers toward his bookcases, and told me his books were altogether at my service during my stay; but this promise ended, I must confess, disappointingly. At last, remarking that I must be fatigued, he rose, and kissed me with a solemn tenderness, placed his hand upon what I now perceived to be a large Bible, with two broad silk markers, red and gold, folded in it — the one, I might conjecture, indicating the place in the Old, the other in the New Testament. It stood on the small table that supported the waxlights, with a handsome cut bottle of eau-de-cologne, his gold and jewelled pencil-case, and his chased repeater, chain, and seals, beside it. There certainly were no indications of poverty in Uncle Silas’s room; and he said impressively —

  ‘Remember that book; in it your father placed his trust, in it he found his reward, in it lives my only hope; consult it, my beloved niece, day and night, as the oracle of life.’

  Then he laid his thin hand on my head, and blessed me, and then kissed my forehead.

  ‘No — a!’ exclaimed Cousin Milly’s lusty voice. I had quite forgotten her presence, and looked at her with a little start. She was seated on a very high oldfashioned chair; she had palpably been asleep; her round eyes were blinking and staring glassily at us; and her white legs and navvy boots were dangling in the air.

  ‘Have you anything to remark about Noah?’ enquired her father, with a polite inclination and an ironical interest.

  ‘No — a,’ she repeated in the same blunt accents; ‘I didn’t snore; did I? No — a.’

  The old man smiled and shrugged a little at me — it was the smile of disgust.

  ‘Good night, my dear Maud;’ and turning to her, he said, with a peculiar gentle sharpness, ‘Had not you better wake, my dear, and try whether your cousin would like some supper?’

  So he accompanied us to the door, outside which we found L’Amour’s candle awaiting us.

  ‘I’m awful afraid of the Governor, I am. Did I snore that time?’

  ‘No, dear; at least, I did not hear it,’ I said, unable to repress a smile.

  ‘Well, if I didn’t, I was awful near it,’ she said, reflectively.

  We found poor Mary Quince dozing over the fire; but we soon had tea and other good things, of which Milly partook with a wonderful appetite.

  ‘I was in a qualm about it,’ said Milly, who by this time was quite herself again. ‘When he spies me a-napping, maybe he don’t fetch me a prod with his pencil-case over the head. Odd! girl, it is sore.’

  When I contrasted the refined and fluent old gentleman whom I had just left, with this amazing specimen of young ladyhood, I grew sceptical almost as to the possibility of her being his child.

  I was to learn, however, how little she had, I won’t say of his society, but even of his presence — that she had no domestic companion of the least pretensions to education — that she ran wild about the place — never, except in church, so much as saw a person of that rank to which she was born — and that the little she knew of reading and writing had been picked up, in desultory half-hours, from a person who did not care a pin about her manners or decorum, and perhaps rather enjoyed her grotesqueness — and that no one who was willing to take the least trouble about her was competent to make her a particle more refined than I saw her — the wonder ceased. We don’t know how little is heritable, and how much simply training, until we encounter some-such spectacle as that of my poor cousin Milly.

  When I lay down in my bed and reviewed the day, it seemed like a month of wonders. Uncle Silas was always before me; the voice so silvery for an old man — so preternaturally soft; the manners so sweet, so gentle; the aspect, smiling, suffering, spectral. It was no longer a shadow; I had now seen him in the flesh. But, after all, was he more than a shadow to me? When I closed my eyes I saw him before me still, in necromantic black, ashy with a pallor on which I looked with fear and pain, a face so dazzlingly pale, and those hollow, fiery, awful eyes! It sometimes seemed as if the curtain opened, and I had seen a ghost.

  I had seen him; but he was still an enigma and a marvel. The living face did not expound the past, any more than the portrait portended the future. He was still a mystery and a vision; and thinking of these things I fell asleep.

  Mary Quince, who slept in the dressing-room, the door of which was close to my bed, and lay open to secure me against ghosts, called me up; and the moment I knew where I was I jumped up, and peeped eagerly from the window. It commanded the avenue and courtyard; but we were many windows removed from that over the hall-door, and immediately beneath ours lay the two giant lime trees, prostrate and uprooted, which I had observed as we drove up the night before.

  I saw more clearly in the bright light of morning the signs of neglect and almost of dilapidation which had struck me as I approached. The courtyard was tufted over with grass, seldom from year to year crushed by the carriage-wheels, or trodden by the feet of visitors. This melancholy verdure thickened where the area was more remote from the centre; and under the windows, and skirting the walls to the left, was reinforced by a thick grove of nettles. The avenue was all grass-grown, except in the very centre, where a narrow track still showed the roadway The handsome carved balustrade of the courtyard was discoloured with lichens, and in two places gapped and broken; and the air of decay was heightened by the fallen trees, among whose sprays and yellow leaves the small birds were hopping.

  Before my toilet was completed, in marched my cousin Milly. We were to breakfast alone that morning, ‘and so much the better,’ she told me. Sometimes the Governor ordered her to breakfast with him, and ‘never left off chaffing her’ till his newspaper came, and ‘sometimes he said such things he made her cry,’ and then he only ‘boshed her more,’ and packed her away to her room; but she was by chalks nicer than him, talk as he might. ‘Was not she nicer? was not she? was not she?’ Upon this point she was so strong and urgent that I was obliged to reply by a protest against awarding the palm of elegance between parent and child, and declaring I liked her very much, which I attested by a kiss.

  ‘I know right well which of us you do think’s the nicest, and no mistake, only you’re afraid of him; and he had no business boshing me last night before you. I knew he was at it, though I couldn’t twig him altogether; but wasn’t he a sneak, now, wasn’t he?’

  This was a still more awkward question; so I kissed her again, and said she must never ask me to say of my uncle in his absence anything I could not say to his face.

  At which speech she stared at me for a while, and then treated me to one of her hearty laughs, after which she seemed happier, and gradually grew into better humour with her father.

  ‘Sometimes, when the curate calls, he has me up — for he’s as religious as six, he is — and they read Bible and prays, ho — don’t they? You’ll have that, lass, like me, to go through; and maybe I don’t hate it; oh, no!’

  We breakfasted in a small room, almost a closet, off the great parlour, which was evidently quite disused. Nothing could be homelier than our equipage, or more shabby than the furniture of the l
ittle apartment. Still, somehow, I liked it. It was a total change; but one likes ‘roughing it’ a little at first.

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  THE WINDMILL WOOD

  I had not time to explore this noble old house as my curiosity prompted; for Milly was in such a fuss to set out for the ‘blackberry dell’ that I saw little more than just so much as I necessarily traversed in making my way to and from my room.

  The actual decay of the house had been prevented by my dear father; and the roof, windows, masonry, and carpentry had all been kept in repair. But short of indications of actual ruin, there are many manifestations of poverty and neglect which impress with a feeling of desolation. It was plain that not nearly a tithe of this great house was inhabited; long corridors and galleries stretched away in dust and silence, and were crossed by others, whose dark arches inspired me in the distance with an awful sort of sadness. It was plainly one of those great structures in which you might easily lose yourself, and with a pleasing terror it reminded me of that delightful old abbey in Mrs. Radcliffe’s romance, among whose silent staircases, dim passages, and long suites of lordly, but forsaken chambers, begirt without by the sombre forest, the family of La Mote secured a gloomy asylum.

  My cousin Milly and I, however, were bent upon an open-air ramble, and traversing several passages, she conducted me to a door which led us out upon a terrace overgrown with weeds, and by a broad flight of steps we descended to the level of the grounds beneath. Then on, over the short grass, under the noble trees, we walked; Milly in high goodhumour, and talking away volubly, in her short garment, navvy boots, and a weather-beaten hat. She carried a stick in her gloveless hand. Her conversation was quite new to me, and resembled very much what I would have fancied the holiday recollections of a schoolboy; and the language in which it was sustained was sometimes so outlandish, that I was forced to laugh outright — a demonstration which she plainly did not like.

  Her talk was about the great jumps she had made — how she snowballed the chaps’ in winter — how she could slide twice the length of her stick beyond ‘Briddles, the cow-boy.’

  With this and similar conversation she entertained me.

  The grounds were delightfully wild and neglected. But we had now passed into a vast park beautifully varied with hollows and uplands, and such glorious old timber massed and scattered over its slopes and levels. Among these, we got at last into a picturesque dingle; the grey rocks peeped from among the ferns and wild flowers, and the steps of soft sward along its sides were dark in the shadows of silver-stemmed birch, and russet thorn, and oak, under which, in the vaporous night, the Erl-king and his daughter might glide on their aërial horses.

  In the lap of this pleasant dell were the finest blackberry bushes, I think, I ever saw, bearing fruit quite fabulous; and plucking these, and chatting, we rambled on very pleasantly.

  I had first thought of Milly’s absurdities, to which, in description, I cannot do justice, simply because so many details have, by distance of time, escaped my recollection. But her ways and her talk were so indescribably grotesque that she made me again and again quiver with suppressed laughter.

  But there was a pitiable and even a melancholy meaning underlying the burlesque.

  This creature, with no more education than a dairymaid, I gradually discovered had fine natural aptitudes for accomplishment — a very sweet voice, and wonderfully delicate ear, and a talent for drawing which quite threw mine into the shade. It was really astonishing.

  Poor Milly, in all her life, had never read three books, and hated to think of them. One, over which she was wont to yawn and sigh, and stare fatiguedly for an hour every Sunday, by command of the Governor, was a stout volume of sermons of the earlier school of George III., and a drier collection you can’t fancy. I don’t think she read anything else. But she had, notwithstanding, ten times the cleverness of half the circulating library misses one meets with. Besides all this, I had a long sojourn before me at Bartram-Haugh, and I had learned from Milly, as I had heard before, what a perennial solitude it was, with a ludicrous fear of learning Milly’s preposterous dialect, and turning at last into something like her. So I resolved to do all I could for her — teach her whatever I knew, if she would allow me — and gradually, if possible, effect some civilising changes in her language, and, as they term it in boarding-schools, her demeanour.

  But I must pursue at present our first day’s ramble in what was called Bartram Chase. People can’t go on eating blackberries always; so after a while we resumed our walk along this pretty dell, which gradually expanded into a wooded valley — level beneath and enclosed by irregular uplands, receding, as it were, in mimic bays and harbours at some points, and running out at others into broken promontories, ending in clumps of forest trees.

  Just where the glen which we had been traversing expanded into this broad, but wooded valley, it was traversed by a high and close paling, which, although it looked decayed, was still very strong.

  In this there was a wooden gate, rudely but strongly constructed, and at the side we were approaching stood a girl, who was leaning against the post, with one arm resting on the top of the gate.

  This girl was neither tall nor short — taller than she looked at a distance; she had not a slight waist; sooty black was her hair, with a broad forehead, perpendicular but low; she had a pair of very fine, dark, lustrous eyes, and no other good feature — unless I may so call her teeth, which were very white and even. Her face was rather short, and swarthy as a gipsy’s; observant and sullen too; and she did not move, only eyed us negligently from under her dark lashes as we drew near. Altogether a not unpicturesque figure, with a dusky, red petticoat of drugget, and tattered jacket of bottle-green stuff, with short sleeves, which showed her brown arms from the elbow.

  ‘That’s Pegtop’s daughter,’ said Milly.

  ‘Who is Pegtop?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s the miller — see, yonder it is,’ and she pointed to a very pretty feature in the landscape, a windmill, crowning the summit of a hillock which rose suddenly above the level of the treetops, like an island in the centre of the valley.

  ‘The mill not going to-day, Beauty?’ bawled Milly.

  ‘No — a, Beauty; it baint,’ replied the girl, loweringly, and without stirring.

  ‘And what’s gone with the stile?’ demanded Milly, aghast. ‘It’s tore away from the paling!’

  ‘Well, so it be,’ replied the wood nymph in the red petticoat, showing her fine teeth with a lazy grin.

  ‘Who’s a bin and done all that?’ demanded Milly.

  ‘Not you nor me, lass,’ said the girl.

  ‘’Twas old Pegtop, your father, did it,’ cried Milly, in rising wrath.

  ‘‘Appen it wor,’ she replied.

  ‘And the gate locked.’

  ‘That’s it — the gate locked,’ she repeated, sulkily, with a defiant side-glance at Milly.

  ‘And where’s Pegtop?’

  ‘At t’other side, somewhere; how should I know where he be?’ she replied.

  ‘Who’s got the key?’

  ‘Here it be, lass,’ she answered, striking her hand on her pocket.

  ‘And how durst you stay us here? Unlock it, huzzy, this minute!’ cried Milly, with a stamp.

  Her answer was a sullen smile.

  ‘Open the gate this instant!’ bawled Milly.

  ‘Well, I won’t.’

  I expected that Milly would have flown into a frenzy at this direct defiance, but she looked instead puzzled and curious — the girl’s unexpected audacity bewildered her.

  ‘Why, you fool, I could get over the paling as soon as look at you, but I won’t. What’s come over you? Open the gate, I say, or I’ll make you.’

  ‘Do let her alone, dear,’ I entreated, fearing a mutual assault. ‘She has been ordered, may be, not to open it. Is it so, my good girl?’

  ‘Well, thou’rt not the biggest fool o’ the two,’ she observed, commendatively, ‘thou’st hit it, lass.’

 
‘And who ordered you?’ exclaimed Milly.

  ‘Fayther.’

  ‘Old Pegtop. Well, that’s summat to laugh at, it is — our servant a-shutting us out of our own grounds.’

  ‘No servant o’ yourn!’

  ‘Come, lass, what do you mean?’

  ‘He be old Silas’s miller, and what’s that to thee?’

  With these words the girl made a spring on the hasp of the padlock, and then got easily over the gate.

  ‘Can’t you do that, cousin?’ whispered Milly to me, with an impatient nudge. ‘I wish you’d try.’

  ‘No, dear — come away, Milly,’ and I began to withdraw.

  ‘Lookee, lass, ‘twill be an ill day’s work for thee when I tell the Governor,’ said Milly, addressing the girl, who stood on a log of timber at the other side, regarding us with a sullen composure.

  ‘We’ll be over in spite o’ you,’ cried Milly.

  ‘You lie!’ answered she.

  ‘And why not, huzzy?’ demanded my cousin, who was less incensed at the affront than I expected. All this time I was urging Milly in vain to come away.

  ‘Yon lass is no wild cat, like thee — that’s why,’ said the sturdy portress.

  ‘If I cross, I’ll give you a knock,’ said Milly.

  ‘And I’ll gi’ thee another,’ she answered, with a vicious wag of the head.

  ‘Come, Milly, I’ll go if you don’t,’ I said.

  ‘But we must not be beat,’ whispered she, vehemently, catching my arm; ‘and ye shall get over, and see what I will gi’ her!’

  ‘I’ll not get over.’

  ‘Then I’ll break the door, for ye shall come through,’ exclaimed Milly, kicking the stout paling with her ponderous boot.

  ‘Purr it, purr it, purr it!’ cried the lass in the red petticoat with a grin.

  ‘Do you know who this lady is?’ cried Milly, suddenly.

  ‘She is a prettier lass than thou,’ answered Beauty.

  ‘She’s my cousin Maud — Miss Ruthyn of Knowl — and she’s a deal richer than the Queen; and the Governor’s taking care of her; and he’ll make old Pegtop bring you to reason.’